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In the process of backing up my data I noticed that barely 1,000 of the 11,000+ songs I have were still available to download or play from iTunes.
While much of that library comes from ripping from my pile of CD's, a decent sized chunk of it was purchased from iTunes.
And if I hadn't downloaded it and saved it... the music I paid for would be gone.
If you're not allowed a local copy, you are renting the media. At best.
Even worse if you're locked into a proprietary format that only runs on their player. Like movies and TV shows from iTunes.
Yep. It's something very discouraging to me, who has always bought software. Now it's rent software and they'll force features on you you don't want.
ReplyDeleteWhich is, after being a loyal Microserf for so darned many years, I now am a Libre-Office peasant. Haven't transitioned to Linux totally, but if Windows 11 is as bad as some people say, will be looking into that, too.
As to the music, wife has the same problem. A huge store of music from back in the days, all on iTunes with their format. And so what has Apple done with iTunes? Yeah.
I'm kinda glad that all of the music I've bought online has been in MP3 format because I haven't been a Mac (recently) or iPhone or iPod customer.
ReplyDeleteI've also never been a Microsoft customer any more than could possibly be avoided.
I've been using Linux since 1993 and pretty much transitioned totally to it from Macs by 1995.
Back in the old days (Apple II, early Mac) I was an Apple fan. I got into Berkeley UNIX starting in 1985 and commercial UNIXes (SunOS, AIX, HP/UX, etc) after that. Linux was an easy transition for me once workable productivity software came out for it.
As far as music goes, Apple dropped the DRM on most of it a long while ago and most players play the m4a files as readily as mp3. The problem is the m4p files that still have DRM attached.
ReplyDeleteGetting the DRM dropped from a song on the iTunes store is dependent on the artist, not Apple. If they don't sign the release, then their music is m4p.
I went Mac to avoid Vista. I kept a Bootcamp install of XP then Win7 to play games. That Win7 install has kept that Mac Pro a viable computer for online stuff as the browsers for my old OSX 10.6.8 have lost support. But the machine and the software are still running and don't need to be online.
I've used Ubuntu happily before. I had a dual boot of an XP machine back in 2007ish. XP for games, music and movies.
I'm running Ubuntu 20.04 on my laptop (using it to type this) and the experience has been seamless. It does everything I need it to do and without needing to really Grok the terminal.
MOVIES and TV Shows bought from iTunes are still chock full of DRM. The movie file itself is the bog standard mp4, but it's locked in a software container that requires iTunes to open.
DeleteUpdates to support IOS made the playback experience on Win7 choppy and ugly. Happily there's stuff to fix that.
Linux Mint Cinnamon has been good. There are a few varieties but the Cinnamon desktop is a lot like Windows 7.
Deletehttps://linuxmint.com/download.php
Brennan B2. Mine's pretty awesome.
ReplyDeletetry https://www.xmedia-recode.de/ for the non drm apple files (m4a) to convert them to mp3...works great...panzer guy...
ReplyDelete