Thursday, January 25, 2007

IT tidbits

iPods are Apple's saving grace and cash cow. They are also the universal choice of MP3 if you ask most people that can afford one. The fact that Apple owns anywhere from 60 to 80 percent of the world's portable player market supports this. Part of the reason for this, right or wrong, is their very locked down Digital Rights Management (DRM). This dreaded term is what the movie and music industry tries to use to say they are helping consumers ad their clients by keeping costs down for everybody. Not necessarily the whole truth but we'll let that slide for now.

What is true is that DRM is a pain in the ass when it comes to you the consumer trying to ensure your hard earned cash used to build your library does not go up in smoke when your library does. You see, you are not able to simple copy your music to any medium and to any machine as you can with your store bought CD (and not even then , see Sony and the disaster they caused with the rootkit they installed without your knowledge). Instead, the music you buy at the iTunes store is locked to a maximum five machines "authorized" to play and if you lose your license to the song you bought, TS; you cannot download it again for free indefinitely.

So, what happens when you buy a new computer and now want to sync your iPod to that machine? Previously, you were SOL and had to buy third-party software, or work a set of cheats, in order to get the music you paid for onto the machine you paid for. Apple finally got a clue and now provides a method to do this within Apple iTunes version 7.x onwards. The links below shows you two different ways to accomplish this.

How to use your iPod to move your music to a new computer

How to back up your media in iTunes

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