Zach Spear
If signed into your iTunes Store account, a look at the home page of the Store will find an "Upgrade to iTunes Plus" link in the right-hand sidebar. Â Clicking the link will bring up a page where there was previously only one large "BUY ALL" button.
Today, the button is still there, but you also have the additional option of upgrading individual tracks and albums.
According to the iTunes Plus frequently asked questions, upgrading will replace the protected 128 kbps file with the highest-quality 256 kbps AAC encoding Apple offers. Â Upgraded music videos also have improved audio, while the video quality remains unchanged.
Apple began altering its iTunes Terms of Service on Wednesday to reflect the change, but AppleInsider was unable to successfully access the new capability at that time.
When the upgrade option was first announced earlier this month, any early positive reaction was quickly dashed once users discovered they could only upgrade on an all-or-nothing basis. Many people elected not to upgrade because they didn't want to pay again for music they no longer listen to or regret purchasing.
Apple began altering its iTunes TOS for UK users on Wednesday, ahead of the official changes.
Now that Apple has delivered more customer-friendly choices, the process isn't without certain details some may not be happy with. If you purchased a given album from the iTunes Store, it's not possible to upgrade a single track or two off of it without upgrading the entire album. The system treats each purchased album as one singular item.
Finally, the special link in the right-hand sidebar is the only place where you can upgrade. If you navigate to an album you've already bought, the full price is displayed for it and for each individual song. These normal pages within the store are not aware of your purchasing history and thus do not mention any information about upgrading as a result.
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Charles Martin
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Andrew Orr
29 Comments
Yeah!
Apple on Thursday began offering iTunes shoppers the ability to upgrade their songs to higher-quality DRM-free tracks on an individual basis, doing away with an earlier mandate that required customers to upgrade their entire libraries all at once. ...
This is obviously a better situation than we had previous, but still a bit awkward IMO.
It would be nice to just right click on an album in iTunes and have "upgrade this album" be an option if iTunes knows (and it does know) what my purchase list is. Probably the list is actually stored on the server and has to be downloaded each time from iTunes?
I guess everyone realises at this point that iTunes needs a very major makeover anyway. Here's hoping that it's soon.
Now upgrading is a little more manageable, not that I personally have a huge backlog of them, I didn't want to pay to upgrade certain tracks that my sister bought.
I really thought they meant it when they said they weren't going to do this.
I paid probably $20 for crap I didn't want to upgrade when I spent the $50 for the original upgrade.
Glad they fixed it, but I have to learn not to pull the trigger so fast with Apple - they will always take the suckers like me first...
I really thought they meant it when they said they weren't going to do this.
When did they say that?