Written by: Adam Christianson
Categories: News
I’m sitting here, late Tuesday night (5/29), prepping the next Maccast late and Software Update just reported that a new version of iTunes 7.2 (34) was available. According to Software Update, “With iTunes 7.2 (you can), preview and purchase iTunes Plus music—new higher-quality, DRM-free music downloads from participating music labels.”. Cool, but there are two interesting things to note about this sentance… 1) Apparently DRM-free higher quality tracks will from now on be know as “Plus” music and 2) it doesn’t specifically mention “plus” tracks as being tied to EMI. The term “participating music labels” seems to imply that there are tracks from other labels available. Of course, I instantly ran the update and immediately began browsing the store for the new tracks. So far I can find no higher quality DRM free tracks available from any label, let alone EMI. I guess Apple still has yet to update the iTunes Store, but hey, they have 2 more days before May has ended so I guess there’s still time.
Maybe this is me being stupid and missing an option until now, but it now seems to finally disregard ‘The’ at the beginning of artists and albums when arranging them alphabetically, at least by default. I noticed in my podcasts that it had moved ‘The 1UP Show’ to the top, higher than ‘1UP Yours’ (it was about 3/4 of the way down previously) and, sure enough, it’s sorted my music in the same way.
Well you are lucky iTunes works after the upgrade. It would appear lots of people myself included cannot get iTunes to work after the upgrade on Windows. I even removed the software and installed 7.1 (Windows version) and that fails also.
So no iTunes and can no longer download your great podcast.
Hopefully a fix will appear very soon.
Yours John
A potential switcher
Well I’m trying to up grade to the DRM free tracks and the iTunes store downloads are going extremely slow– if I can get anything at all. So far I’ve gotten 8 tracks to download out of 104. Nothing happening on the rest at this time. Maybe later.
Updates break the Apple TV!!
Check Forum for more details
I upgraded to iTunes 7.2 very early this morning (1pm) and before I left for work, I bought my first DRM free track from iTunes. I haven’t experienced any problems with the upgrade. Tonight I plan on getting all the upgraded tracks I’m allowed.
The system seems to be working perfectly fine for me and I’m thrilled that iTunes finally has DRM free tracks. I sure hope these new tracks sell well enough to persuade the other labels to sign on. I know that I’ll be buying more songs from iTunes now.
Wow. The music I got from iTunes Plus is amazing. It sounds like the bands actually there playing the music, which is not what I expected. Even from an oldies track i noticed a difference. The sad thing is only two of the artists from the top 100 songs were on iTunes Plus; and thats where I get a lot of my music from. Hopefully other labels will get into this :-/
So far the iTunes Plus experience has been fraught with snags. Just have a look at the problems over on Apple Discussions. I cannot get my one of my libraries updated because “items are no longer available” or some such technical problem.
I’m confident everything will get worked out. I did download a new Joss Stone EP in iTunes Plus and the sound quality is quite an improvement.
Has anyone been over at iLounge lately? There is an article there noting that the iTunes Plus tracks contain hidden identifying information about customers (email and name). Apple has been mum about it. Here’s the link:
http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/news/comments/users-angry-over-data-in-itunes-plus-tracks/10111