iTunes Plus, the DRM-free version of the iTunes Store, launched yesterday with kind of a big bang—Paul McCartney’s full catalog. The promised Upgrade My Music feature launched too. I didn’t really know what to expect there, so I was kind of astonished to see that the list of my purchases that were eligible for upgrade included twelve albums worth of music. I decided to go ahead and make the move to the high resolution downloads.
Now I’m kind of wishing I hadn’t—or at least that I had waited until a few days after the service launched. That’s a lot of 10 MB downloads, and they have a tendency of taking a really long time. Three of the downloads stalled the entire queue last night, so it looks like I will have to babysit the downloads for a few days. Fortunately restarting iTunes appears to have cleared whatever blockage was causing the problem.
One interesting unanticipated feature of the upgrade was spotlighted by CNet, who point out that the upgrade feature provides a way to retrieve a previously purchased but lost song for only 30 cents.