Category: music

Apple rolled out “iTunes Plus” today, their DRM-free, higher-quality audio format. Any songs you already own that are now available in the new format can be “upgraded” for 30 cents a pop. I think this varies if you’re upgrading an entire album — my collection came to $11.70 for 44 songs, including two full albums and a handful of miscellaneous tracks. I decided to give it a shot, but I couldn’t get the purchase to go through. I guess a lot of other people are trying, too. Maybe I’ll try again in a day or two. Meanwhile, I’m trying to decide if I want to preorder the new Paul McCartney and Ryan Adams albums.

There’s a good article on iTunes Plus over at Ars Technica.

I preordered the new Wilco album from iTunes a couple weeks ago. It was released this week, so I went into iTunes to download it, but I kept getting an error 5002. I contacted support, and found out that there’s a really weird bug in the iTunes store: if you’ve got song credits (as opposed to dollar credit) in your account, you can’t download a pre-ordered album! How weird is that? The support guy told me that if I used up all my credits, then downloaded the album, he’d then replace the credits for me. So, basically, I’m getting 21 free songs out of this bug.

I’d been meaning to download the Essental Gram Parsons collection, so I went ahead and did that. Unfortunately, that used up dollar credit instead of song credits for some reason. It’s not an album, just a collection of songs, so I don’t see why the “buy all songs” button wouldn’t use song credit before dollar credit, but that’s what it did. So, I then decided to download the Essential Ryan Adams and Essential Sol Volt collections too (just the “basics” part, not the whole thing), but I did it song by song, so I’d use up the song credit.

So now I’ve got quite a pile of alt-country (and related) stuff — Wilco, Son Volt, Ryan Adams, and Gram Parsons! A lot of stuff to listen to. I haven’t heard from the support guy about putting those credits back in my account, but I’m assuming that’ll happen by Monday.

Lately, I’ve been adding money to my iTunes account from various sources, rather than just putting stuff on my credit card. I’ve been cashing in pennnies, nickels, and dimes at CoinStar, and getting iTunes credit in return. And, a while ago, I bought a $50 iTunes card at CostCo for $45, and put that into my account.

Today, I was buying a gift certificate for someone from AmEx, using my rewards points, and I decided to spend some points on an iTunes certificate for myself while I was at it. I didn’t look at the fine print too closely, though. The certificate you get through AmEx is a 50 song certificate, rather than, say, a $50 certificate. The difference seems to be that you can only use it towards individual song purchases, as explained in this tech note on Apple’s site. So, that’s a bit of a pain, since I’m usually only buying albums. Also, song credits expire after six months or so; regular dollar-value credit doesn’t. I guess I’ll have to spend it on individual songs, and maybe buy some albums song-by-song rather than all at once.

I noticed that Apple added a bunch of Jethro Tull stuff to the iTunes store this week. Tull was my very favorite band back in my teen years. They’re still a sentimental favorite, though I don’t listen to them much anymore. Browsing through the stuff in iTunes made me think a bit about which Tull albums I had on CD, vs. the ones I only ever had on cassette or vinyl. While I have about a dozen Tull CDs, I’m missing a few key albums that I never got around to re-purchasing. I also realized that I’d never ripped any Tull into my iTunes library. I decided to correct that by ripping the 20 Years of Jethro Tull box set.

I didn’t get very far, since my iBook wouldn’t pull the first CD into the drive. Nor would it pull any other CD into the drive. After some research, I eventually figured out that you can fix this problem by inserting a CD into the drive right as the iBook starts. OK, that’s kind of weird. The drive sounds kind of funny now, but it’s loading, reading, and ejecting CDs fine.

Getting back to Tull, I found a few casettes that I didn’t have on CD, so I figured I’d look into buying them from iTunes, or maybe just getting the CDs from Amazon. As usual, the iTunes version is more expensive than buying the physical CD from Amazon in most cases — usually $10 from iTunes and $8 from Amazon. The one notable exception is “A”, which comes with a bonus DVD if you get it from Amazon, so it costs a bit more than just buying the album from iTunes.