iTunes Store makes you upgrade iTunes now

As I've written before, I have a problem with the copy-protection that's applied to music in Apple's iTunes Music Store. Because I use devices that can't play the encrypted iTunes format, like my Squeezebox, I need to have my music in open formats like mp3.

As a result, even as my purchases of online music have been growing by leaps and bounds, I've been purchasing less and less music from the iTunes store, preferring to get my music from places that will deal me straight, unencrypted formats, trusting to my honesty not to do bad things with it (and I don't). So I buy music from eMusic, and Audio Lunchbox, and Calabash Music, which all have great selections of interesting music.

But sometimes there are things that only show up in the iTunes store. So I've steadfastly resisted upgrading iTunes, as I've been able to stick with iTunes 5, where I can use JHymn to decrypt the iTunes songs and transcode them into mp3s.

But today I went off to the iTunes store to purchase a song and got this:

That makes me unhappy - especially as I just read in the Apple Blog that iTunes 7 eats over 100 MB of real memory and 300 MB of virtual memory.

And it doesn't get Apple or the music industry anything - I can still just burn the iTunes songs onto CDs and then rip them into mp3s - it just makes getting my music the way I want it more of a pain in the butt.

I like Apple's products most of the time, but this makes me unhappy. Whatever happened to rip, mix, burn?

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