Oh, sure, like we'd let a little thing like a complete inability to purchase any music stop us. We're pleased to announce that whatever bizarre bug afflicted the iTunes Music Store on Monday night had cleared up by Tuesday afternoon, at which point we suddenly found ourselves able to sign in with an existing Apple ID and set ourselves up to start buying. After much soul-searching (and some extremely creative bookkeeping), we determined that ninety-nine cents was indeed within AtAT's plotline-research budget-- albeit just barely-- and thus a-purchasin' we went.

One thing we'll say right off the bat: the buying experience at the iTunes Music Store is top-notch. Being able to browse the catalog just like we browse our local iTunes Library is as intuitive as it gets; the thirty-second previews sound terrific and are perfectly zippy over a broadband connection; clicking the little "BUY SONG" icon leads to instant consumer gratification (or darn close, anyway). In mere seconds we were the proud owners of one AAC-encoded copy of a live cover of the Velvet Underground's "Sweet Jane" by Lone Justice. Life is good, right?

That said, despite all the rave reviews proclaiming the iTunes Music Store to be the most significant advance in human history since the invention of Lemon Pledge, we have to go all contrarian and admit to a little buyer's remorse kicking in-- and a lot of that's about what we can and can't do with this little song. Now, see, if we had bought the actual physical CD from which this track was taken, we could do pretty much anything we want to with it-- encode MP3s or AACs, edit raw AIFF data to add fade-ins and fade-outs before burning to disc, use the disc itself as skeet, etc.

Songs purchased via iTunes, however, have all sorts of little restrictions lurking underneath the surface-- not nearly as draconian as the restrictions placed on music acquired from PressPlay or Rhapsody, but restrictions nonetheless. They can only be played on up to three Macs, each of which needs to be "authorized" with the buyer's Apple ID and password-- even if you're streaming via the Rendezvous sharing option. You can burn them to disc, but if you have any purchased music in a given playlist, that specific playlist can only be burned ten times. And you can't convert purchased music to any other file format, either via the iTunes "Convert Selection to MP3" menu item or by exporting the data in QuickTime Player. (The Export menu item is greyed out.)

Now, three Macs and ten CDs per playlist are going to be just fine for most people, but it's that last one that really kicked us in the gut-- because without converting the song to MP3, we can't play it in the living room on our TiVo with Home Media Option, which wouldn't know an AAC file if one bit it on the IR blaster. And since the TiVo is now our primary non-iPod method of playing music down here at the AtAT compound, we've got a teensy problem. (Note to any Apple/TiVo employees who may be tuning in: we humbly request TiVo Desktop 1.1 with AAC support tout de suite.)

Luckily, there's a workaround. We were able to burn our purchased track to a CD-RW, and then encode the burned track right back into the iTunes Library as an MP3. Sure, there's a little quality loss (theoretically-- we can't hear a difference, but then again, this is a live track), but at least now we can play the song on the TiVo, or slap it on a non-iPod digital music player (as if), or whatever.

Still, that's a kludgy and time-consuming workaround that lacks the very elegance we as Mac users hold in such high regard. As things stand, then, we here at the compound have to ask ourselves some pretty tough questions when it comes to buying music via iTunes. Say, for example, we wanted to buy Lou Reed's New York, to replace our copy on vinyl that's sitting in a crawlspace a thousand miles away. We could buy it via iTunes for $9.99 and get the music immediately and then jump through hoops and suffer potential quality reductions just to play it how and where we want to play it. Or we could shell out an extra thirty-five cents via Half.com and wait a week for a brand new shrinkwrapped CD for us to do with as we please. And the CD comes with liner notes. Decisions, decisions.

Of course, our biggest regret about buying that song from the iTunes Music Store is that all sales are final. We hardly think this is fair, at least in our circumstances; the thirty-second preview showcased only the vocal stylings of the immortal Ms. Maria McKee, but two minutes and sixteen seconds into the purchased song we were suddenly assaulted by the yowlings of a (shudder) guest vocalist. Surely there's someone at Apple we can call to yell "My Lone Justice track has BONO in it!" Oh, the injustice of it all...