Home > Geekboy > Archives > 2006 > February > 23
Thursday, February 23, 2006
iHate iTunes
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Geekboy does not exercise, unless typing qualifies as sport, which, if it did, my glistening and sleek shift pinkies would clearly power the U.S. to office Olympic gold medal glory.
As you can tell by the last sentence, I have been watching the Winter Games while drinking and slogging my way through pay-for-play music download sites.
Today’s victim? Apple’s iTunes.
You will notice my vitriol tapers off as your read this column — I blame the Buckwheat Zydeco music I am listening to and the wine, Red Bicyclette, which iSelected only because the label had a cute dog chasing some beret-wearing fellow on a bike stealing bread. Or perhaps that’s his dog? Life is full of mysteries.
One of life’s largest mysteries is the popularity of iTunes.
iTunes is largely retarded, but lets you burn CDs of what you download. That is the good news. The bad news is the CDs don’t work.
iTried burning a CD a second time and iTunes crashed. iThink the iTunes CD burning software is junk.
The problem with iTunes is it is owned by Apple, and they are more worried about being cool than being good. Take the name iTunes for instance. Unbeknownst to most, the “i” in everything Apple tries to offload on a genuflecting public stands for “Internet.”
It’s enough to make you wonder why an Internet Portable Device, aka iPod, can’t access the Internet.
Maybe the “i” can now stand for Intel?
iTunes supports Windows and, of course, Macs. iTested on a PC because Macs are computers for girls.
The download is 35megs. It downloaded quickly, so quickly I had to do it again because the file was corrupt.
As usual, iTunes tried to become the default media player on my system. I avoided this by deselecting the proper boxes during the install process.
After a successful install, iTunes, in classic English as a second language jargon, proudly beamed, “With iTunes installed now it’s a snap to access and download the music you wanted.”
Someone should iFix that.
iTunes looks nice, but only plays 30-second clips of songs, not the whole song like every other service iTried.
There are no Lets Active tunes available. Bummer.
Individual songs are 99 cents each, the most expensive I have seen.
I have to create an account at the iTunes music store, so humbly submit my credit card info. I download the 12-song album “Life’s Rich Pageant” by R.E.M. for $9.99 in less than 3 minutes. That’s about 84 cents per track.
The files appear in an iTunes folder created in the My Documents folder. The files are M4P (not MP4) format, meaning they will not play in WinAmp. M4P is a proprietary Apple format designed to prevent burning of CDs. From what I can gather it is merely a “protected� form of Apple’s ACC sound file format.
What protects it?
iSprang into Geekboy mode, nearly tripping on my cape.
A header is typically text information at the beginning, or head, of a file which tells the computer what to expect when reading the remainder of the file. It can also be used to lie to the computer, and thus prevent a file from being burned to a CD.
If you are up for a little hack, open an M4P file in Notepad and check it out. You will have to tell Notepad to look for “all files” not just text files, and you will have to wait a few minutes while your computer tries to parse the binary data, but eventually you should see something that looks like a screen full of garbage. iSuggest expanding Notepad as big as you can first.
As you will see, the header info contains YOUR NAME and potentially other personal information! Have I mentioned iHate Apple?
I couldn’t burn the songs using Nero, I got the usual DRM, or digital rights media, error.
If you just want to find music and download it, iTunes does the job and allegedly lets you burn CDs for your car. I could never produce a properly functioning CD, but your mileage may vary.
If the CD had worked, and if Apple had not infused my name and who knows what other information into the file headers of my music, I would probably give them a better review. But instead iWill tell you to stay away. This Apple is rotten.
