The irony of DRM suckitude.
I recently upgraded my Gen 1 to a iPod 160gb Classic. Probably a dumb decision given that I appear to have only about 12 gigs of music. Oh well. I’m a sucker for big numbers.
And while it’s nice…it’s also been a huge pain in the ass.
The movie Babel came through our Netflix queue a few months ago. I thought it was an excellent, wonderfully moody movie. The next evening I had the urge to listen to more of the soundtrack. Well, as usual, eMusic didn’t have it. I don’t think Amazon had opened the flood gates yet to their MP3s, and iTunes only had the crappy DRMed version. But I had the itch and iTunes makes it so easy to purchase it, so against my better judgement, I paid for the DRM version.
And that was fine.
Until I wanted to also listen to the songs on my new iPod.
For some reason, every other track or so from this double album won’t play on my iPod. It just gets ‘stuck’. Crap.
Do a bit of googling, and find an Apple Tech Doc.
Step one: De-authorize and then re-authorize your machine. Ok, that was easy. Nope. Didn’t fix the problem.
Step two: Reset your iPod to it’s original factory settings. Hmm…this is a bit of a pain. First, download the 60mb update file. Install it, wipe the iPod clean, then resynch it all. An hour later and…nope. Didn’t fix the problem.
Step three: Rebuild your iTunes library. Sigh. That’ll take an hour. And now I have to re-synch it to my iPod. There goes another half hour. And, yea, you guessed it…didn’t fix the problem.
“In Gen. 11:9, the name of Babel is etymologized by association with the Hebrew verb balal, ‘to confuse or confound’”. The myth is that Babel was the city that united humanity, with everyone speaking a single language. God didn’t like this for whatever reason and decided to scatter humanity across the globe and confused their languages so that we’d forever have difficulties communicating as one.
The movie plays off of this quite poetically, in my opinion. iTunes plays off of this with stunning irony as well. I have to smile at clever irony. But must really restrain my urge to SMASH COMPUTER SMASH IPOD SMASH DRM!
4 Comments
Save yourself some tears and just burn the crappy DRM files to CD then re-rip to MP3s (or unportected AAC if you’re into that codec and never plan to own anything but an iPod).
A tip: if you don’t eject the CD-R after burning and just go ahead and rip it, iTunes will remember the song meta-data and add them to your MP3s. If you eject the CD-R and re-insert it, iTunes will forget everything about it and you’ll have to enter all that song data by hand. Who says Apple doesn’t want you to have DRM-free files?
Take your Mac computer and your iPod down to the Genius Bar at the Apple Store and get them to get it going for you. They take care of Apple Macs and Apple iPods, and they will certainly get them both working together just fine for you.
If you don’t want to carry them both down there, then go to the Apple Support Forums, where users help other users (not an Apple Tech, just users for users). You get a lot of smart Apple people there and if one person has had any such problem, they will usually have put the solution up there.
And also, you can put a ticket into Apple Support, directly for your iPod problem, and if need be (after they sort it out for you), they’ll get you another iPod, if this one is defective. It’s obviously defective, if you can play your DRM music on iTunes on your Apple Macintosh, but you can’t play it on your Apple iPod. If that’s the case, they’ll replace a defective iPod for you.
Well, this all involves a Windows PC and an external HD, so there’s no way I’m hauling that into the Apple Store.
I did email Apple and 48 hours later got the usual “we are too lazy to actually read the details of your email so we’ll just point you to the generic KB article”
Which, of course, is the article I referenced in the email I sent to them.
Again, serves me right for buying DRMed music…
or just convert your mp4s to mp3s … problem solved, no more DRM.
google “mp4 to mp3″ and take your pick.