Funkii Munkii

Quick question for the guru's (Markus et al )

Someone gave me an itune gift card for my birthday, seeing as we are in Oz it's in Australian dollars. Now my account was opened when I lived in the UK and I still pay for any purchases through my UK bank account.

I have read that I will have to open another account

So my question related to opening another account will Itunes allow me to have two accounts for the same ipod what will it do with regards to purchases already made under my UK account.

In short will this be a nightmare and screw my collection up, after 18 months I have finally got everything from my CD's that I wanted on the pod 4600 songs, all artwork correct etc etc and I'm about to start wading through my vinyl collection and for the sake of a $30 gift card I dont want to screw anything up or lose anything.

Anyone experienced this ? any pointers ?

Cheers

Markus

Yes you will have to open another account, for each store you want to use, you need an account.

Yes you can have multiple accounts for a single iPod/iPhone/Computer and it won't mess things up.

I've got three accounts, one UK, one US and one Canadian. I have purchased and synced music and apps (my US account is a free one as I don't have a US credit card and I only want it to download free apps from the US store, there are/were a couple of free things in the US store that were not in the Canadian one) to my iPod and iPhone without issue.

Basically what happens is you sign in, let's say with your Oz account, you'll download and pay for the music. If you try and play a song purchased via the UK store then iTunes will moan that you are not authorized to play it and all you need to do is sign in to the appropriate store to be able to play it.

Note that I said iTunes, from my experience the iPod/iPhone doesn't care and doesn't show this message. Provided you're logged into the appropriate account when you transfer the music over to the iPod/iPhone, it'll play without issue, even if you then login to a different account in iTunes.

Now, I will go and have a little look and see if I can verify what I said above. Why? Well, a while ago I removed the FairPlay DRM from all my mp4 files. This was to try and avoid having grief in regards to it requiring me to login to a specific store when I tried to play a song. I know it required various apps and things to get working, and I'm not sure if it still possible to do this, but I'll have a look.
If it is possible to still do this, then it could be worth looking into.

What I will try and do is find a few free songs on the various stores I have accounts for, and see what happens when I download and switch between stores. I'll report back later

Markus

I am back.

I've just created an iTunes account for the Oz store (Here's a tip to get a free account. Pick ANY free application, then click Get App, then use the create account option that appears. Under payment will be a "None" option, select that, fill in an address in the country you have selected - to cheat, use an Apple Retail Store address, if the country has them, if not, do a quick search for a local hotel in that country). I've also checked my other iTunes accounts.

So, I've got four accounts now. I've logged into each one and downloaded a free single of the week from each store, and I've logged out of the store.

Now, when it comes to the free singles, I can, without being logged into the stores, play the songs in iTunes WITHOUT it prompting me to sing into the appropriate store.

This is a good thing. What I don't know is wether the same would happen for paid music, and no offense, but I'm not going purchase music just to check this out, sorry.

My next step is to copy these tracks onto another computer that hasn't seen the store logins and see if they play. It's possible free tracks might not be DRM'd in the same way as paid for tracks, which does make some sense. Again I will report back.

* edit - reporting back *

Ok, four songs copied over to clean iTunes. Imported and they play without any request from iTunes. Makes sense, they are m4a files and not m4p files, the latter usually signifying protected files.

Markus

As for removing DRM. search for Requiem (only of use if you have a Mac however and itunes 9.0, as I think 9.0.2 breaks it - downloading Requiem 1.8.13 at the moment to see if it will work). Or the other option is to burn the files to a CD and then re-rip them, but you can lose quality doing that.

Funkii Munkii

As ever Markus is on the money

Nice one Thanks very much, time to spend my 30 bucks

Trout

iTrader: (1)

Will have to look into this. I have had a 30USD gift token hanging around for a while.

Markus

David, Try the method mentioned for creating a free app account in the US Store. It certainly works for getting free apps, as that's what I've used it for. I can't see why it would not work for a gift card, you should not need to provide billing information with it, well, bar the gift card number