Currently me and my bro both have got mp3 players, all of the music on them comes from the same directory full of mp3's that we both set up which is shared on the network. Currently he has an ipod and transfers the music to it using ephpod and ive got a creative zen and just transfer the music to it using the audio device plugin so it appears my computer and just drag and drop. now im thinking about getting a new ipod and i was wondering what would happen about the apple software putting drm on all the music so we have problems sharing the same music collection is this gonna happen if we continue to use ephpod?? if not what about if we both started using itunes to transfer our music on our own pc's respectively?? any help would be appreciated as i dont wanna end up with a whole collection of music with drm on so it will only work on one player. thanks!!
First Point. The apple software maintains DRM on files which are aqquired from the iTunes Music Store. Say you rip a CD to itunes it will have no DRM on it, just plain MP3 files (if you encode in this), which have no player restrictions. Second Point. iTunes normally works by pulling all files in its library into a central folder which it catologues and organises whithout making any changes to the actual files (still regular MP3's). It can be told not to do this and just use the original file source. The only problem i can imagine you may have with this is one of permisisons. Third Point. The iPod has a music partition and a data partition (if enabled (check box in options in iTunes)). You can't browse the music partition easily. You can only ever (without resorting to clever trickery) put music into the music partion but not remove it. But if you ever need to move large amounts of files about (like say an MP3 collection) put it in the data partition and you can read it off on the other machine you plug it into. Take home message: iTunes doesnt add DRM to DRMless songs. iTunes is very good at filling up iPods and managing songs and is less of a hastle than ephPod (having used both) providing your ID3 tags are in order. Hope this helps, Douglas
yeah thats great thanks you cleared up the main points that worried me about itunes putting drm onto songs that didnt allready have it thus rendering the songs useless to the other person. Thanks! edit: ill have to have a play with itunes then as i gotta make sure i dont enable the option where it pulls all the music into one central folder i want it to leave it where it is then hopefully it will be ok as it is allready nicely organised to my liking!!
