Masthead
One of my photos

Bloody iTunes

July 24th, 2009 · Posted by Skuds in Technology · 1 Comment · Technology

I think I have wondered in the past exactly when it was that Tony Benn switched from being the bogeyman to being a national treasure, well now I am wondering when Apple reached their tipping point on their journey in the opposite direction.

It used to be that Microsoft had everything tied up and Apple were the plucky underdogs and outsiders, attracting the free spirits who didn’t want to be forced into conformity.  Now they seem, at least in the music arena, to be as bad as Microsoft – providing a seamless (according to them) listening experience as long as you are buying music from their online store to play in their software and on their portable music players, and only making grudging allowances for anyone who dares to prefer another product.Ages ago I installed iTunes on an old PC, so I could put music on an iPod Nano I bought for one of our boys.   In the past I had various players from Sony, iRiver and Creative.  The Sony was a pain, but apart from that I was used to dragging and dropping files onto the player as I wanted: the iPod would only take files from iTunes, and even then it wouldn’t just copy them, but had to convert them into its own format first.  I was looking forward to the iPod falling prey to the entropy field that surrounds our kids and did not have to wait long before I could purge the computer of the software.

Since then I have been listening to podcasts more, downloading them from different places: going to one place for the Phill & Phil podcast, to another place for Collings & Herrin, and another place for the Word podcast.  I was thinking about starting to listen to others like Adam & Joe perhaps, or Danny Wallace, but couldn’t face having to keep manually trawling round everywhere for them.  However, I did know that they were all available on iTunes, and that you could subscribe to have them downloaded for you whenever they were ready.  Also it keeps an archive of older podcasts for some of them.

This evening I finally bit the bullet and went onto iTunes only to find that the only way to use the store – even if you are only intending to download free podcasts – is to access it through the iTunes client software – so I downloaded and installed that.  At various points it tried to make itself the default music player, make Quicktime the default video player, move and rename all my existing mp3 files and convert all my wma files.

I’m up and running now, but what a lot of fuss just to get what are basically radio shows.  Just hoping now that it doesn’t keep nagging me whenever it realises it is not the default player.

Tags:

One Comment so far ↓

  • Rullsenberg

    I’m currently resisting taking on the latest ‘upgrade’ on iTunes because it is prone to just randomly trying to take over the world…