I spent a little over $50 yesterday upgrading my iTunes library to the DRM-free iTunes Plus. I had 219 songs upgraded. I feel a bit like a chump for paying Apple so much money just to get DRM-free, slightly higher bitrate, versions of stuff I’ve already paid for. But it’s a one-time thing, and I like the idea of having the DRM-free tracks. In practice, I don’t think it’s going to make much difference though. I listen to my music primarily on my iPod, or through my CD player, so the DRM never got in my way.
It took a surprisingly long time to download all the new tracks. I had to quit the download last night, so I could turn off the computer and go to bed. I picked it up again this morning, and I think it ran for a few hours at least. It was still running when I left for work, so I’m not sure. The download process does an OK job of replacing the old tracks with the new ones, but it didn’t move all the old tracks out of the way like it should have. I had to go in and clean out about 50 tracks manually.
I wish Apple would have come up with a good way of automating the replacement of the old tracks on a second computer, though. To get the new tracks from my desktop to my laptop, I had to attach to the desktop, put together a “smart folder” to pull the new tracks together, copy them to the laptop, move them into the library, then delete the old versions manually for *all* the tracks. That was a bit of a pain. And there’s no way to fix existing playlists, to replace the old tracks with the new ones, so now I have a bunch of empty, or nearly empty, playlists. Well, it was probably time I cleaned up some of my old playlists anyway.