iTunes Authorization

[MacRumors]

This KnowledgeBase article describes the process in Authorizing and Deauthorizing your computer to play "Protected" AAC's

The process appears relatively simple - with protected songs played for the first time, requiring your Apple ID/Password to play. Subsequent plays on the same computer are otherwise seamless.

Deauthorizing your computer simply requires selecting "Deauthorize Computer" in the iTunes advanced menu, which deauthorizes all the songs on your computer.

At this point, you can presumably copy the songs to another computer and reauthorize them. Note: by default, Apple allows for a song to be authorized on three computers simultaneously.

[arn]

assuming DRM is a necessary 'evil' for online music purchases.... it seems reasonable.

The major caveats are:

1) You can't migrate to a PC yet. Not until Apple releases a PC client... because you can't play them on the PC yet.

2) You are locked into iTunes/iPod. Again - no other players will play these. At the moment, it's 'ok' - in that this is what I would use anyhow... but you limit being able to change later. Hopefully, AAC will become more popular.

3) Your songs are tied to Apple. Hopefully, Apple will do well ...

arn

[hvfsl]

The main thing that annoys me is you cant use the music store in the UK (or any where else outside US), so it looks like I will have to stick to kazaa for the time being.

[j_maddison]

Originally posted by hvfsl
The main thing that annoys me is you cant use the music store in the UK (or any where else outside US), so it looks like I will have to stick to kazaa for the time being.

I can't really understand why this annoys you, keep using kazaa or limewire and get your music for free. Seriously though, I think that .99c for each song is overpriced. If you download an entire album you start to get into the same cost as bying a CD. Baring inmind that the net is inherintly a cheaper route to market, why does the music industry just see it as another way to overprice its products. Surely they should be cheaper on the net? There are minimul distribution costs incured, no packaging or logistic cots, and the only sores costs is incured by hosting and bandwidth costs. Just seems pricey to me, no wonder people on the net still support peer to peer file sharing and illegal music distribution in the way they do.

if the music industry demonstrated any sence the price of a download would be low. Economies of scale would take over ensuring maximum profitability, and then in a few years once the consumer has become comfortable with the distribution medium then they could increase the price. Just seems ill thought out on all fronts, both for the consumer (another nescient marketing cock up) and for the business (probably marketings fault again, sorry have a pet hate for marketing at the moment. Being made to suffer several module on my msc long live economics!!)

enough ranting.

jay
p.s. arent the new ipods quite sexy looking, makes my old ipod look a bit dated.

[alia]

What happens if you buy say 1,000 songs (hypothetical here!) and then move them to another computer? Can you authorize them en masse, or is it one at at time? I think that would be the biggest pain when it comes to this system.

Of course, I'm still not in a financial position to switch yet, so I guess it doesn't matter yet.

Alia

[jimjiminyjim]

Well, at least someone is using drm with the consumer in mind. Thank you apple. The drm management seems a little complicated to me - i don't know what they've done with the "rights" of individual users on the same computer, i haven't found much mention of it yet.

I tried to rip one of my CD's to aac, and got a message about access privileges. I think it is because I had the iTunes music folder in "Shared" so that everyone could put an alias to it in their home/music folder. Experimentally, I deleted the alias, and let iTunes create a new folder - it kept all the music from "shared" and then also let me rip the CD that I previously couldn't. This is what I don't like about drm and OS X users - the privileges are complicated, and there are many bugs that still need working out (i must admit, OS X privileges give me far less hassle now than in the first versions).

j_maddison: these songs aren't overpriced - they're on apple's website. (sarcasm) seriously though, now apple as well as the music industry takes a cut, plus, all the work behind the scenes to make a program like this fly probably cost a little money. In the technology world, we're paying not so much for the product as for all the research and development that went into creating and providing it.

[jwthomp]

"I can't really understand why this annoys you, keep using kazaa or limewire and get your music for free. Seriously though, I think that .99c for each song is overpriced. If you download an entire album you start to get into the same cost as bying a CD."

This is not true. The album price is at a reduced rate. It appears that almost all albums are $9.99. Far far cheaper than the cost of most albums in the store.

The .99 price becomes an excellent deal when you only wish to purchase one or two songs from an album.

One problem that can arise is if you purchase one or two songs from and album and later decide to purchase the whole thing, you don't get credit towards your purchase. So in effect you own "two" copies of some songs. I also imagine that the digital rights mechanisms do not handle this (say putting it on 6 macs).

One thing that puzzles me is the Rendezvous support. If anyone wants to listen to my music via iTunes Rendezvous support, they must have my user name and password for my .Mac account to authorize them, and this counts as one share. I am in a work environment where we are all on Mac's and this basically negates using Rendezvous for sharing music. I can't even pick one or two people to let use my music as I own two other Macs (an iMac and an iBook) that I use regularly and want to be able to listen to the music on those systems. For me this is the biggest drawback so far.

[AlfieJ]

I can see it happening...your computer crashes, or some prefereces file gets corrupted, and your computer deauthorizes itself.

You've legally bought and downloaded all this music, and you're not allowed to play it on this computer. Let's say you've already got two other computers authorized, and the artificial restriction of 3 means you can't re-authorize your computer. Now you've got headaches trying to convice Apple that you're a decent, law-abiding, citizen before you can re-authorize your computer.

The biggest problem I have with all of this is that you're treated as a criminal first.

[Le Big Mac]

Originally posted by j_maddison
Seriously though, I think that .99c for each song is overpriced. If you download an entire album you start to get into the same cost as bying a CD.

If you want an album, buy an album at tower records.com. You get the art and a permanent CD w/o DRM. But if you don't want an album, because you want only 2-3 songs (or 1), $1 each is pretty good. You come out way ahead, because you're not throwing money away on songs you don't want. Other than napster-style stealing, where else can you buy a single song that you want for $1? All the EP/CD-singles are $5, and that's only for some songs--the rest aren't available anywhere.

[mproud]

What's the rule on burning songs you've bought onto compact disc? Wouldn't it change format, or is there still some protection somewhere? Would I be able to burn an album I just bought to play it in the car? Does it count against authorizing/deauthorizing?

[arn]

Originally posted by mproud
What's the rule on burning songs you've bought onto compact disc? Wouldn't it change format, or is there still some protection somewhere? Would I be able to burn an album I just bought to play it in the car? Does it count against authorizing/deauthorizing?

you can burn a song as many times as you want. DRM is stripped when you do so.

*though you can burn a specific playlist/mix 10 times before you have to rearrage them. most people won't run into this

arn

[kdickey]

Well then, for those of us with older SCSI CD-Rs that do not work with iTunes we are screwed and cannot burn to CD I assume. If I am to buy any songs or albums I will want to burn a perm. copy for backup and if I cant burn then I dont want to buy.

To bad because I really like apples system. Not supporting some CD-Rs in iTunes may hurt apple.

Is there a way to burn the AACs with Toast? If so then that would work for me.

[DGFan]

At this point, you can presumably copy the songs to another computer and reauthorize them. Note: by default, Apple allows for a song to be authorized on three computers simultaneously.

I think it would be more accurate to say that a song is linked to an account and that account can be authorized on three computers simultaneously.

[bigdog]

According to a Fortune article posted recently, you can burn audio CDs fine but trying to re-rip them (to MP3, no idea on ripping to AAC) results in horrible quality. (clicky)

Apple has also come up with a copy-protection scheme that satisfies the music industry but won't alienate paying customers. You can burn individual songs onto an unlimited number of CDs. You can download them onto as many iPods as you might own. In other words, the music is pretty much yours to do with as you please. Casual music pirates, however, won't like it. The iTunes jukebox software will allow a specific playlist of songs or an album to be burned onto a CD ten times. You can burn more than that only if you manually change the order of the songs in the playlist.

And anybody who tries to upload iTunes Music Store songs onto KaZaA will be shocked. Each song is encrypted with a digital key so that it can be played only on three authorized computers, and that prevents songs from being transferred online. Even if you burn the AAC songs onto a CD that a conventional CD player can read and then re-rip them back into standard MP3 files, the sound quality is awful

[DGFan]

Originally posted by AlfieJ

The biggest problem I have with all of this is that you're treated as a criminal first.

I gotta go with SJ on this one. The difference between Apple's service and the others is that you're not treated like a criminal with Apple's.

There are some restrictions in the Apple service but none that I would ever run into if I wasn't going to break the law.

usage on:
- unlimited iPod usage
- unlimited computers on a local network
- three unrelated computers
- audio CD's (thereby permanently "unlocking" the restrictions on the music)
- possibly MP3 CD's (seems possible, haven't tried it)

You should only run into problems if there is a technical glitch or you're doing something illegal. Technical glitches suck anyway. I'd hate to have to do surgery to repair iTunes and re-rip MP3's from 100+ albums due to a technical glitch that totally paralyzes iTunes. Dealing with the authorization issue probably wouldn't be a big deal (and might be nothing more than deleting the plist which probably contains an encrypted key or something similar).

[Mr Jobs]

Originally posted by kdickey
Well then, for those of us with older SCSI CD-Rs that do not work with iTunes we are screwed and cannot burn to CD I assume. If I am to buy any songs or albums I will want to burn a perm. copy for backup and if I cant burn then I dont want to buy.

y dont you just sell you SCSI and get yourself an internal cdr/dvd combo way cheaper, or a external firewire if you dont have a powermac.

SCSI is dead - SerialATA baby all the way, a hell of a lot cheaper

[DGFan]

Even if you burn the AAC songs onto a CD that a conventional CD player can read and then re-rip them back into standard MP3 files, the sound quality is awful

That's not really news to anyone who's worked with lossy data formats before but I suppose it's worth mentioning again. This shouldn't really be a surprise, though, since it was brought up (often) well before the service went live.

I haven't read through the other thread (200+ messages) but what about reripping them to AAC (from an audio CD)? Would they still be unlocked (or do ALL AAC rips become locked)? And wouldn't the quality be better since it would be using the same codec?

[nickgold]

My sad tale is the song I've downloaded will not play, because iTunes is convinced it hasn't been authorized to play back my purchased music -- even though it clearly _is_ authorized when I look at my account settings via the Music Store. De-authorizing and re-authorizing doesn't help, in fact my local copy of iTunes never reflects that it has been de-authorized, even when the Music Store reflects that it's been de-authorized. Repairing disk permissions didn't help, nor did putting my Home directory back in the same partition OS X is on. Trashing iTUnes' pref file didn't do anything. I have a note into Music Store Customer Service, hopefully they will have some idea. Only 2 other folks mentioned this problem on the Music Store discussion forum on Apple's site -- I guess that means it's an obscure problem, at least. One guy mentioned it spontaneously started working for him. Maybe I'll get lucky.

What a bummer. This leaves a really foul taste in my mouth, and shows why DRM can be a royal pain and obstacle, even when you have no fundamental qualms with the "limits" of the DRM system itself -- if it simply dioesn't work, you're screwed, and the music you paid for is inaccessible. LAME.

[menoinjun]

Originally posted by jwthomp
One thing that puzzles me is the Rendezvous support. If anyone wants to listen to my music via iTunes Rendezvous support, they must have my user name and password for my .Mac account to authorize them, and this counts as one share. I am in a work environment where we are all on Mac's and this basically negates using Rendezvous for sharing music. I can't even pick one or two people to let use my music as I own two other Macs (an iMac and an iBook) that I use regularly and want to be able to listen to the music on those systems. For me this is the biggest drawback so far.

One note about Rendezvous...what you described above is not how it works at all. Rendezvous is all about streaming music, not copying music from one computer to another, so you don't have to worry about DRM at all. All you have to do is set it up in your iTunes 4 prefs that one doesn't need a password to use your music, and then once they are on the network it just works!!!

I have a G4 and an iBook, and I tried it last night! I have no music on my iBook, but I was able to seamlessly stream music from my G4 without any problems. You should be able to do this over large networks.

[copperpipe]

I keep hearing people ranting about an alum at .99 is too much. Go and check out the service before you post negative about it here first! In case you haven't noticed, albums are $10. That's cheaper than I've ever seen a new popular album for. Most new big albums sell for $16. That is a very big reduction in price. As for worrying about your computer crashing and all that, back it up! You should back up anyway right? The only real concern right now is getting the indie labels on there.

[FatTony]

Originally posted by jwthomp
One thing that puzzles me is the Rendezvous support. If anyone wants to listen to my music via iTunes Rendezvous support, they must have my user name and password for my .Mac account to authorize them, and this counts as one share. I am in a work environment where we are all on Mac's and this basically negates using Rendezvous for sharing music. I can't even pick one or two people to let use my music as I own two other Macs (an iMac and an iBook) that I use regularly and want to be able to listen to the music on those systems. For me this is the biggest drawback so far.

From what I understand, this is incorrect. You can share via iTunes Rendezvous without any DRM problems, because the users who log into your iTunes don't get to copy the songs. The songs are just streamed to them. That is why in the demos on stage that when the ibook or PowerBook lid is closed and the computer goes to sleep, their playlists are no longer available.

[AVALONdesign]

I already listened to streams from 2 other computers in my dorm and they listened to mine. The only problem was making sure the iTunes port was open on all of our firewalls.
It works wonderfully.

[tduality]

Originally posted by copperpipe
I keep hearing people ranting about an alum at .99 is too much. Go and check out the service before you post negative about it here first! In case you haven't noticed, albums are $10. That's cheaper than I've ever seen a new popular album for. Most new big albums sell for $16. That is a very big reduction in price.

Indeed. Around here in Switzerland decent CDs sell for about $20.

I guess one of the reasons we don't have the service available here is that the record companies try to protect their higher margins here at least for some time.

Martin

[noel4r]

i have an important question. what if i buy some music from apple then in the course of ten years buy 4 apple computers, can i keep transfering my songs to my fourth apple computer or does it limit the transfer to three macs? i try to buy a new computer every 2 or 3 years and i definitely still listen to music purchased a decade ago...

[arn]

Originally posted by noel4r
i have an important question. what if i buy some music from apple then in the course of ten years buy 4 apple computers, can i keep transfering my songs to my fourth apple computer or does it limit the transfer to three macs? i try to buy a new computer every 2 or 3 years and i definitely still listen to music purchased a decade ago...

you would not be able to have a full copy of them work on all four computer simultaneously... but you would be able to have them on any three.

arn