Bagel Belly Blog

Trust is a two-way street

Back in March of 2004, I decided to trust iLife with some of my precious digital content: in particular, my photos and my music. For the most part, I have been happy since then, but the occasional problems have caused me to wonder if it was a great idea. There are bugs in iPhoto 4 which make it at times unusable (for example, it's difficult to sort in a sensible order, some text fields that habitually lose focus as you are typing in them). iTunes is fragile (if you move your tracks to an external drive, you will probably lose your play count) and the need to defend the music industry's interests means you can't do obvious things like keep your music on the iPod and play it from the iTunes interface (essential if you're on the road without aforementioned external drive).

I think I'm getting to the point where I am so put off by the Dubious Restriction Machinations of iTunes in particular that I need to seek out more open (and ideally libre) alternatives. Yesterday I did a wholesale move of my Powerbook across to an identical machine (more on that next). I could have swapped the hard disk into the other powerbook, but instead did the digital equivalent. On starting iTunes, I got the familiar warning that my computer was not authorised. After authorising, I'm told I'm just about out of lives:

All because I forgot to play by Apple's rules and deauthorise my other computers. And this is only the second machine my music has been on. The other 'fair uses' were lost due to operating system upgrades or reinstallations. Sing along with me: ours is less and less a free society.

So right now I figure I have two choices. Convert all my music to MP3 (less than ideal; it's a lossy conversion) or re-import all my CDs as MP3s. Not a particularly tempting prospect. Unfortunately JHymn is not yet able to work around the restrictions in iTunes 6 (and arguably, why should users have to resort to quasi-criminal software to get fair use of their music?) As for the tracks I bought from the iTunes Music Store: I guess I should write that off as a bad idea, and start listening to libre music instead. Next time I feel the need to buy an album from iTunes, I'll give the money to the EFF instead.

The encroaching restrictions of iTunes make me fear for the rest of my digital data.

Funny, I remember being told years ago that FairPlay AAC was evil. Next time someone tells you that Free is good, don't necessarily write them off as a zealot or a crank. Maybe, just maybe, they are forward-thinking true prophets of our digital doom.