Alternatives to iTunes?

seriously, dude. if by "old OS" you mean pre-OS X, you're fucked. just upgrade. or buy CDs instead.

No, actually it's 10.1 something. I cannot afford to "upgrade". Up until last week I could use iTunes perfectly finely.

You can't posibly be suggesting that only people who can afford to upgrade all the time should be 'allowed' to download?

Shucks, all I wanted was a little advice.

Even with my creaky OSX 1 I can look at the store anbd buy albums but not single tracks. That was why I was looking for an alternative.

without being funny: if you're using 10.1 (and yo, that level of detail is massively helpful when you're asking for advice) you're lucky you can use iTMS at all. 10.1 is, what, about four years old now? i don't think one OS upgrade in that time is exactly unreasonable.

You can't posibly be suggesting that only people who can afford to upgrade all the time should be 'allowed' to download?

not "all the time", no. but occasionally would be nice. otherwise what do you expect apple to do: never make any improvements to anything, just in case someone out there is still running system 6?

http://discussions.info.apple.com/[email protected]@.68bbac60

I (and loads of other people) have spent thousdands of pounds on Apple stuff and now feel we've been pretty much shafted because we can't (or don;' want to upgrade our OS - in my case I can't - it'll shaft my computer and see below).

Basically in order to buy stuff from iTunes now I need a new computer. I don't want to / can't afford to buy a new computer this one works fine (except for the f-ing iTunes store).

All I want is to be able to download legally new chart stuff that my kids want to hear. All the stuff I like I download from eMusic or other places.

As a matter of fact I have updated my OS once or twice and I ended up spending more time on the Apple forums trying to fix the bugs than I care to think about.

i appreciate how this must be a bit of a pisser for you, but ... er, really, if you're sitting there using 10.1 you must be noticing that there's an awful lot else you can't do (or can't do very well). without wishing to sound like Captain Apple, if you're willing to shell out for a shiny iMac, is it really such a big deal to upgrade the (vital) OS every now and then?

progress is good. and yes, it costs money. this is a shame, but what can we do?

Anyway....this isn't really the place to ask this but where might I buy such a thing as 10.2? I just put it in google and the only place in the UK selling it seemed to want £300 - that don't sound right do it?!? OS 4 is only £90. I guess it's back to the Apple forums...

As for your last point - when I bought my shiny iMac I had a spare grand, now with two kids and a mortgage up the yazoo I don't really have one (shiny or new) penny. I'm not complaining about THAT though! Kids and house are great...it's just this pesky iTunes store business has p-ed me off enormously (as you can probably tell!).

Thanks for your help though.

greedy fuckers! no, that's not right. i thought apple still sold these things? hmm.

[makes phone call]

apparently not. o well. eBay is your best bet, then, i think.

Sure things need to progress and improve, but Apple breaking old stuff on purpose is just nasty.

My 15 year old CD player still plays all the latest releases for it, so why not a 4 year old Mac?

well, i have a four-year-old mac that runs iTunes 6 perfectly well: the issue here, as ned admits, is that he's chosen not to upgrade his OS until now. i don't think apple are being particularly unreasonable here: like i keep saying, what do we expect? that they never upgrade anything ever, just in case someone's still using a IIfx?

computers aren't the kind of thing you can just buy and run for ever. it's implicit that there will be software updates and so on and so forth. and, er, it's not as if iTMS existed when ned (or i) bought our iMacs, so ... we can't really complain, can we?

that's the big problem, i guess: the more we become reliant on software (MP3s) rather than hardware (CDs), the more we're going to have to accept occasional bouts of obsolescence.