<rant>
I fired up Front Row this morning for some background tunes to my Saturday-morning-flaffing-about routine and discovered to my shock that suddenly my mini is “not authorized” to play a significant chunk of my DRM-free MP3 files. My mp3 files, that I ripped from my CDs and I’m not authorized to play them on my computer. My microwave never tells me that I am not authorized to nuke my food.
It turns out others have recently encountered this issue with FrontRow too yet there is no admission from Apple (that I can find) that this is a bug they will fix which begs the question- was this implemented in the latest updates by design? Meanwhile I have to either move my mp3 files onto the Mini’s internal hard drive (where there is no space) or mess around with ID3 tags in the files. Baah!
I started buying Macs because I was sick of this sort of low level mucking around on machines running the Windows. I do enough of that at work every day, I don’t want the hassle at home.
I’m beginning to sympathise with all this talk of switching.
</rant>
on 18 Jun 2006 at 12:26 am # Marcos
MMm, this isn’t DRM. It’s some kind of bug in Front Row. And the solution mentioned in the applecare discussion forum article you link to- converting the ID3 tags to v. 2.4 - seems pretty simple.
Also, DRM is the invention of the media companies - people who own the music, movies, etc. - not technology companies like Apple. If people weren’t so inclined to steal things they want (movies and tv shows from bittorrent, napster for music in the old days), maybe DRM wouldn’t be as pervasive.
on 18 Jun 2006 at 2:11 pm # Aehso
Converting ID3 tags is pretty simple - to you and me. Try telling the average Mac user “oh you just need to convert your ID3 tags” and you’ll get a pretty blank stare in return.
And I _know_ this is a bug in Front Row but it would have helped my attitude if Apple would do us all the curtesy of commenting on the applecare discussion forum and admitting as much. Perhaps even going as far as letting us know that they will fix the bug for the next release!
Hokey workarounds like “move your music onto the same drive as iTunes” or “update your ID3 tags” don’t cut it for me. As I said in my post, that’s why I started buying Macs in the first place but lately the bugs, combined with the lock-in are getting on my nerves.
on 19 Jun 2006 at 2:25 am # jbelkin
You’re absolutely right - just saying NOT AUTHORIZED is more Windows like than mac like. It should simply point out that ID3 tages need to be updated and would you like to do it manually or YES, it will do so automatically …
on 19 Sep 2006 at 5:23 pm # R.T.
Interesting thing is Shuffle isn’t affected - it works fine in Shuffle mode.
on 28 Dec 2006 at 9:13 am # Damo
Shuffle _is_ affected: it only plays the songs with the correct tag version.
I have to agree that it’s annoying, but not overly - especially given the number of articles like this on the ‘net. Front Row’s a great tool, and I’m having an awesome time with my remote.
Just for anyone reading and asking “how do I convert”… to update my tags, I selected all of the songs in my library, hit Advanced->Convert ID3 Tags then selected “ID3 tag version” v2.4. My 18 Gig of (legitimate… surprisingly) music took about 5 minutes to update on an Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro 15″.
on 16 Feb 2007 at 4:21 am # Anthony
Got “Not Authorized” message in FrontRow. I changed my itunes music location to the folder where my music was located and it fixed the problem.
on 15 Mar 2007 at 10:14 am # FoSi Bear
Thanks for the posts! I just got the same “Not Authorized” message. Pretty Mac savy but I did have a blank stare on my face when reading about converting my ID3 tags! Thanks Damo for the quick post about that too.
on 19 Jun 2007 at 4:11 pm # Rob Poretti
I bought a miniMac recently and connected iTunes to my music server (70GB’s of well organized mp3 music with clean ID3 tags, ripped from my CD collection.) WMP10 and 11 runs on a half dozen PC’s at my home without problems…
Aside from the fact that the iTunes directory of artists is a bloody mess, I can’t play anything because of this error.
Looks like I’ll have to put WMP9 on my Mac. I can appreciate software bugs - hey I own lots of Windows machines - but after searching the Web for this issue, I did not expect this type of problem.
Does anyone know of a good player that can handle a very large library gracefully and not tied to some commercial on-line music store?
on 27 Jun 2007 at 3:19 am # Cefn
I\’ve been an Apple advocate for a good few years and it\’s behaviour like this which is losing my loyalty - compromise legitimate customers who\’ve paid you already for the purpose of some spurious commercial gain now or in the future.
Screw you Apple! You\’ll see me on the other side of the debate very soon.
And when we all switch, you\’ll realise how much our bottom-up support grounds your commercial success.
Hopefully not too late. We WANT you to succeed as an organisation who got it right (for a while - BSD, podcasts, iPhone). Continue that approach and we\’ll stay your ally.
But we\’ll be your enemy as readily as your friend if you shit on us from a great height as soon as we hand over our money.
Remember, we\’re not just customers, we\’re hackers too.