>Oh… so nice.

I just re-downloaded much of the old music I had purchased off iTunes. iTunes finally went full DRM free – 256k, not the best but almost. 320k is the most you can get normally and most pop tunes won’t fill that bandwidth on VBR (variable bit rate – adjusts the size to fit how complicated the music is).

In any case there were a lot of tracks I had lost when the mac harddrive originally went – I had backed it up but I hadn’t gotten them all. At the time Pepsi was doing their promotion. 1 in 5 caps had a free code for an iTunes download. On a hunch and a curiosity trip I bought 5 one day. I won a free iTunes download on 4 out of 5 and was hooked. For the rest of the summer I never bought fewer then 5 pepsi’s at a time. By the end of that summer I believe I garnered over 130 songs before that promotion was through. Free songs, free soda – however you want to look at it.

I was just presented the opportunity to purchase my previously purchased songs. Granted, it’s a little bit backwards sounding – I’ve already paid for these, why do I need to re-buy them? Well, it used to be that you had to do your entire library – an all or nothing sort of thing. A lot of those for me were free tracks or tracks I found sucked after I downloaded the whole thing and got to listen to more then 30 seconds. There was no way I was paying $235 for all the tracks I had ever downloaded. I’ve now gone through and cherry picked the best ones. I can now use these AAC files with my XSession Pro for mixing without having to record a playing iTunes DRM’d file and make an MP3 of it. It’s worth the effort to pay an extra 30 cents for that.

In any case check it out and see what you can do for upgrades.