Serious iTunes/iPhone Usability Issues
Peter Zion, Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
This post is a bit of a rant; however, I want it to serve a constructive purpose. I’m writing it to highlight the difficulties with DRM in general and the iTunes/iPhone “ecosystem” specifically.
Yesterday, I discovered the “Yeah Yeah Yeahs” (yes, I know, I’m a few years behind). I really like their song “Maps”, so I went to buy it from iTunes. I’ve generally not had a lot of trouble with iTunes and the fact that you can burn the tracks to CD makes me feel more secure about the DRM encoding of the tracks.
After confirming the purchase, the iTunes store told me that the track had been removed since I started the purchase (?). I tried a second time and the same thing happened. I’m not sure why this song was removed from the store (I managed to buy another track from the same album with no problem at all).
But I really wanted to buy this track. I noticed that they have a music video for it for 50 cents more, and since I like the video (I saw it on YouTube) I decided to buy it instead. This purchase went fine. Once it was downloaded, I copied it onto my iPhone, put on my headphones, and pressed play. All fine so far.
Since I don’t actually want to watch the video right now, I press the button to turn off the screen. The music stops. Assuming that *I* had screwed something up, I turned the screen back on, pressed play, then turned off the screen. Again, it stopped. Apparently, you can’t only listen to the song of a video on the iPhone; the screen has to be on — and touch-responsive — to listen to it. This isn’t acceptable because I want to put my phone in my pocket and go out for a walk, but neither should it be necessary.
Fine; if they are going to put this restriction in, then there must obviously be a way to extract just the audio part of the video — the video I just paid for — into an audio track. Indeed, there is a context menu item for the video in iTunes called “Create AAC for this video”, but when I click on it it tells me I’m not allowed to do it because the track is protected. Remember, I paid for the right to watch and listen to this video.
Fine; I’ll just fall back on my last resort, burning to CDs. Indeed, iTunes allows me to add the video to an audio playlist (sensible), but when I right click on the playlist and pick “Burn to CD” it tells me I can’t burn the track because it doesn’t have burning permission enabled. Remember, I paid for the right to watch and listen to this video.
I’m out of options. Does someone have a copy of “Fever to Tell” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs they can lend me to rip?
September 24th, 2008 at 23:54
You should be able to access the video through either the “Artists” or “Albums” route (rather than “Videos”) and it will be treated as an audio file.
For video content (like TED talks) you can pause the audio playback, find the video through the “Videos” menu and it will resume with video. The reverse also works.
There are a lot of hidden “gems” in the iPhone UI… probably a little too hidden.