Friday, October 06, 2006

Update QuickTime...now

When iTunes 7 first came out, I was pretty excited like most Mac users and immediately downloaded and installed it. It worked fine, but I had a weird problem in the Alarm Clock application. I tried to play a song I had purchased from the iTunes Music Store, and I got an error dialog saying that my computer was not authorized to play this song, and that I needed to authorize my machine from within iTunes. This is a problem within itself. But when I opened up iTunes and tried playing the same protected song, it worked fine. So I tried playing the song from that QuickTime application, and I got the same dialog message. This time I clicked OK, and it brought me into iTunes and prompted me to authorize my machine by signing into my account. I signed in and my machine count went up by one, but I STILL couldn't play any of my protected music outside iTunes!

I was a little freaked out by this, and immediately sent a bug report to apple. I was expecting to recieve hundreds of complaints via email from users... but I didn't. Then a few days later I was notified that a software update was ready for me. It was a QuickTime update that had been available for weeks, and I had just ignored it before. I installed the update, and everything works fine now. So if you have installed the new iTunes 7, but don't have QuickTime 7.1.3, please update immediately!

I sincerely hope this problem didn't affect anyone but me. But in case it did, my apologies. However, the problem isn't fully solved yet. As somebody pointed out to me before all this occured, the same thing will happen if you're not authorized to play a song, and you try to play it in Alarm Clock. In other words, you got a protected song from somebody else, that they bought from the iTunes Music Store, but you're not currently authorized to play it. I'm currently looking for a work-a-round for this problem, but I haven't found one yet. The problem seems to be that there is no way to check to see if a machine is authorized to play a song BEFORE you try to play it. But this seems ridiculously silly. Surely apple wouldn't do something so stupid... would they? If anyone knows of a way to do this, I'd love to hear from you

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