[bbales]

With college girls with their own computers, with myhaving gotten a new Macbook, but still leaving the old Powerbook for my youngest daughter to use, we have run into the 5-computer limit. (Also -- I THINK my new iPhone is considered a "computer." I swear I had to authorize it last week.)

It appears I can set up a new account on itunes, so I could have the girls get their songs that way. However, we have years worth of purchased songs under one single account.

I believe I read years ago that many people, take their purchased songs, burn them to a CD and then re-import them, to strip them of the digital rights management scheme. Is this true? If so, I could do that with the new laptop, as I haven't even transferred most of the music onto this yet anyway.

And I don't suppose Apple plans to ease up on the limit of 5 anytime soon? THat seemed so many, once upon a time. Now I'm counting devices and thinking that limit needs to be expanded.

And again -- I'm not trying to get someone else's songs! We paid for every single one of them...

[seanc]

There's a program available called NoteBurner that will emulate a CDRW. This way you 'burn' your music to the hard drive making it a hell of a lot quicker and saving on hours of swapping CDRWs in and out.

If you have a lot of music, you could probably justify the cost of $39.95, otherwise it could be cheaper to purchase all of the music from Amazons MP3 store, it's cheaper, better quality and their download program will even pop it into iTunes for you.

[philm]

There is no easy way around this without burning millions of CDs which is highly tedious. That said, an iPhone (like an iPod) is not treated as a separate computer, so it does not count as one of your five.

The Amazon store also has the benefit of no DRM so that's helpful for family situations.

[Person Man]

Or, you can wait until MacWorld, when it is rumored that a possible deal will be announced that extends iTunes Plus to the other three major labels, and then spend 30 cents a track to "upgrade" your music to DRM free.

There is no way I'm going to pay another 89 to 99 cents a track on the Amazon store for music that I've already bought on iTunes for 99 cents a track just to get DRM free music.

[bbales]

I've been giving this some more thought -- and I think we may be OK. It's the SONGS that can only be played on 5 computers, correct? Well, the stuff my kids buy -- there are a bunch on my old laptop, because for a long time that was the only laptop in the family -- is not what I would buy, so it won't be on either my new laptop of my iMac (in theory) at least.

So the limit might not be too ... limiting. I would just as soon avoid having to set up another account, as I think that would get pretty confusing as to which song was purchased on which account.

So I guess I'll just wait and see what happens. I already had to deauthorize everything and begin the reauthorizing process, after getting the new laptop. (A couple authorizations were with a now-unused desktop and to a laptop hard drive that crashed.)

I'm not going to rebuy songs, but I was looking through amazon and may go that route in the future. Cheaper, and no rights to worry about.

[seanc]

Every iTunes account can only have DRM protected content purchased via it played on 5 different computers at one time.

[Art Vandelay]

If you aren't sharing computers anymore and you aren't listening to each other's music, then separate iTunes accounts is the way to go. You can have multiple iTunes accounts authorized on a single computer when there are songs that you do want to share with each other.

Also, it is quite possible that this will become moot in the near future.

[King Bob On The Cob]

Like yesterday. Upgrade your library!