I’ve bought a few CDs on iTunes “Plus” recently - all of which I promptly burnt to a CD and listened to that way.  For me, iTunes’s puny 128kbps standard encoding is too poor to enjoy much of the music that I like.  So when iTunes Plus, featuring “DRM-free music tracks featuring high quality 256 kbps AAC encoding for audio quality” came out I was thrilled.  The new tracks I downloaded seemed to stand up to my library - all encoded at 320kbps.

Today I purchased an album by the Doves on iTunes Plus.  I didn’t have the time to burn a CD, so I just threw my DRM-free tracks on my portable HD and headed into work.  Then I tried to play the files in Windows Media Player.  No luck.

I researched the iTunes Plus file format (.m4p) and discovered that WMP doesn’t play this type of file.  This is somewhat astonishing to me.  Obviously, it is good for Apple to not have their tracks playable on Microsoft software such as WMP, a direct competator.  But what made me frustrated is their DRM-free label.  A quick google search reveals various converters and even some “codecs” that I have read varying degrees of success about.  But why, Apple?  Why not give us what we all want…???

…the MP3

I guess I’ll go back to Amazon.com’s MP3 store.