rotten apple
I've always regarded Apple as a kind of likeable company, with the nice and witty commercial,the cleancut design of its products, providing a I-am-not-microsoft alternative on the computer market, beeing the first to present a legal alternative to file-sharing and whatnot.
Now this didn't mean that I bought a mac instead of a pc or a ipod instead of a zen, or buying my songs on itunes instead of buying the cds, but the name apple had a nice ring in my ear.
Like I said I've never used online music stores until now, since I like the tangible experience a cd offers and if I like a song I prefer to get the whole album instead of the song.
Nevertheless I decided to try itunes store, more to test it than because I wanted a special song, but I've heard "meds" by placebo and while I don't care to much for them I kinda liked the song.
I had registered on itunes before to download some free vids, so all I had to do was search the song, double-click it click on yes a couple of times, got my credit card lessened by 99c and like five seconds later I had it on my hard drive.
so far, so peachy...
I tried to play the file on itunes... nothing happened.
instead my itunes informed me that i had to register my pc, since it was a new one (i recently
discarded my old numbercruncher)
so itunes did this.
so far so peachy...
i tried to play the file on itunes... it worked and sounded nice.
okay, it was only 128 kb/s but i am not audiophil enough to care much about that.
so far so peachy...
then I searched the file to play it in winamp. it had a filename i hadn't come across before (m4p) but it just seemed like a new kind of mp3 to me. so I tried to open it with winamp... nothing happened... I thought maybe winamp doesn't know this fileformat... alas all my other players didn't know this format, with the exception of itunes, of course.
problem is, I don't use Itunes, I don't like Itunes as a playersoftware.
well, not that bad, I mostly listen to music on my mp3-player. oh yes the creative zen.
making half and hour spend on trying and a lot of curses short, it didn't work.
so I bought a song from itunes that I could not play in my favourite player and not in my mp3-player.
now I am aware that using some kind of restriction on the files is not apple's idea but is a must have for the content industrie, who are afraid of me giving it to someone else.
but it is apple's idea to restrict it to the itunes software player and the ipod.
and you can say what you want, this is the kind of market action that made me hate microsoft. except microsoft doesn't make it technically impossible to use winamp instead of wmp or firefox instead of ie.
the apple suddenly looks pretty rotten.
end of the song, I opened emule, searched for the song, double-klicked on it, and ten minutes later I had it on my hard drive.
i took the 224 kb/s file, copied it on my creative and added it to my winamp playlist.
if you don't want my money, hey i can get it for free...
cheerful
annoyed
