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Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

Well I just voted with my dollars and upgraded my whole library. It finished surprisingly fast considering their servers must be getting hammered right now.

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Do none of you find it annoying that you have to pay to remove DRM from music that you already paid for? I think this is ludicrous.

When you bought the music, you bought it under the DRM agreement. By paying for it, you said you thought it was worth it. And your payment paid for Apple's servers as this happened.

Yeah, it stinks that you have to upgrade. But they aren't forcing it. I'm keeping my DRMed tracks the same until I have a reason to remove the DRM. It's not costing me anything. And I know this is a one-time deal, that I'll never have to pay extra for future tunes.

Annoying? Yes. Ludicrous? No.

I'm not paying to upgrade because I know it will cost Apple more $$$ to support my DRM tracks. I figure at some point they'll want to turn off their DRM servers and I can only hope they will have a free upgrade path to iTunes+.

What do you expect? They're letting you redownload songs that you already bought. They've sold how many million DRM tracks? So now they just turn on their servers and, without charging, let you redownload every song you've ever bought from them? That would kill their server. I doubt even iTunes could support that all at once.

The pricing helps Apple in two ways: it keeps their server going, and, by adding a charge, it discourages everybody from doing it at once, which means iTunes doesn't break. I understand your frustration, but Apple's doing a good thing by making this available. Complaining is fine, but don't act like Apple's the villain for negotiating an end to DRM in the largest store on the planet.

You're speculating about Apple throwing up prices to prevent their servers from getting "killed". Why do you think they distribute iTunes media on a CDN?

You're also being a bit presumptuous on your accusations of me thinking Apple is "Evil".

iTunes DRM does not require running a server on their end. Only subscription services require that.

How do you authorize new machines?

Some of this is probably for accounting purposes as well. It's the same as when the wireless-G drivers on some device were released after the fact - apple charged existing owners $10 to upgrade so as to not fall afoul of laws regarding earned and deferred incomes.

iTunes+ also doubles the bitrate on that music.

Just burn the tracks to a CD-RW and then re-import them. This has always been the free way to upgrade your iTunes music.

How does the upgrade work?

Go to the music store. There is an iTunes Plus link under quick links.

Thanks. I just did this too - goodbye DRM! 57 songs upgraded for $15.40, not too shabby.

Based on how FairPlay works, and how quickly the conversion happens, I think itunes probably just gets permission from Apple's servers to permanently decrypt the files: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairPlay#How_it_works

But aren't they also improving the sound quality to 256 whatchamacallits? I thought that was another aspect of iTunes plus.

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