iTunes

I bought a song on the iTunes store today

You may be thinking this is crazy in the age of streaming “all you can listen to” music, especially since I am subbed to Apple Music on the family plan (sharing with my partner). And maybe it is!

But I can only run Apple Music through a browser on Linux and my preferred media player on Windows, which is, er, Media Player, cannot “see” the DRM-addled streaming music downloads of Apple Music, so if I want to listen to something there, I have to provide a local copy, hence downloading a song from iTunes for the first time in years.

On the plus side, it’s DRM-free and fully portable, so I can move it around wherever I like, to any system I want, just like in the olden days of ten years ago.

Bi-annual lamentation over iTunes

I tried to play music in iTunes.

A story in two images:

This seems easy to solve!

Oh, I am signed in.

Next: The software equivalent of “turn it off and on”, which is to say, I restarted iTunes.

This did not work.

I next logged into the web version of Apple Music. I needed to sign in there, but once I did, it played a song that I have only ever listened to through Apple Music (not purchased separately in the iTunes store). Yay, it works!

I tried iTunes again, thinking this may have sent a successful signal to the mothership.

It did not.

I thought about doing some searching on the interweb for other solutions or to see if other people are experiencing the same issue, then I remembered that I have several thousand songs I own–that I actually purchased on physical media and ripped (as we called it in the olden days), so instead of wasting my time hunting down something I probably couldn’t fix anyway, I just listened to my own music.

Using Windows Media Player.

Alas, iTunes, alas.

Bonus: When prompted to allow the Apple ID sign-in, it seems Apple places me “near Abbotsford”:

I mean, it’s right, if you consider 43 km away to be near.