Music Store Restrictions?

P

phatcactus

The Ugly Organist
I really really like this idea, but I'm a little worried that the files are crippled in some way. When I go to create a new account, it tells me that I can "burn any unchanged playlist up to 10 times" and "play music on up to three Macs."

Are the files I'd buy from the service just regular audio files? If so, how can they restrict how many Macs I put them on, or how many times I burn them to a CD? Is there anything I can't do with these songs that I would be able to do with MP3s from, say, Gnutella?
 
Apparently, the downloaded songs are in AAC 128kbps format and contain some sort of copy protection... if you simply copy them to another computer, they won't play from what I've heard.
 
Originally posted by phatcactus
I really really like this idea, but I'm a little worried that the files are crippled in some way. When I go to create a new account, it tells me that I can "burn any unchanged playlist up to 10 times" and "play music on up to three Macs."
Click to expand...

The 10 times of a playlist is burning that list 10 times. Basically if you burn a playlist 10 times you can't burn it again until you rearrange it. This is to keep someone from making a playlist of a CD, and just dumping out copy after copy after copy to give to 134 of their closest friends. It makes them actually do some work inbetween. If they rearrange the playlist every 10 burns they can keep burning until they run out of CD's


Are the files I'd buy from the service just regular audio files? If so, how can they restrict how many Macs I put them on, or how many times I burn them to a CD? Is there anything I can't do with these songs that I would be able to do with MP3s from, say, Gnutella?
Click to expand...

The files are ACC, which is mp4. The files have DRM (Digital Rights Management) content in them. Basically you can only play them in iTunes or burn them to an audio CD to play on normal cd players. iTunes will also transfer the songs to the iPod so you can play them there. Basically each song is tied to your local computer (not sure how, probably by mac address, or something similar). The song gets tied to your computer by connecting to Apples site and authorizing that computer. Apple allows you to have up to 3 computers authorized at a time. If you get a new computer, you simply deauthorize your old one, and authorize your new one.

Brian
 
The AACs do, apparently, have the advantage of better compression, smaller file sizes, better sound for the size.

Doug
 
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