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So, you’ve purchased some songs from the iTunes Store in the past, and you’d like to upgrade your selections so that they’re free of digital-rights management and playable on things like your Zune. Well, breaking free will cost you… 30 cents a song (or 60 cents a video)! If you’re switching over an entire album, the charge is 30% of the album’s full price. Is it worth the money/hassle? You tell me. [Apple]
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Making me pay for the same thing again? Sounds like someone has taken a page from the label’s playbook…
So the choice is that for $.99 I can buy a song from iTunes and for an extra $.30 I can get it DRM free, or just buy DRM free from Amazon for $.89?
uhm…doesnt sound like too good a deal to me.
FUCK NO
burn that shit to a CD-R and re-rip it for free, duh.
That makes my transcode-sensitive ears burn. But, at least it’s free.
It’s easy. Just find an old boombox and cassette tape (if you don’t have any blank ones, just find an old DJ Jazzy Jeff tape and put some tape over the square holes on the edge), put it up to the speakers and hit record while playing the DRM’d mp3s from iTunes. Then, rewind the tape, open up Photobooth, change the settings to ‘video’ and start recording. Put the boombox up to your computer’s microphone and hit play. Then, after the songs you want are over, save the movie and import it into iMovie. Make some cuts in between every song, and export them as non DRM’d audio, lossless files of your choice! Beat the system! Take that, Jobs!
It also doesn’t help that if you want to do it for one song, you HAVE to do it for them all. Lame.
DRM-hobbled files are broken and now they want you to pay in order for them to be fixed. It’s like their daring you to download songs illegally.
Total Sucker Trap.
It’s much cheaper to just expire out old DRM files and rebuy them for full price than to fall for this scam.
Apple is probably doing this for the Tin Apple set, then will probably upgrade the files for free once they feel the heat from competition again.
Meanwhile, you can still get practically anything for a dime a song on the Russian sites. Not that I condone such practices, but they aren’t asking for you to buy anything twice.
Though I noticed that somehow Prince managed to get his stuff removed from them! Dude has lawyers EVERYWHERE.
ITMS suggested that I buy DRM-free upgrades for albums I no longer have (deleted them) and it’s an all-or-nothing upgrade route. Luckily, it turns out I don’t still own anything that wasn’t DRM-free from them except Kiki and Herb Will Die For You, which I would, in fact, pay for twice.
@LostTurntable: thank you for articulating so well–exactly!!!
As a DJ that uses Serato when I play out, the DRM-protection made them impossible to access, so I simply stopped importing anything from iTunes and just use it to store music I acquire via other means–which includes just buying tracks from Amazon.
Let’s see, as of right now, I can “upgrade” most of my iTunes Music Store library for the “special offer” price of $186. There’s a handful of these that I actually want, but like the last time around, it’s all or nothing. So, guess what? I’m choosing nothing. Too bad as I’d actually pay for a few of the albums I’ve downloaded as they aren’t available anywhere else. But there’s a lot of crap I downloaded on an old Pepsi promotion that I don’t need upgraded, thankyouverymuch.
It’s been like this for a while, right? I only buy stuff on there at DJ sets or when I need a song in a super-pinch, so I think I’m alright.
This is why I signed up with Emusic years ago. But hey, upgrading my iTunes isn’t a huge headache (setting me back only $44*)compared to dealing with DRM’d music for years and years…
*upgrading right now, actually
Oh – no – wait, $44 covered ONLY WHAT’S CURRENTLY AVAILABLE AS NON-DRM FILES! Looks like I have…another 581 songs waiting!
*gulp*
time to bust out the CD-R spindle…
@T’Challa: You wouldn’t want to play the 128kbps AACs on a decent soundsystem anyway. Eww. The 256s they deal in now are … okayish. 320 mp3s (or equivalent) and/or lossless 4 lyfe though.