It’s Your Music!Overcoming the oppressive restrictions of iTunesI had swallowed my frustration for months. I was only paying 99 cents per song, so on what grounds did I have to complain too much? Still, the notion that a song I buy from iTunes can only be played within iTunes or on an iPod seemed like a policy created by IBM, not Apple. My frustration bubbled over due to the experiences of a family member not those of my own. My sister Jody, who has had nothing but trouble with her iPod, shared with me the public venting of a New York Times journalist, which you can READ HERE. |
Even before I owned an iPod, I bought my share of songs from iTunes, and I find it to be the height of arrogance that a song I rightfully own cannot travel with me outside of something beginning with a lower-case i. When it began to impede on one of my businesses (www.PhotosToMemories.net), I knew I needed to find a solution.
So I went back to my childhood. I used to spend untold hours recordng music to cassette. First it was AM top-40 music, then the higher-fidelity FM stations, and ultimately my records. I would lose a bit of fidelity from the vinyl, but it was worth it to be able to play music from my records anywhere I wanted. Funny how far we've come and yet what a giant step backwards we’ve taken.
And then I encountered an alarmingly simple shareware program called Any Sound Recorder. It is one of several programs that does exactly what its name implies: it digitally records any sound that emanates from your sound card. It has become my answer to Apple.
When I buy a song from iTunes, the first thing I do now is record it to CD-quality WAV or MP3 format, replace the purchased file with the WAV or MP3 file, and say goodbye to all restrictions. As far as iTunes is concerned, the WAV file is a piece of music that is entirely outside of its jurisdiction. While the song will play in iTunes, burn to a CD, and transfer to an iPod, iTunes does not nag me about authorization or give me any grief should I ever want to convert it to another format. The WAV file is much larger than the purchased file, but that is my prerogative: I could have chosen to save it as MP3 or in one of several more compressed (and lower fidelity) flavors. If I wanted to cart thousands of songs on my iPod, I would choose to do that, but I have hundreds, not thousands, I have a large hard drive, and I love the notion of having a high-quality original audio file, from which I could create compressed versions at will.
At $24.95, this program is a trivial expense. The more significant outlay is your time: Any Sound Recorder (ASR) and programs like it do not “convert” your songs; they record them. Therefore, after you have paid your .99 to buy a five-minute song, you will need to spend five minutes playing it with ASR listening. Again, if you have a library of thousands, that is no small task. Most will consider it a worthwhile price to pay for the flexibility you gain.
ASR is as good as your sound card, but if your sound card were a piece of junk, you would already know it because your purchased music would sound terrible. And while there might be some measurable drop in fidelity running the music through your PC's circuitry, when compared to what I used to do with my cassette deck, the compromise is so small as to be laughable.
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This is all completely legal. You own the music and provided you do not intend to resell it or distribute it illegally, you are perfectly entitled to manipulate it to suit your needs. (My republishing of the NYT article here is probably more of a violation than anything discussed here.)
You can also record Internet radio with ASR. I listen to an iTunes stream. and as a song is about to begin, I tap a key to launch a script that activates ASR's record command. If I don't like the song, I stop the recording. If I do like it, I wait for it to end, trim off any fat at the beginning or end, save it as a WAV file, and drag it into iTunes. These recordings are typically not of the same quality as purchased music (depending on the quality of the stream), but they'll do. There is software specifically dedicated to this purpose that will insert track and artist information. ReplayRadio is one such program that has earned praise, although I have no experience with it. I don't mind entering the track information manually, if I even bother to do it at all.
Any Sound Recorder fills the bill very nicely for me and solves a problem that Apple deserves shame for creating.