Have you ever bought polaroid film? If so, did you get upset because it didn’t fit into a 35mm Kodak camera?
How about this one: If you had a Schick Mach III razor and you used all of the blades up, would you consider purchasing a pack of Gillette Fusion blades and crossing your fingers in hopes that they would fit even though they’re Gillettes and not Schicks?
Finally, let’s say you are a Cingular customer and you want a cool new ringtone for your Cingular phone. Would you entertain the idea of heading over to the Sprint website and trying to download one of their songs to your phone even though you’re not a Sprint customer?
I would be very surprised if any of you answered “yes” to any one of these questions. Therefore I can’t understand why people are so pissed off over the fact that songs purchased from the iTunes Music Store cannot be played on a non-iPod music player, especially since it isn’t even entirely true.
The iTunes Music Store is specifically designed to give iPod owners a way to easily purchase, download and play music on their iPods. ON THEIR iPODS! Not on their Creative Zen nano players. Not on their Phillips portable MP3 players. Not on their SanDisk digital audio players and certainly not on their Oregon Scientific 256MB MP120 Waterproof MP3 Player with up to 8 hours of playback time players.
These kinds of walled gardens have been around for years. Whether they are good practice or not is another discussion but whether they work or not and whether or not we have been used to them for a long time is a completely ridiculous argument.
Besides, there are plenty of possible reasons behind this kind of restriction. It is fairly common knowledge (or should be) that the record labels have a big hand in defining the terms of the DRM that is attached to music purchased on online music stores.
The fact that Apple offers a convenient way of purchasing music for their iPods is a luxury that we should not take for granted. But then again, so is the fact that you can burn that music to a CD and then re-import it which completely strips the song of all DRM (enabling you to put it on any MP3 player you want).
But most of us are too busy complaining to figure that one out…
July 7th, 2006 at 1:39 pm
Hey son, you are right. I tried all those things and none of them work!
You are a gal danged genius. How did you know all that stuff?
I also tried putting a penny in the dime slot at the parking meter. I tried putting chocolate syrup in water and I didn’t get chocolate milk. I give up. There isn’t a good way I know of to beat the system by going cheap.
All I can say is, if you want the best, go with the POD!
July 10th, 2006 at 11:46 am
No way, that ‘pod doesn’t have the FM radio, voice recorder and extra $300 in my pocket that my iRiver has.
Of course it only has maybe a 100th of the capacity your pods do but I don’t mind. I’ve used the thing fewer times than I have figures and toes since I dropped $100 on it a year ago.
July 10th, 2006 at 1:18 pm
There are definitely plenty of alternatives to the iPod. Fortunately, the idea that you can’t play music on them that you’ve purchased from the iTMS is nothing more than a myth. Sure, you’d have to burn a CD and then re-import the songs but at least you DO have that option which is fortunate since the iTMS was created specifically for the iPod.
July 17th, 2006 at 12:51 am
I don’t have a problem with this particular walled garden, mostly because iTunes never did claim that the iTMS was a general/one-stop music purchasing company. They’ve never claimed it, as far as I’ve seen, but have, like Todd said, stated that it was created specifically for play on the iPod and in the iTunes application. There are many, many other places to purchase music on the internet that were not created for any player in specific.
We should just be glad that you’re not forced to ONLY play iTMS mp3’s on our iPods.