Filed under: iPod Family, iTS, iPhone
iTunes Plus upgrade available on a per track basis
Apple has apparently bowed to pressure because the iTunes Store is now allowing upgrades to iTunes Plus on a per track basis. Back when Apple first dropped DRM on some of their music they started allowing customers to upgrade their previously purchased tracks to the higher bit-rate and DRM-free iTunes Plus versions. Unfortunately, until recently Apple required you to purchase the upgrades for all of your qualifying music all at once, whether your wanted them all or not. Now it seems you can upgrade your previously purchased music to the iTunes Plus versions for 30 cents per track. The albums in my account seem to cost between $3 and $4 to upgrade. You can find all your qualifying music on the iTunes Store by following this link (iTunes link) or from the iTunes Store home page.
It's nice to see that Apple has seen the light on this. Note that Macworld is reporting some kind of glitch with using the shopping cart and are saying you need to turn on the buy with 1-click option in the iTunes Store preferences to get the correct upgrade price (and not be charged the full album price again).
[via Macworld]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Johnny Thrash said 7:47AM on 1-29-2009
It's about time. They probably got tired of all the refunds. My last upgrade had to have 4 different refunds due to mistakes made by iTunes.
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Optimus Rhyme said 8:15AM on 1-29-2009
Excellent news! I went to upgrade my library to DRM-Free the other day and iTunes quoted me £120 for the pleasure. I will upgrade the whole library but not all in one go like that.
Also, does anyone know if you are charged to upgrade the free single of the week? If the file was free the upgrade should be also right?
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VanillaSpice said 9:57PM on 1-29-2009
Free songs are not eligible to be upgraded to iTunes Plus, and should not appear in the upgrade list.
Colin Fox said 8:20AM on 1-29-2009
We, I just tried it. Got a message saying that I had been upgraded, but then told me that nothing in my library had anything to upgrade...I bought the Thiriller album when it was on sale at Halloween, but I still can't get to DRM free and burn the video to disc to watch on my TV.
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Galley said 8:31AM on 1-29-2009
Thank you, Jebus!
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Ethan said 8:40AM on 1-29-2009
Great for anyone who occasionally buys terrible music, myself very included.
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Brian Allen said 8:41AM on 1-29-2009
I have been doing this for some time now. I could do individual albums or song purchased separately.
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Jeff said 3:26PM on 1-29-2009
My email must have worked.
You're welcome.
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colouroflight said 11:20AM on 1-29-2009
If you got your music elsewhere you wouldn't have to disinfect the DRM in the first place.
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Adam D said 11:39AM on 1-29-2009
I did it, and it charged me the full price of the cd's i wanted to upgrade. So as of now I bought the same CD twice for 9.99. I contacted Apple, I am awaiting them to fix it. They usually are good with this kind of stuff.
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dniq said 11:48AM on 1-29-2009
No, you still have to upgrade the entire library, or a couple of tracks, apparently randomly selected. I have 708 tracks to upgrade, but iTunes only allows me 135 of them to be upgraded on a per-track basis. It does show price of upgrade for albums, but it will not allow you do add just one album to upgrade - you still have to either purchase it at a full price, or upgrade them all at once. The price, apparently, is just to show you how it's been calculated (or the feature is broken - either way).
As it stands now, if you want to upgrade only what you want - you can't (with the exception that if what you want managed to get into the random list of tracks they allow you to upgrade).
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clay said 11:56AM on 1-29-2009
I want my money back for all those "free" weekly tracks I just spent 30 cents each on. I'm guessing I had about 50 of them. So 50 X .30 = $15 that I spent on free songs because couldn't upgrade songs separately. How bout a gift card Apple?
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VanillaSpice said 10:14PM on 1-29-2009
Did your free songs of the week all appear in your upgrade list? None of the FSotW appeared in my upgrade list, and the T and C said they were not able to be updated.
clay said 1:38AM on 1-30-2009
You know, I think I might have jumped the gun on the "free" songs thing. I looked, and the majority of the songs that I haven't been able to update yet are actually those free songs. I guess I should have done more research before I went off the deep end. ;-) Can't say for sure that none of the free songs have been updated though. I have too many songs.
Ray said 12:06PM on 1-29-2009
This report is incorrect. You could always select which tracks to upgrade. You never had to upgrade them all.
Based on the previous commenters, this seems to have been a common misconception, so I don't know what to say, maybe there was some confusion in the user interface that if you made the wrong choices go you to some destination where you could only upgrade your entire library, but since the inception of iTunes Plus, I was able to select only a few of the tracks that I owned.
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Anders said 12:49PM on 1-29-2009
Well then, this "common misconception" seems to be rather widespread as half the internet is reporting on this apparently new feature today.
Ray said 1:10PM on 1-29-2009
That's one of those things about common misconceptions, many people, say like "half the internet" believe them, even though they aren't true.
Anders said 1:29PM on 1-29-2009
Except in this case, it is true.
VanillaSpice said 10:00PM on 1-29-2009
Ray, there was no misunderstanding.
If you read the terms and conditions, it explicitly stated that you had to upgrade everything together, and could not choose what to upgrade, and that iTunes would look at your purchase history (not your library) to work out what you had bought.
It was also reported widely on the net, and neither you nor Apple said at the time, "nah, just an interface problem" because, you know, it actually wasn't.
tifosiotaku said 11:32PM on 1-29-2009
If I upgrade, will I have to delete DRM-infected songs manually, or does the iTunes application do that for me?
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