So for about 17 months I’ve had an iTunes “problem”. It started around the time things got rocky with my ex-girlfriend and turned into some kind of virtual comfort food. And once you start with that shit, well, it’s hard to stop.
NOTE: This is an Apple rant.
Apple (Computer) Inc. almost constantly annoy me. On the one hand, their hardware is some of the most gorgeously innovative stuff on the consumer market today – like many others, I just can’t get enough of the shininess. But on the other hand, Apple software is some of the worst software ever conceived by man. Sure, it’s far more usable than Windows (but since when did I care about that?), and doesn’t tend to break too often, but it’s otherwise completely crap. You’ve no idea what it’s doing at all, it’s completely uncustomizable, it makes Microsoft look like an “open source friendly” company, and Steve persists in his love of DRM-forcing-you-to-stay-with-the-program in iTunes in spite of much better services like Amazon’s MP3 Download. What did you promise before, Steve? Something about wanting to kill off DRM? Amazon did, so why is iTunes Plus still utterly craptastically limited in comparison with Amazon?
Steve Jobs might well have saved Apple from doom, but these days I wish he’d just f-off. He can take his iPhone closed platform shit with him. If it weren’t for him, I’d happily own just one mobile phone, but thanks to the restrictive crap of the iPhone I have to own two – one to use as a phone, and the other to verify cracks/experiment with before deploying to my regular “production” iPhone (people of the world, you’ve no idea how cool the iPhone can be when running Winterboard and other customizable software). If it weren’t for Steve Jobs, I could probably also play music I bought in iTunes with RhythmBox on my desktop. But no, this is not allowed, citizen. You didn’t sacrifice a goat to the DRM Gods. If fairness, I did know about this before I got into it, but I wasn’t exactly in the best state of mind at the time – and I regret that now. I regret it very much.
Anyway. iTunes is now considered Evil Bad and Wrong for music at least. There are plenty of much better alternatives such as Amazon (and for more niche stuff there’s Magnatune, and similar sites – I bought some music on Magnatune just this afternoon) that we should all be using rather than giving uncle Steve the time of day. Don’t be like me, don’t give into Steve and his shiny iTunes crack. Be a stronger person, throw it away and download unrestricted content instead.
Jon.
Perhaps you should found the first chapter of the AUA (Apple Users Anonymous)…
This is why I’ve never downloaded iTunes and people ask me why? Next time I will just say, “Read Jon’s blog!”
You are an idiot for buying DRM music in the first place. Don’t rant about it, you knew the problem and still bought it. I always told you it was dumb and winced every time you mentioned it.
I take it you can’t crack the files and free them from the DRM? Personally, I would just download the music that I purchased by Bittorrent in MP3 so I could actually listen to them.
“why is iTunes Plus still utterly craptastically limited in comparison with Amazon?”
Because the major labels (EMI aside) are licensing DRM-free music to everyone but Apple in an attempt to undermine their dominant position, because Apple won’t give them variable track pricing.