The fruit that people love to hate.
For years, people have bitched for Apple to drop their DRM. Now that they have, people are bitching that they dropped it too late, Amazon is already free, why do I have to pay an additional 30 cents per song, etc.
What’s the problem? Apple is not a charity.
- Apple is dropping their DRM. Great news. DRM is bad. They got the picture. The record companies they dealt-with required them to implement the DRM in the first place.
- Amazon is DRM-free, but the selection is not as good as Apple’s. (close, but not quite there yet, again with the record company contracts.)
- You don’t have to pay to free the DRM. You could make playlists of the albums, burn them to cd/cdrw, then re-add to itunes after deleting the purchased libraries. Just remember to set the encoding higher. This has been my SOP for a while now. no DRM, no extra fee, only the time involved with erasing the cdrws. I also encode to mp3 and flac for my linux and bsd boxes.
- Saying that pirating music hurt the RIAA’s or their slaves’ er, I mean “Recording Artists”, bankrolls is like saying that OPEC is hurting because of Hybrid vehicles. There is more to it than the surface arguments.
I like iTunes.
- It is easy to use.
- Convenient.
- (Now) DRM-Free.
- Works decently for managing my ipod and music library.
I don’t like bits of iTunes.
- It’s a bit heavy.
- Not as flexible as I would like.
- Keeps wanting to install Safari (after telling it not to keep asking) and / or ‘Bonjour’.
- Doesn’t allow me to edit / manage the id3 tags or however it maintains the meta-info.
- No Linux or BSD versions. (Maybe that will change without the DRM, now? Please?)
On a similar track . . . Audible. I enjoy listening to audiobooks; at least when they’re done well. Audible does not allow me to make a backup so I can listen on my htpc (linux box) which has my good speakers hooked-up. I have not found a way to skirt the DRM to be able to better enjoy what I paid for. If it were not for the better pricing, I would drop them in favor of iTunes or Amazon’s sets. I may yet do this.
I really want to like the linx alternatives. Amarok, Banshee, Songbird, and the variants . . . they all have interesting views on building an iTunes replacement, but none really stand-out as an original or better Media Management package. My box is running 4GB RAM with an intel 6750 CPU. With my 34 GB (mp3, 256Kbps, ripped from CDs that I own) that I’ve built-up over the years, they have all choked to some extent. I have not tried Songbird after it’s 1.0 release, nor have I tried Amarok 2.0 . . . So my opinion could change. Nothing is immutable. (Well, maybe ‘c’ . . . that may be immutable.)