As you may already know, Phil Schiller announced at Macworld Expo last month that the iTunes music store was going to start offering DRM-free music and that people would be able to “upgrade” their previously-purchased DRM-protected music to DRM-free files. I was thrilled to hear that and haven’t begrudged paying for the upgrades that have become available since the announcement. Unfortunately, these upgrades have wrought havoc with my primary method of enjoying my music: smart playlists.
I have multiple smart playlists that automatically sort out music added within a certain time period and consider their rating as well. What I quickly found out with the DRM-free upgrades is that replaced music is considered as added to your library on the day you do the upgrade. Yes, this makes sense when I think about it, though it irks me that the upgrade process can still manage to keep my assigned ratings intact when replacing the DRM-protected files – so why can’t it keep the date marker the same? Grrrrr.
So, I now have a bunch of playlists that are completely useless to me since they’re pulling my upgraded music in addition to my latest downloads of new music. If I really want to focus on the real new music I’ve gotten recently, I’ll need to do it manually. I frankly didn’t realize how much I rely on these smart playlists in listening to my music until this happened. When trying to listen to music on my iPhone these days, I literally stare at the screen for a few moments to get my bearings and think about what I want to listen to rather than automatically going to my new music playlist or the playlist that pulls my 4 and 5-star rated music added in the last 6 months. I don’t buy that much music, but it’s still very easy for me to lose track of new music if I don’t hear it soon after I buy it.
There you have it – my music listening experience all jacked up thanks to an arguably fabulous move made by Apple. Damn, damn, and damn!