iTMS Coda

Well, the results of my query in my most recent "why is this person still posting after he shuttered this blog" posting (A: it's kind of "my thing") is conclusive - absolutely no one really gives "a hoot" about this blog, which ironically frees me to post to it when and as I wish... Which is to say, without any concern about contextual continuity or taming my innate love of constructing tortured, difficult-to-navigate sentences, rich with parenthetical asides and sub-clauses, that then trail indecisively into ellipsis...

So anyway, he wrote, applying one of the laziest of transitional phrases, I did, as I alluded to in the aforementioned previous post, slump on over to the iTunes Music Store by and by and forked over the premium in order to convert my modest collection of purchased music into DRM-free file formats. It's only fair to say that it has been a long time since I had any substantial technical issues with Apple's DRM. It's a matter of principle, maybe nominally of future stability, mostly it just bugged me that they were in there. Sitting there in their weird file formats with their invisible rules, looking like normal songs.

Which made it all the more irritating when I discovered that the library conversion process didn't quite clear the FairPlay out of my music library. A couple dozen misbebehavers didn't register on the iTMS conversion radar. Some of them obviously came from some sort of long-forgotten freebie download (free downloads don't qualify for the conversion deal, it turns out), some of them had disappeared from the store (victims of negotiation breakdowns with one off-brand label or another from Apple's DRM-free shift?), one album (P.M. Dawn's Greatest Hits) was inexplicable.

Intolerable. I rolled up my sleeves and set forth to do what I had thus far avoided, more out of laziness than principle: I violated the DMCA by circumventing copy protection software. Or did I? The territory, as usual, is rife with gray areas. I burned the offending tracks to an audio CD, which is legal. After dragging album art from the iTunes file information window into a temporary folder, I deleted the original tracks, which is legal. Finally I ripped the files from the audio CDs back to iTunes as AAC tracks. Which is normally legal, with CDs I own. But it's maybe illegal because I used the whole process to replace copy-protected files with unprotected ones? Yet it was legal for me to have unprotected CD Audio files on an actual CD? Whatever, if I'm a criminal I can only say, I did my best, but the iTMS just wouldn't cooperate.

I wonder if I will buy any more music from the iTMS. Amazon is just as easy now, and often cheaper. I suppose as is the shape of things, pretty soon I will be seeing artists releasing things digitally "exclusively on Amazon" or "exclusively on iTunes." Of course, given I'm currently on a music budget diet and not allowing myself any new music I'm not downloading from my eMusic subscription, for the time being it's a moot point anyway. All things considered I have a feeling it will be a long while before I buy another music track from Apple.

See previous reviews and submit sites for review at the Index Page