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DRM can bite my ass
As you all know, I stopped buying CD’s because the rights holders went apeshit on their customers – and I’d rather be an ex-customer than submit to their kind of abuse.
It now appears that even non-DRM music is not safe:
[Quote:]
Dear Apple:
As I’m sure you know, I’ve been a pretty unrepentant Mac fangirl for a while. I like shiny things. I like your laptops. I like your operating system (and I used to like your old one, too). I like my transparent terminal windows. I like not having to run OpenOffice just to read the attachments people insist on sending me. I like Quicktime. I like a lot of things you do.
But I’ve got to tell you, this iPod destructive mind-meld “link” to a specific computer, or whatever the hell it is, is just fucking stupid.
So I’ve got two powerbooks. One’s my “real” computer, which has a slowly failing hard disk, and so I’ve also got a loaner from work. I copied my home directory over to the new one via drag and drop and everything worked very well — thank you — such as my shareware apps recognizing my previous registration codes, all my photos and documents and the cruft accumulated over years. Even my Firefox plugins came over (and, it should be noted, that the Firefox on this laptop doesn’t exhibit the completely wack-ass behavior that Firefox on my other laptop does — so that seems to prove well enough that it’s not my preferences or plugins or something that’s causing it, interestingly enough). Everything was great.
…Until this morning. I had ripped some music over the weekend, onto my external hard disk and added it to the real laptop’s iTunes library therefrom. I wanted to listen to it at work today, but my upload speed from home is pretty crummy, so I decided I’d just throw the music on my iPod Shuffle and take that to work and listen to the tracks off of it. I hopped in the car, happily listened to my new MP3s on said faithful iPod on the way in, arrived at work, and plugged in the iPod to my loaner laptop. Whereupon I got a message that said something like “Some songs have not been copied to the iPod ‘wee’ because this computer is not authorized to play them, including ‘$song_by_some_other_band_that_was_in_aac_format_but_i_dont_care_about_that_band.’”
Okay. Whatever. I have that album on this laptop and I don’t know why you’re whinging about it anyways, as I didn’t ask you to “copy” anything. ‘Cos it was already *there* and all. But whatever, I didn’t want to listen to that band at the moment (and I can always go type in my stupid iTunes Music Store password if I did). I want to listen to those new MP3s……hey, WHERE THE HELL DID THEY GO?
What I’m assuming happened here is that my iPod, named ‘wee’ (what? it *is*!), had some sort of sympathetic bond with my old laptop, “shiny.” It liked shiny. It was evidently involved in a fiercely monogamous relationship with shiny. When I plugged it in to my loaner laptop, “snooty,” it decided that, as a part of automatically updating the iPod (why was snooty auto-updating wee if wee is married to shiny?) it would delete the MP3s that were not a part of snooty’s music library. Despite the fact that they’re not AAC files and had no DRM of any kind. And it’s not just that iTunes is not showing them; I downloaded and fired up PodUtil just to check. Then I plugged the iPod directly into my external speakers. Gone, daddy, gone; the love has gone away.
Attention Apple: Those were my bloody MP3s. I wanted to play them for myself on my bloody iPod. You morons have just fucked me over because now not only can I not listen to them on my laptop speakers, but you deleted them off the iPod entirely so I can’t listen to them in the car or over headphones until I get home tonight. (I would be SO PISSED if this had happened while I was travelling and away from my home computer!) In practical terms, won’t someone please explain to me the legal reasons I have *less* right to listen to music I purchased on one set of speakers versus another, to the point where the laptop not only disables the music in question but outright destroys it? You disabled the AAC files that were not authorized. If you wanted to similarly refuse to play back the MP3 files that were not in my currently-connected laptop’s music library, why was it necessary to REMOVE them and not simply disable them?
I used to carry my old 5G original iPod around with music on it and plugged it in to listen to on other people’s computers with some regularity. That was evidently okay behavior back in the halcyon days of, what, 2002? The times they are a-changin’.
Suck my dick, Apple.
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I have never had any of those problems with my IAudio player. Drag and drop and no ITunes!
A little unfair as a criticism since it is nothing to do with DRM. It is part of the design of the iPod family that they are essentially mobile mirrors of a single iTunes library (or subset of it). If you sync an iPod to a different machine then it will erase the current songs and replace them with the library, or subset of it, from the new machine. I believe it warned me the one time I tried it, but I might be mistaken.
That is a most stupid design if it’s true.
That’s why I don’t use iPod, but a simple mp3 player. Smaller, cheaper, and it does not try to decide for me what I am allowed to listen to.
It’s just perfect.
Fuck Corporate Mentality. Period.
My iPod has never decided what I am allowed to listen to, and I have never purchased anything from the iTunes music store, or even been bugged to do so. All my music is in MP3 format imported from my CD collection and it handles that perfectly.
The design might be stupid, but I suspect that it is there to make the device as simple to use as possible for the 80% use-case. Apple is very good at keeping the usage model simple for people who do not want to understand technology. That has the side effect in many cases of frustrating those who do understand it and want to do different things with their devices or software than it was designed for. A simple flash drive model might make more sense to you, but would probably baffle a lot of the non-technical users of iPods (and the non-tech savvy community is probably still larger than the tech-savvy one, so it makes business sense to design for them).
All of that said, the main reason I bought the device over the other choices however was that it supported downloading the photos from my camera directly. That allows me to leave the laptop behind when I am on a trip and still have a means to offload the images from the camera’s flash cards. When I get home, the offloaded images are imported into iPhoto as if they were on a flash card. It makes my travel kit much lighter, and provides me with over 30GB of storage for images (allowing some space on the 40GB drive for some music, my contact list and the thumbnails of my recent photos).
Ok, I see your point,though I don’t know how a simple mp3 player is technically more difficult than iPod.
I would say that if my mum – not a technically savy lady in this area – would have experienced the same thing, she would have been more angry than the lady who wrote the letter above.
I don’t think that technical ignorance makes it easier to accept that your music just disappeared.
If you use it to store pics, then it is probably a good choice, though I only want to listen to music
It has everything to do with DMR. If I don’t have to use a program that makes DMR decisions for “my” music that I have purchased, then I am better off. Your player, which needs ITunes to function normally, is the problem because it relies on a program that is buddy, buddy with DMR. When I drag and drop, my player says, “Okay, your the master, whatever you want!” The iPod is a fine piece of hardware but the software it uses has made me go elsewhere. My player doesn’t warn me that I am about to do something legal but that it doesn’t like.