Ok, I’ve never really used the iTunes Music Store to purchase music, mainly because they really don’t carry much from the artists I like, and I still have at least 500 pieces of vinyl and cassettes to digitize, but anyway, as a favor I purchased a few songs for someone. It didn’t turn out so well…
I was already registered, I’m sure I did that when the iTMS came out, or for some contest or something, so I managed to login ok. (Even though Apple still thinks my old email address should be my user id, though I’ve tried to change it, luckily it forwards to my current email address.)
Alright, so I purchase the music, it loads into iTunes, I can play it, and I now attempt to burn it to a CD. The user experience quickly goes to hell.
First iTunes tells me that “at least” of the songs in the playlist can’t be burned to a CD. So I try deleting one, then another, and another, soon there are no songs in the playlist. I assume that none of them can be burned to a CD. Did I miss a memo? Can you still burn songs you purchase from iTMS to an audio CD?
And still, some in the industry wonder why people don’t like DRM.
Now keep in mind, this is a favor for someone, and I said it should take 15-20 minutes. More than enough time I figured to download the songs and burn them to a CD, right? Well, now I’m searching for software to break the DRM, just so I can put these freakin’ songs on a CD. No luck there. I end up using Wiretap (old free version) and Soundflower to play the songs on my Mac and record the output right back to non-DRM’d files. This added 30 more minutes to the process.
In the end it did work, though I was told the sound quality seemed to lose something, which I will chalk up to preconceived notions about re-recording the audio to non-DRM’d versions, and nothing else.
Note: As I’ve recently received an iTMS gift certificate (Thanks Lenzies!) I’ll be trying this process again. I’m hoping to skip the whole “breaking the DRM” part this time though.