Farewell iTunes Store

And so after a few years I bid the iTunes store farewell. Well not really. I've just backburnered iTunes for the Amazon Store or anywhere else that I can get non-DRM'd music. Yes I'm late to the rabid anti-DRM party, but hey at least I'm here. When the iTunes store came out I was happy I could get high quality music for a decent price without theft or the possibility of downloading trojans. I didn't mind the DRM because at the time I was a full Apple home. iPod and Mac. I didn't feel that I needed to have other formats and I could still play my mp3's.

The one huge gripe I had with the iPod was that it would not cross-fade music. Apparently most people could care less about that feature but I like my music mixed. No gaps. Not stop and start. I want continuous music and when two songs meld together, all is good with the universe. I didn't care about video, super capacity, color screens or phones. I simply wanted to have my portable music player mix my music.

iTunes mixed music so when I was at the computer that particular need was met. Then I got a Nokia N800. It has a music player. Well actually quite a few music players. I installed XMMS on it. It's a pretty powerful music player which reminded me of MacAmp/WinAmp. I figured I could use it for music, since I take it everywhere my iPod goes. Well the problem was that the AAC files from the iTunes store don't play on that program. Not a big problem. I still have my iPod(s) and besides XMMS is somewhat of a CPU hog, especially if the EQ and sound processors were being used. I prefer for my N800 to have juice for GPS or other tasks.

Then in June I was planning a trip to Philly for the Odunde Festival. I wanted a mix. So I went online and settled on FutureDecks lite. It's a decent program that unfortunately does not allow you to pick a secondary output for monitoring so cueing up music can be hard. Anyway, this program, and others, will allow you to record your mixes live. Perfect. So I load up the music library and notice that It's a bit light. It was then that I discovered that I cannot use DRM'd iTunes files.

Say what?

SO let me get this straight. I paid for the music. I'm going to mix it so I can listen to it the way I want to but some record company has decided that I can't. because of this little problem I had to plan out what music I wanted to include in the mix, make a playlist, burn the playlist to CD(s). and then copy back the huge AIFF files to the system. Oh and since the names of the tracks on the second CD turned into "Track 1", etc. I had to rename them. Oh that was fun. So about 3 hours after setting about to make the mix, I was starting the mix. Subsequent mixes didn't take as long to set up but I had been soured on the experience.

The last straw for me though was when I downloaded "Must Be the Music" a Hip Hop classic. At some point in the download iTunes got stuck processing the file. I'm not sure what that entails but I had to force quit iTunes which resulted in a file that refused to play in iTunes. I managed to get it to play in QT and captured the audio with Audio Hijack. I had had enough. The funniest thing about this is that the news of the Yahoo music store going away came out soon after this debacle. It was a sick joke that people who had purchased music from Yahoo were being told that they wouldn't be able to listen to said music on any new systems they might get, cause you know, computers never die. They were told to burn the music to CD, which clearly causes a loss in quality.

So enough of the DRM. Enough of the artificial lock in. Enough of the "you purchased the right to listen to music, the file doesn't belong to you" attitude that these businesses have managed to foist on society. If I paid for it, and it wasn't a rental, then it's mine. So it's off to the Amazon store from now on for my music purchases. Oh, I'll look it up in iTunes. I'll play it in iTunes, but Apple won't be getting my money. And it's sad, because the record company that allegedly forced Apples hand on the DRM front will still get my cash.

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