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The Wax

November 17, 2004

Merging Our Digital Assets.

When I married my wife, that came with certain assumed mergers. In addition to our lives and all our worldly assets, we too would merge our digital assets. Specifically our purchased iTunes songs.

Now you might remember George's attempt to sell his songs on eBay. He found it difficult and if nothing else expensive.

In my case, I'm not trying to get rid of the songs, rather I'm trying to consolidate our libraries into one more user friendly set. Currently, when we come across our purchased music, we need to log in and log out depending on who bought the song. Makes for some annoying UI if your sitting at the dinner table listening or hanging with friends.

So I emailed Apple to see if we could merge the accounts. I simply asked them if there was some way to move her songs to my account or vice versa. Their response was curt and basically unresponsive unconstructive.

Dear David,

Thank you for contacting the iTunes Music Store.

Accounts cannot be merged, to listen to your purchased music you must log into your separate accounts.

The catalog of songs grows every week. Visit often to preview the latest:
http://www.apple.com/music/store/

Sincerely,

The iTunes Music Store Team


I'm not sure if the curtness is what annoyed me the most, or the fact that they ended their uninformative jerkwad email with an advertisement for their growing catalog.

Next steps?


Posted by davidissimo  ::  Permalink  ::  Comments [4]  ::  

Comments Section

Welcome to the wonderful world of DRM, where paying customers are treated worse than copyright infringers. My suggestions:

1) Use Hymm to unlock all your current AAC files. IANAL but this should fall under fair-use.

2) Stop buying music that has DRM. If you keep buying it, you'll run into this situation over and over as you wind up in a scenerio that the DRM maker hasn't forseen.

Posted by: George at November 17, 2004 10:43 AM

Your digital music -- all of it, the stuff you ripped and the stuff you bought from ITMS -- is all sitting in the iTunes Music folder, no? Why not move that folder into a Shared folder that both user accounts can access?

Does this not work? I haven't tried it myself, so I don't know if it does or doesn't, but it seems like the most straightforward solution.

Posted by: alex at November 17, 2004 12:13 PM

The music can obviously be shared, but the DRM can't be shared...get it?

Posted by: davidissimo at November 17, 2004 12:48 PM

in my experience, the lock is not according to the account, but the computer that you are trying to play the song on. i think that what you have to do is authorize your computer to play songs bought on her account, and vice versa. you're allowed to do this for up to five computers per account. when i switched computers, i just authorized the new computer and all of my locked songs played fine.

interesting note:
i recently backed up various things on my ipod and wiped the hard drive clean, reinstalling the OS. i do this periodically to keep the speed up. but after putting my songs back on the computer, itunes refused to play the locked ones, thinking it was a different computer. so, i had to authorize this "new computer" and now 3 of my five allowable computers are used up.

if you wipe out your hard drive every once in a while, keep that in mind!

Posted by: jeremy at November 17, 2004 12:57 PM

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