iTunes Plus in 'choose what to upgrade' climbdown
iTunes now allows you to upgrade only the songs you want to the Plus format. Three cheers for not upgrading 'Get Your Biscuits In The Oven And Your Buns In The Bed'
In a brazen u-turn, Apple's iTunes Store has changed its mind over upgrades to the DRM-free iTunes Plus format and will now let customers choose the songs and albums they want in the higher bit rate. Yup, that's right -- Apple now grants users the gift of choice!
You can now enjoy not upgrading Michael Bolton's Can I Touch You... There? and revel as you don't have to pay for a high-quality version of Mama Get The Hammer (There's A Fly On Papa's Head).
Remarkable, really. After a few weeks of demanding shoppers upgrade everything they've ever purchased, or nothing at all -- spending fat wads of Queen pics in the process -- Apple will now allow shoppers to upgrade the 100 tracks they want, leaving the other thousand on Apple's servers.
This should've been a feature enabled the instant iTunes went DRM-free. But later is better than never, we suppose, and now we don't have to pay £2 to upgrade and download Dream Theater's Live In Budokan album, which we since bought on CD and ripped into Apple Lossless anyway.
There's another twist to this tale, however. We've had a few CNET UK users complain that they've spent hundreds of pounds on iTunes downloads, and were faced with a whopping bill to upgrade the whole lot, when they only wanted to upgrade a selection of their songs. Can these users get a refund for the songs they didn't want to upgrade? We've contacted Apple for a comment. A spokesperson couldn't immediately respond, but we'll update this story when they do.