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Is having your music locked into the iTunes/iPod experience a pain point for you? (View All Discussions in this Group)
I've had a few instances where I've been frustrated with the iTunes experience:
- trying to test my music on other devices (you have to do major hacks and download all sorts of other stuff to make it work, then you are punished when you 'go back' to the apple products)
- trying to use music to make presentations, etc. (not for sale)
- during one upgrade, iTunes lost about 15 songs that I had purchased within the past 3-4 weeks and I couldn't download them again (no links even though they had records of me purchasing, so I had to buy again)
Anything else?
While the experience works pretty smoothly when it does work, the bumps get pretty rough when you try to colour outside the lines a little. I get so used to the music I buy from ITMS 'just working' that I forget it's different (as in locked) until I try to put a song on my non-i-phone.
It's funny we were talking in a hack session today about this, specifically in regard to the sudden arms race between Apple and its customers who want to use their purchased music as ringtones on the iPhone. We more or less concluded that Apple likes things to 'just work', but they're in this mutual embrace with the music labels, they can only fulfill that goal so much.
Is it a pain point for me? Yes, to the point where I think I'll go through the (few) hoops of getting rid of the DRM DRM Dumpster (View Details) just to make sure I don't get stuck should iTunes 'forget' some of my songs as in your case. That's just being a smart consumer.
Well I don't even let it happen to me :D...I know its geeky, but I remove the default iPod OS and install Rockbox :)
I don't buy music on itunes. I think that limiting myself to the ipod experience can be a bad thing. As a person used to get the MP3 music freely to use with all devices i think i can never use the itunes experience of buying music just for my ipod. I use songbird to manage my ipod's music and for buying music i use any mp3 store out there.
I may use itunes if somehow the platform became a better working one or i switched to mac. I am a PC user wanting to switch to mac. But for now i will just stick with the MP3 downloads. I guess we prefer a certain amount of freedom in that and to avoid problems like the ones Tara had.
On the other hand i must recognize that itunes works!! Like Todd said it just works, but it works! and it does the thing so it´s ok.
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