Will be down at Sun’s Burlington campus tomorrow for an analyst event, so unless they’ve gotten wifi since I was last there I won’t have any posts for you.
In the meantime, here’s an exchange I had with a non-technical friend of mine:
I have a technology question for you: If I purchase songs from Itunes, what format are they in? If, one day, I want to play those songs on a non-apple mp3 or other music player, will I be able to? I don’t want to go too crazy on i-tunes if it is going to lock me into ipod forever, b/c i’m sure better devices will come out in the future. I find this all very confusing.
And therein lies the problem. Here was my response:
apple’s itunes tracks are encoded in AAC – a transportable format – but unfortunately are shackled by Apple’s proprietary (read: closed) DRM layer. the translation of this is that anything bought on itunes cannot be ported to any player besides the ipod.
that’s the bad news. the good news is that if worst comes to worst, you can always burn the tracks to CD, then import the CDs as MP3’s. that, of course, is hardly ideal, but, hey, it’s a worse case scenario.
another potential option – if you’re willing to really get into the technical end, is to use the tools here (http://www.hymn-project.org) to strip the DRM off. haven’t tried them myself.
so in short, you’re semi-screwed if you buy from itunes, but it’s not impossible to free them if you have either time or a technical bent.
in case you’re wondering what i’ve done, i’ve bought a least a few hundred itunes tracks, basically because of the workarounds i mentioned. but you need to gauge your own tolerance level for such things. for my money, the convenience of online purchasing outweighs the pain of reformatting them if it comes to that; you may disagree.
but blame apple for putting us both in this situation.
Or, more accurately, blame the RIAA for forcing Apple to deliver what I as a consumer don’t want. We’re not looking to do anything illegal here – simply play our music on the device of our choice. Should be pretty simple, so of course it’s not. Thanks, RIAA.
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