So Long iTunes (downloads) – you sucked!
The iTunes download store is closing down. I am delighted to announce that, despite being an early adopter of the iPod (first windows version), I never bought a single track from iTunes and the only album in my library was the free U2 one.
I never understood iTunes – you had to pay $10 for an album of copy protected compressed files that you never really owned (you could not sell them on “second hand”) that were stuck in the Apple universe. Buy the CD and rip it bozo! I know, I know, it was all about the “tracks” – I remember Bruce Willis asking what would happen to his iTunes library when he died (it dies with you). iTunes was dead the moment that Rhapsody started a streaming service – about 10 years ago. Subsequently Spotify came to dominate the market and music broke “free”.
Whenever I look at the pile of tapes, videocassettes, CDs, DVDs, BluRays and Records that I have accumulated over the years – realizing that all of this is available now with online subscriptions that I pay for, I take comfort that, at least, I didn’t waste money on iTunes. What is remarkable, in hindsight, was the big fight that Steve Jobs had with the music industry – he wanted MP3 downloads – they insisted on copy protection (hence AAC). Amazon started making MP3 files available for download later, and still include autorip for CDs that you have bought. These days I stream Flac files from Qobuz – in both CD and 24 bit resolution – as part of my subscription. I think Apple and the music industry should do the right thing now – make everybody’s iTunes libraries available to them to download in 16 bit flac.
One last comment: as a music ripper, iTunes is ok but not great – but I always seem to end up using it. iTunes has always lacked the precision, but not the flakiness, of dbpoweramp – and of course forces you to use apple lossless rather than flac. Albums are listed as compilations if there is a track “featuring” somebody other than the primary artist – not infrequently resulting in two albums appearing in the library. It’s handling of album art is terrible (“get art” does not add artwork to the meta-tags). Nevertheless, once you tidy up the meta-tags, folder organization is fantastic and I have never found a better programe for sorting out albums into artists folders. Also, its CDDB is really good – freedb on foobar is close to useless, I gave up on music match in 2009 and media monkey in 2012 and, did I mention that dbpoweramp is flakey as hell. So, hopefully, the iTunes ripping software will be around for a few years to come. Disclaimer – I ripped approximately 5000 CD with iTunes in 2008-2009.
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