Cory Doctorow Must Be Stopped

Seriously.

Now he is ragging on iTunes for "selling unrippable music":

If you buy the latest Bob Dylan album from the iTunes Music Store, be prepared to lose four of the tracks when you burn it to CD. Four of the tracks on "Modern Times," which is only sold as a whole album on the iTMS, are only made available as video files, and iTunes isn't designed to allow you to burn the audio portion of a video when you burn your CD.

The CD version of "Modern Times" comes as a 14-track disc that includes the audio of the four iTunes videos; also included with the CD is a DVD carrying the four videos. In other words, if you buy the packaged good, you get the audio and the videos for the final four songs, if you buy the iTunes Store version, you only get the un-burnable videos for them.

-- Boing Boing: Bob Dylan and iTunes sell un-rippable music

Here's the thing. The four tracks Cory is referring to are music videos of older Dylan tunes. Yes, that's right, Apple is so very evil for having re-released Blood In My Eyes, Love Sick, Things Have Changed and Cold Irons Bound in a horrible tyrannical video format. Tracks you can find on such albums World Gone Wrong, Time Out Of Mind and The Essential Collection. The video for Things Have Changed is (no pun intended) unchanged from the last time I saw it as well.

And the CD version of Modern Times does not include the DVD extras ... that's the deluxe version which is about a tenspot more than buying it off of iTunes. So more evidence that Cory can't add, the CD comes with ten audio tracks, just like on iTMS, and the deluxe version tacks on an extra DVD with the four videos.

And of course, it's not up to Apple to have iTunes be able to burn videos to DVD - it's the deal with the DVD Copy Control Association (see DeCSS uproar). And soon enough that might change as well. Why Cory thinks Apple would be licensed to rip the audio portion and not the video is a complete mystery.

So yes, if you really want to listen to these videos and not watch them ... you'll have to buy the boxed CD/DVD deluxe set, purchase a special DVD audio ripper and rip them to a CD. Course, that DVD audio ripper will run you about $30 and buying the songs individually (and they'll probably sound better as well) from iTunes will cost you $8.

Since the iTMS version is $10 less than the boxed set, you would still save $2 if you just stayed within iTunes (even before running out and buying that audio ripper).

Go ahead, Cory. Stick it to the man. Clearly you've been wronged.









tagged: boing boing, itunes