Date: 20/7/2005
| For a number of reasons I finally decided to have a look at iTunes and ITMS. And well so far it's been a bloody mess.
Gee lets see, download and install iTunes, fairly bog standard. Run iTunes... ok all good. Type a band name in the "search music store" box and hit enter. Nothing. Ooooooook. Click "browse". Nothing. Riiiiiiight. This is obviously not going to be as easy as I thought.
Maybe I have to sign up or something to search the store, so I click "sign in" and try and use my Apple Dev ID. No luck, that'd be just too cool if it worked. So I click "create account" and follow the prompts. At which point I discover that ITMS is slow. Like watching paint dry slow. I fire up Firefox and browse a few other pages in the background, and they are all The Snappy. Ok so the net connection isn't hosed. It's just ITMS. Alright I really only want to buy 2 songs, I can live with painfully slow. Of course I want to pay with PayPal don't I so I select that and click the "verify paypal account" thingy, jump through all the hoops to hook up the paypal account and then it jumps back to the ITMS site at apple.com. I switch back to iTunes and it's still at the "choose payment type" window with the options "go back" and "cancel". Uh huh. Riiiiiight. So somehow the paypal site is supposed to tell iTunes something to go to the next stage and it didn't connect. The little bill gates devil on my should pipes up and mentions that I'm using Firefox and things might "Just Work(TM)" if I use IE instead. So out of morbid curiosity I fire up IE, make it my default browser and start the painfully slow ITMS signup from scratch. I get up to the paypal connect stage and this time I get sent back to iTunes only to get the finger: "paypal account country doesn't match ITMS country". #$*&^%#*$^@#*O$&@)#$(&*@)#($.
Now I notice the "if your billing address is not in the united states then" option and sure enough Australia is not listed there as an option is it.
So then I notice the "Choose Store" options. Click that. Wait... wait some more. 2 minutes pass. Oh ok a list of flags. No Australia. Nice. Here we are with connectivity from one end of the earth to the other and we still care about countries. Nice.
Lets recap, ITMS doesn't support firefox, doesn't support aussies, is slower than a 300 baud modem and hogs 50mb of ram. Wow... I'm speachless, so this is what all the hype has been about.
Ok back to p2p then.
I was curious to see if they carried some interesting but somewhat obsure aussie bands and also to see what the quality of AAC is like. Neither artist I wanted to listen to was listed.
And now finally, in a class peice of irony the tooltip for the search box says "quickly find songs, artists and albums". Hahaha... ha... ha....
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