Jason Burns’ Blog

Now I have had this hunch for quite a while. I am not sure what experiences other people have had, but despite the “it just works” marketing hoopla, many times our Macs don’t just work. In recent memory I have had problems in OS X, Logic, iTunes and iPhoto just to name a few. These problems aren’t just glossy little I can’t figure it out problems, they are bugs or glitches. So big that searching Google almost always brings up a huge 50+ message thread on the Apple Support Forums.

The one thing that seems to be missing from these support forums is any comment or interaction at all from anyone at Apple. I am not sure what the expectation for product support forums but I am used to seeing a “this isn’t a bug” or “we are researching this” or whatever. But in all my searches on Apple’s support forums I only see hundreds of hapless souls who are suffering from the same problem with no response or resolution from Apple.

Today I got screwed out of $0.99 by Apple. I wanted to add Megadeth’s Sweating Bullets as a ringtone for my iPhone. Now let’s be clear, I not only OWN this song outright, but I also have it on Zune Pass, so I kind of double own it. But I wanted to do it the easy way which costs $1.48.

I bought the song, downloaded it, right clicked and choose “Create Ringtone” and got this little jewel of a message from the iTunes store:

Excuse me? I bought it. It said I could when I paid for it, now you are saying I can’t after I already repurchased a song I already had? The Apple Forum page I found on it said that lots of other people have had this problem and not a word from Apple.

Make any song a Ringtone

Well, that’s crazy, but as all good geeks do, I found a way around it. Do you have the song you want as an MP3? Drag it into Garageband. Clip it to the length you want and choose “Send to iTunes as Ringtone” from the share menu. Then it doesn’t matter if you ever owned it or not.

Has anyone else noticed this phenomenon of useless support forums at Apple?

What’s that you say? Subscription sucks because you want to own your music? Here are some numbers for you.

iPod Classic 120GB
Zune 120GB

$224 @ Amazon
$239 @ Amazon.com

$0.69 DRM
$14.99/mo.

16,000 songs
16,000 songs

$11,040
61 years @ 14.99/mo.

What’s that you say? let me explain a little further. I pay $14.99 per month with my Zune Pass subscription. It gives me access [...]

I am really curious about something. iTunes is a media player, right? QuickTime is a codec and a browser plugin for the most part, correct?
I mean, iTunes plays MP3 and other media files, I can see there being file associations to open iTunes with certain file types. I know that it’s meta-data is all [...]

I know I have complained about this before, but tell me this isn’t somewhat predatory:
All I have installed on this PC is quicktime.
I got a software update saying there was a new version of Quicktime, I unchecked Safari and Itunes because I don’t want them on my work machine.
I updated Quicktime and the dialog box [...]

On my main machine I had installed Safari for Windows for testing purposes. Knowing that, I was not surprised when Apple’s update software alerted me that 3.1 was available for download. I updated and all was right with the world.
I saw update pop up on my wife’s machine this week and noticed Safari in the [...]