[Ted L. Nancy]

This, of course, is great. I think it is the biggest announcement of the day.

I'm still wondering if drm-free applies to songs already purchased? Will the new iTunes handle this?

[ibook_steve]

You can upgrade your whole iTunes library of purchased songs for $.30 a song, I believe I saw.

Steve

[Mrjinglesusa]

Originally Posted by ibook_steve 

You can upgrade your whole iTunes library of purchased songs for $.30 a song, I believe I saw.

Steve

That is correct.

Now, you can choose from millions of iTunes Plus songs from all four major music labels and thousands of independents. With iTunes Plus, you get high-quality, 256-Kbps AAC encoding. All free of burn limits and digital rights management (DRM). So iTunes Plus music will play on iPod, Apple TV, all Mac and Windows computers, and many other digital music players. It’s also easy to upgrade your iTunes library to iTunes Plus. You don’t have to buy the song or album again. Just pay the 30¢ per song upgrade price. (Music video upgrades are 60¢ and entire albums can be upgraded for 30 percent of the album price.)

http://www.apple.com/itunes/whatsnew/

[darcybaston]

I tried to upgrade, and while it upgraded 55 of my songs, it left about 300 untouched. When I looked up many of the songs it skipped in the store, I can buy them again full price at iTunes Plus quality, but they won't upgrade to it. What the hell?

When I use this url (from Apple support) to get iTunes to rescan my library for eligible songs (which I've paid for, these aren't free singles or whatever): http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/M...iTunesPlusPage

It says that my library is already up to date. But I have whole albums, like Rihanna's "Good Girl Gone Bad" in the DRM format that is available as a Plus album in the store. Anybody else experiencing this sort of thing?

[slugslugslug]

It's got mine wrong, too. Trying to get me to upgrade an album that I already bought as iTunes Plus. Doesn't seem to be missing much else, though.

[darcybaston]

It's possible my recent account switch is causing the problem. I recently changed from the USA store to the Canada store (currently logged into that during the checking) after I moved to Canada and began using a canadian credit card. I bought that Rhianna album from the USA store, and when I click on the store arrow next to a song title, it says that that album is not available from the Canadian store.

But on the flip side, my USA purchased album from artist Gypsy soul upgraded successfully from my Canadian account tonight.

And, the song "Be Yourself" by Audioslave, purchased on the USA account, is available in the Canadian store as a Plus title, and it wouldn't update. I bought it again as an experiment to see if iTunes would detect it as a duplicate or upgrade candidate, and it didn't. It treated it as a totally new song.

Oh wait, there is another difference. Most of the singles I purchased (bought one song off an album) with a USA account that are also available in the Canada store, have had their album description text changed at some point. I once batch renamed the group of singles' album text to "Singles" or whatever. It seems that when you do that, iTunes Plus is unable to recognize them anymore, even if you re-type the original album name and do a Plus upgrade eligibility scan again afterwards. I think I may have shot myself in the foot there.

Ok, so what I've learned from all this:

USA content not found on the Canada store won't update.
USA content found on the Canada store WILL update, assuming you NEVER edit the MP3 tags.