thelinuxlink.net

That's right -- links to any sort of music, TV shows, movies, podcasts, audiobooks or anything else available through Apple's iTunes store requires custom software to be installed on your computer before they will display thing one to you.

Is it so unreasonable to expect links in your browser to resolve to, oh, I don't know, web pages containing information about the thing you just clicked on? Is there anything more anti-web than demanding users install custom software to display information that could have just as easily been delivered through the browser?

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001149.html

Hopefully that whetted your appetite to read the rest of post.

I "love" the podcasts that are still exclusively on iTunes. Makes me want to email them and offer to teach them RSS, or fix it for them for a nominal fee. Add that with the ID3 tag problems, and you could almost start a decent service business.

In general, I have no problem with itunes - it is what it is, and if you have a mac and an ipod (or windows and an ipod, I guess), it's really a pretty damn sweet service. My wife is extremely happy with her Macintosh lifestyle, for instance. DRM is DRM - Apple's is less obnoxious than some, but it's still lock-in - considering *most* music and video is drm encumbered, I doubt this is a major issue for most people.

What bugs the shit out of me is when I find free audio that requires itunes to download. I get a fair amount of stuff from learnoutloud.com, and occasionally they give out free "books." Recently, I received an offer for a book I thought about downloading until I saw that it required itunes (The Alchemist). That pissed me off some, especially in light of the fact that historically learnoutloud has been one of the few places you can find DRM-free audio books. Oh well - I guess we all gotta make a living somehow.

What I love is when I visit Apple's movie trailer website, and they tell me I need to download Quicktime, even though my MPlayer browser plugin is perfectly capable of playing the video clips. I'm sure they do this purely to discourage non-Apple/Windows users. There is no technical reason for it. Thanks Apple.

I don't use iTunes, so I don't listen to anything that's exclusive to iTunes.

I DO have iTunes installed on a system that has Windows on it, but I don't use it much. My experience with iTunes has been that it's buggy and difficult to use.

My church put out it's podcast exclusively through iTunes. I asked the guy who produces it about the RSS feed and he didn't know what I was talking about. It's not possible to have a podcast that is ONLY available on iTunes because iTunes still uses an RSS feed to access the enclosures. I was eventually able to dig around in iTunes and get the feed for the show and access it directly (with bashpodder, King of all feedcatchers). With a little bit more prodding I eventually got the media guy to put the link to the RSS feed directly on the church website, so all is well.