Stop. Stop now, before your complete ignorance of what you speak against continues to shine. The DRM free music is a higher bitrate than AAC protected music, so your claim of a loss of quality is ignorant at best, and deliberately ignoring the facts at the worst. The only time a possible loss of quality is the conversion of DRM music when burning an audio CD of protected content, but the AAC music is 128Kbps any way, so it's not much, if any, of a real loss. Before you make another single claim about what does and does not happen with iTunes I highly suggest you go have a look for yourself. Your repeated spouting of false info in the face of direct links to the source for easily found info is astonishing.
In the "Quick Links" section of the main iTunes page is an "iTunes Plus" link that takes you to the main page for iTunes Plus where everything shown is DRM free. Apple charges .99 for iTunes Plus songs, just like it does for iTunes DRM songs. I just fired it up and right next to the .99 price is a + icon showing that it is DRM free music. Hard to distinguish my ass.
I never said Apple wasn't to blame, but they are not as much to blame as you seem to like. You gain a point in my book by having a belief you stand by, but you lose several by being so blinded by it that you cannot see the wave of truth coming straight for you out of the sea of web links shown to you.
Jon.
On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 5:39 PM, Leo Mauler [email protected] wrote:
Actions speak louder than words. Currently they issue DRM music files which are cheaper than non-DRM music files, and their DRM files are indistinguishable from their non-DRM files. And as Jon has been so quick to point out, there's a FREE TOOL to *legally* remove the DRM from their files.
Apple can say what it likes in its press releases. It is what it chooses to sell (and its choice to make you pay more for non-DRM, while claiming better quality and not delivering it) which tells the real story.
iTunes Plus Music is indistinguishable from iTunes. Typically when one pays more for an optimized version of a product, one expects better quality in the more expensive version than in the much cheaper version, yet Apple appears to be discouraging use of iTunes Plus by charging more for music files which aren't any better quality than the DRM music files and, as Jon has pointed out on numerous occasions, the Apple-brand DRM music files can have their DRM removed easily.