iTunes Music now DRM free

...or not! :) Just tried to upgrade my library (245 songs for EUR 42.75, why am I doing this?). I click "buy now", iTunes Store asks me to agree to their new terms of service. Fine. I click "buy now" again. iTunes says, "The item you tried to buy is no longer available."



Slow downloads I would have expected, but this is weird. So I go back to the iTunes Store front page, and both the "iTunes Plus" and "upgrade my library" links are gone!

I look at my iTunes account information. Ah, I have 245 downloads available? Even though all of my attempts to purchase had been rejected by errors? Interesting.



Well, why not click on "download now" and finally upgrade my library! Or so I thought.



Looks like I am going to have to wait. Still, I'm psyched about iTunes music being DRM free now. Glad I bought my music there, and not from some Windows Media based, already defunct service.

Update 1/7/09:

Today the "upgrade my library" link was back. I clicked it, and it offered me another 40 songs. I was able to download them immediately.



The 245 songs from last night I still cannot download. They are still waiting for me to download them, yet when I try to do so, "the iTunes Store is temporary unavailable". Go figure...

Update 1/8/09:

Ah, finally downloading!



Except...





But I'm sure these are just a minor glitches.

iTunes Cover Flow Bug

Is anyone else experiencing this weird iTunes Cover Flow Bug?

Instead of showing the appropriate cover, iTunes displays the content of the screen inside iTunes.

It even calculates all the reflections and everything, and does so for the cover inside the cover inside the cover inside the cover - I can even browse through the covers and it will do all that in real time!

iTunes 7.6
Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.11
iBook G3

The same iTunes library works fine on a Powerbook G4 and MacBook Pro.

Apple Unveils Higher Quality DRM-Free Music on the iTunes Store

DRM-Free Songs from EMI Available on iTunes for $1.29 in May
DRM-free tracks from EMI will be offered at higher quality 256 kbps AAC encoding, resulting in audio quality indistinguishable from the original recording, for just $1.29 per song. In addition, iTunes customers will be able to easily upgrade their entire library of all previously purchased EMI content to the higher quality DRM-free versions for just 30 cents a song. iTunes will continue to offer its entire catalog, currently over five million songs, in the same versions as today—128 kbps AAC encoding with DRM—at the same price of 99 cents per song, alongside DRM-free higher quality versions when available.

iTunes Store Problem Solved!

This is amazing. Somehow I managed to solve the problem (at least for my situation).

I am using an Alcatel SpeedTouch 510 DSL modem/nat-router/firewall, and I added the following firewall rule:

:firewall rule create chain=forward index=3 srcintfgrp=wan prot=tcp syn=yes ack=no action=drop

Basically this drops all TCP packets which arrive out-of-state on the WAN interface.

Not only did this solve my iTunes Store problem, it also made my Internet connection much faster (let me rephrase that - it is finally as fast as it should have been from the beginning. It has been kinda slow for a long time, I guess I just got used to it.)

My guess is that my ISP is doing some sort of traffic shaping/QOS, and maybe that's why a lot of packets arrive out-of-state. So if you have a similar problem, you might be able to solve it by putting the packets back in order or dropping out-of-state packets before they get to your iTunes (i.e. on the firewall/router in front of your computers).

iTunes Store

After upgrading to iTunes 7.0.1 and Mac OS 10.4.8 I'm having problems connecting to the iTunes Store. I know there are tons of threads about this and other issues in Apple Discussions, but so far I have not been able to find a solution (or even understand the problem, really). There has got to be something I can change or something my ISP can do to fix this.

I found this article:

www.cedarville.edu/help/Accessing+the+iTunes+Music+Store

Tried my ISPs proxy, and I was able to access the iTunes Store. But I don't want to use a proxy all the time, so this didn't really solve my problem. So I looked further.

The first thing I figured out was that (at least yesterday) a lot of DNS servers were unable to resolve ax.phobos.apple.com.edgesuite.net. I worked around this by using the OpenDNS servers:

208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

Then I added a rule to my firewall (router which is also doing NAT) to allow ICMP type 3 code 4 (and log it). Even though not a single ICMP packet has hit this rule, I was able to access the iTunes Store all of a sudden!

But only sort of. I can access it only from one computer at a time. When I put the "working" Mac to sleep, and re-open iTunes on the other Mac, the store will work on that other Mac. I wake up the first one, can't access the store anymore (only from the second one). Put the second one to sleep, re-open iTunes on the first one, iTunes Store opens on the first computer!

One of the two Macs is a PowerBook. I can access the iTunes Store fine from at work (along with other Macs and Windows PCs at the same time). I also tried another ISP and everything worked perfectly.

Using tcpdump all I see is more or less "normal" HTTP traffic between iTunes and the iTunes Store servers at Akamai.

Needless to say there are no other problems with the network or Internet connection - both Macs can access any website, mail server, etc. at any time and at the same time. The PowerBook is connected via AirPort Express (in bridged mode), the other Mac is a MacMini connected via Ethernet.

Can anyone explain this to me or help me figure out what's going on? Am I running into one of Akamais anti-DOS mechanisms for some reason? Is it possible that my ISP is blocking something like a specific kind of ICMP packets, and this is only now causing problems with the new iTunes version? Is there anything you need to keep in mind as an ISP not to break certain Akamai-hosted services? Routing-wise or anything?

Absolutely any ideas would be greatly appreciated! No matter how far fetched they are..!