I-pod woes

[Don Corleone]

So, I received an I-pod for my birthday this year (thank you again, Mrs. Corleone). And slowly but surely, I've been expanding my knowledge base, beyond just loading CDs I already own onto it to actually buying songs & albums at the Itunes store, downloading podcasts, stuff of that nature. Well, I brought my I-pod to work today to try to play some of my music. But I can't get the music on my I-pod to play on my computer, because it says my I-pod is only allowed to sync with one computer. I can understand not being allowed to play music that I loaded from an external source, namely the CD's, but the damn thing KNOWS that I bought a bunch of the music... it shows up in the Purchased folder! Any ideas on how to play purchased music on more than one computer?

[Beirut]

I'm not familiar with the I-Pod music copyrights so I hope y'all will keep the discussion in the legal direction. Thanks.

[Craterus]

With the latest iTunes software, you can authorise up to 5 different computers to play purchased music.

If you're plugging in your iPod and trying to play its content on the computer, I can't help you. I've never tried that. Sorry.

[drone]

Welcome to the wonderful world of DRM. One would assume that paying for the sound would allow fair-use, but apparently not.

I point you to the following Slashdot articles, especially the one with the Steve Jobs quote from the WSJ in 2002:

If you legally acquire music, you need to have the right to manage it on all other devices that you own.

http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl.../10/23/1826234
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl.../10/25/1246226

Take whatever other information present in the articles and comments as you will (along with your personal knowledge of the DCMA).

[BDC]

You're screwed over by DRM.

I hope you learnt your lesson. Buy it on CD next time. It's the same price and if you order it online you don't even need to move. It's better quality too.

iTunes has no end of issues when you try and play it on another machine. I just suggest you get a 3.5mm to 3.5mm lead and plug it into the mic socket or something.

[Big King Sanctaphrax]

This is why I refuse to buy media jukeboxes which force me to use proprietary software to access the music on them. Windows explorer all the way!

[Xiahou]

Don,

See if this is of any help to you.

[screwtype]

You're screwed over by DRM.

I hope you learnt your lesson. Buy it on CD next time. It's the same price and if you order it online you don't even need to move. It's better quality too.

iTunes has no end of issues when you try and play it on another machine. I just suggest you get a 3.5mm to 3.5mm lead and plug it into the mic socket or something.

According to drone's article above, you can just burn your iTunes song onto a CD and then convert it to MP3 format from the CD. Once you've got it into MP3 format, you should be able to use it on any machine, shouldn't you?

[caravel]

I agree 100% with BKS. You're better off with a bog standard MP3 player that allows you to drag and drop MP3's into the players memory via Explorer. You can then do exactly what you like without restriction and you don't need to run restrictive proprietary software like the Apple iPod service in order to manage it. iPods are just a gimmick.

[Evil_Maniac From Mars]

According to drone's article above, you can just burn your iTunes song onto a CD and then convert it to MP3 format from the CD. Once you've got it into MP3 format, you should be able to use it on any machine, shouldn't you?

You can. I've tried it, and it works.