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How Starbucks killed the iPhone

Jul 7th 2008 at 1:19 AM

I purchase songs from iTunes because even if I can't buy the DRM-free version of the songs, I can remove the DRM with QTFairUse.  So, I'll always be able to take my songs with me.

I've been pretty diligent about not upgrading iTunes, just in case it becomes incompatible with QTFairUse.

One of the recent free iTunes "Pick of the Week" songs at Starbucks (I think it was Waking Up by Bitter:Sweet) required an upgrade from my crufty old iTunes 7.2 to 7.6.  I've been thinking about getting an iPhone, and in a moment of weakness, I upgraded my version of iTunes.

And sadly, that put my iTunes in a walled garden, because Apple sent a cease and desist to the QTFairUse team, and QTFairUse doesn't work with iTunes 7.6.  Now any new songs I purchase with DRM will have to have the DRM stuck to them.  I shouldn't have upgraded.

This is pretty disappointing.  iTunes feels cripped to me now, since all the songs I want are DRM-only there.  My disappointment in being stuck with the DRM at iTunes translates to the iPhone, too.  So, now I'm not so sure I want the iPhone 3G either.

Darn.  I wonder if I can regress my iTunes library back to 7.2...
Tags: geek, music

Comments

 narilka on Jul 7th 2008 at 9:14 AM
A really long time ago, my dad sent me a link to a site that archived all the old versions of iTunes, back when there was a big hubbub about 4.x. It might still exist and give you back 7.2?

 dblume on Jul 7th 2008 at 4:51 PM
Thanks! Actually, I kept a copy of my previous iTunes installation. I just worry about the format of the the iTunes library. Maybe it's not backwards compatible. (I can uninstall the program and reinstall the older one, but would the older one recognize how the newer one modified my library?)

 halophoenix on Jul 7th 2008 at 1:29 PM
I can offer up the exceedingly inconvenient workaround - burn those DRM'd tunes to CD using iTunes and then re-rip them as mp3 or some other format? It'll strip the DRM, at the very least, even if it takes time and energy (and CDs). There's got to be a way around that though...

 dblume on Jul 7th 2008 at 4:54 PM
Yeah. I know. I just liked the way QTFairUse converted directly from m4p to m4a and retained the album art and tags. The red book to mp3 way loses that meta data, and is more lossy. Not to mention that I'm on a PC, so my iTunes can't use the LAME codec. (Although maybe that doesn't really have to matter in this issue.)

 tpederson on Jul 7th 2008 at 6:48 PM
What is it you like to do, and can't with the DRM? Just curious.

 dblume on Jul 7th 2008 at 7:11 PM
Convert the song to MP3 to play from a more accessible location. (Eventually, not worry that I've forgotten to decommission certain PCs or iPods from my iTunes library.)

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