iLifeZone Episode 35
All About iTunes
Run Time: 31:14

Scott Bourne www.podango.com and www.applephoneshow.com
Chris Breen MacWorld and Playlist Magazine

Let's get on with it, shall we?

As of May 30th, iTunes is now offering DRM-free tunes as something called iTunes Plus. The songs are non-DRM'ed AAC files (meaning you can play them pretty much everywhere) and they cost $0.30 per song more. Albums cost anywhere from $9.99 to $12.99 and the songs are encoded at 256k instead of 128k like the older files. There's no longer any copy protection on the files, so you can drag the files into a converter and voila, instant MP3. You can also right-click a file and click Convert to MP3 right inside iTunes.

Chris believes the impotus for this move is cash. Songs now cost more. Secondly, most music today is purchased via CD anyway which is unprotected as it is. As record companies see digital downloads increasing, they're going to have to cut their losses and attract more customers. Chris also thinks that other record companies should follow suit but some probably won't no matter what and they would be wise to change their ways.

Chris noticed a few glitches with iTunes Plus. A large number of the billions of tracks sold on iTunes are now available as iTunes Plus tracks. In iTunes, you can now "upgrade" your tracks to iTunes Plus without DRM. The catch is you have to either do all of your songs or none of them; you can't pick and choose which available tracks you can upgrade. Right now things are really slow or not downloading at all. Things are going to be slow-going for a bit, but eventually all will be right with the world at some point.

Scott thinks this is a good thing. His tip is that no matter what happens, even if you've deleted songs that are now available in upgraded form, you can still get those tracks from iTunes. Chris points out that you can also get any downloaded tracks a second time by going to the iTunes Store's support section in case something catastrophic happens.

Chris also points out that some people are a bit upset that their name and Apple ID appear inside the new unencrypted tracks. Chris points out that it's a pretty dumb idea to share these files seeing as the source of your song will be available to anyone. Scott points out that with just a bit of figuring out, someone can get your password and voila. Gone. Don't share stuff you bought, people.

Chris isn't thrilled with the fact that you don't have the option to, on an album by album basis, pick which albums you want to buy as iTunes Plus and which you want to download as standard iTunes. Instead, you have to set a default preference. Chris is correct in saying that it's slightly inconvenient. Scott is surprised that it isn't more intuitive also. Chris notes that the page is somewhat empty for now as far as available albums go, but that will probably improve as time goes on.

Chris has one more tip. In older versions of iTunes, you could burn your protected files to a CD and then re-rip them to remove the DRM. In iTunes 7.2 that functionality seems to have been broken a bit. In 7.2, it'll have problems doing that, but you can get around that by just using a different program to rip your CDs. If it truly is a bug, this is going to probably be fixed.

Scott points out that the podcasting section was acting weird last week on the iTunes store, but it has since been fixed.

Chris and Scott wonder where Paul McCartney's complete catalog is (Vinny's Note: Shortly after this recording, Mr. McCartney's Catalog did in fact appear in iTunes). Could the Beetles be far behind? Hmmmm...

Some iTunes Tips:
Scott: If you hold down the Option key when loading iTunes, you can choose which iTunes library you want to load. This allows you to create a new library or even create a new one.

Chris: You can create a second account in the iTunes store. You can use this to create an account that's limited by an allowance in case you have no self control (like all of us!). You will need a second e-mail address to do this, but it's a good way to keep your spending under control.

Scott: In the iPod, you can randomly listen to albums. It'll shuffle through albums as opposed to songs if you set it that way. If you use the Albums option, you can have it randomly play songs within the same album then it'll move to another album instead of song to song.

Chris: If you go into the iTunes preferences, you can turn on the shopping cart. This is good because with one-click shopping, you can spend a lot of money very quickly. If you use the shopping cart, the cart will appear in your Store section of the sources. It'll also tell you how much you're about to spend. This is your chance to remove a bunch of stuff rather than just buying everything.

Scott points out that none of Chris' tips this week are going to make him very popular at Apple.

That wraps it up. On June 20th, we turn 1 year old! We'll have a retrospective to celebrate with clips from the past 6 months (the last time we did a best-of).

We're going to move to a once-a-month publishing schedule from here forward. On the 20th of each month, you'll get a new episode of the 'Zone. This is only temporary until October when we'll most likely be getting a new version of the iLife suite. Don't fret! It isn't permanent!

Thanks everyone!

Important note: Our show is no longer on Libsyn. If you still subscribe on Libsyn, please use the new subscribe link below or visit Podango.com.

This episode was sponsored by Overstock.com and ShieldZone.

The next show lands on June 20, 2007. For more information email us at info@ilifezone.com.

Thanks also to Vincent Ferrari for the shownotes!

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