I bought some DRM-free music this weekend on Amazon MP3. The experience was fantastic. Its obvious that they really put a lot of thought into the user experience when they built the site. I already have an amazon.com account, so once I decided to make a purchase, the first thing it did was ask me if I wanted to install the Amazon MP3 downloader. I installed it, provided my account information, and my download started instantly. The download was REALLY fast…I downloaded Pink Floyd’s The Wall - a 2 disc set with a total of 26 songs - for $8.99, and the download of all of the songs took maybe 5 minutes at the most (over my broadband cable connection). The really nice thing about it was not only did it download the music, but it also automatically added it to my iTunes library. Very nice. From there I was able to instantly load it onto my iPod (I don’t have mine setup to automatically sync).

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A while back my friend Jeremy told me about a little tool he used for importing music from his iPod into his iTunes library called Senuti. He mentioned it as a way of getting around iTunes content DRM issues. When you buy media from the iTunes store, the DRM it comes with will only allow you to transfer it a certain number of times before it disables it. Well, I’ve transferred my stuff enough times that I was beginning to worry that I might be getting close, and I had a need to transfer my stuff again, so I decided to take a look at Senuti.

So, since I got my MacBook Pro, I’ve sort of put off the task of trying to get all of my media transferred to the new laptop. The idea of backing up my iTunes library on my old PC laptop, and then importing it all (over 15GB worth of data) over the network into my iTunes library on the new laptop just did not sound appealing at all. So then I remembered about Senuti, and how it would let me import everything directly from my iPod. My only question was whether or not it would have any issues with the fact that my iPod was formatted for Windows and not a Mac. According to the FAQ, there had never been any reported issues with this. Apparently it would work just fine with Windows formatted iPods. Sweet! So last night I gave it a shot. I was very pleased with the outcome.

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The iPod/iTunes experience just gets better all the time. I’m pretty excited about this.