Cory Doctorow’s latest article for Information Week is filled with excellent points about how the iTunes Music Store is changing (in his opinion, in a bad way) the music business. You might be interested in reading it if you’ve been following any of my posts about the iTMS.
I’ve gone on and on about how people don’t understand that all you have to do to get iTMS songs onto another music player is to burn them to a CD and then re-import them. Cory doesn’t see this as a good solution, though, because he says that you have to re-enter all that metadata like song title, album title and artist.
I almost wrote a post about how this isn’t true because every time I re-import songs that I’ve bought from the iTMS, all of the metadata comes in with it. However, I only buy full albums whereas most people buy individual songs, and iTunes can recognize a full album but not a CD with all sorts of random songs on it so Cory is actually right. If you’ve bought a ton of songs from the iTMS and you decided to switch to a different music player other than an iPod, it would definitely be a tedious process to re-import and re-enter all of that metadata.
But in my opinion, the point still stands that if you don’t want to run the risk of not being able to quickly transfer your songs onto a non-Apple iPod, then maybe you shouldn’t be buying music from a store that only sells songs that play on an Apple iPod.
July 27th, 2006 at 8:36 am
you should have written a post becasue you’re right about the media transferring. everytime i buy something off of itunes i immediatley burn a copy of it just in case someday my computer crashes and i lose everything. at that point, you couldn’t tell the difference between that burned cd i made from an itunes download, and one that i burned from an original cd.
July 27th, 2006 at 9:24 am
You’re right. At that point, you can’t really tell. Some people (with really good ears) can hear a difference between the two but not me. The post I was going to write was about how you don’t have to re-enter the metadata after burning to a CD and re-importing, however, if you don’t burn an entire album then you will have to re-enter the metadata. I didn’t know this because I don’t buy individual songs from the iTMS, just full albums. Anyway, thanks for commenting. I was hoping I wasn’t boring the hell out of everyone.
July 27th, 2006 at 9:55 am
I’m a full album kind of guy too luckily, and when i had my “crash of ‘06″ I lost most of what i’d purchased from iTMS. I did have a few cd’s burned that I could easily import back into iTunes and not have to type in the info. I was also able to pull everything off my iPod using a slick little plugin for WinAmp (yes I’m a PC guy). So yea, burning backups is a GOOD IDEA.