Welcome to Rehash Day here on AtAT! Yes, there seems to be a bit of a lull casting its icy pall across the Mac landscape, and most of the stuff that's happening now is actually stuff that's happened before. But hey, there's nothing wrong with leftovers now and again, right? Heck, lasagna's better on the second day right out of the fridge, so why shouldn't your Apple-flavored drama age just as deliciously?

Try this on for size: PaidContent.org has selected comments from Peter Lowe, Apple's Director of Marketing for Applications and Services, taken from his keynote yesterday at the Jupiter Plug.IN conference. "What's this," you ask? "A keynote we hadn't even heard was happening in the first place?" Well, yes, probably; we certainly didn't know about it until after the fact, but then, we're pretty out of the loop these days. Still, don't panic; you didn't miss a new PowerBook intro or any onstage hijinks involving Phil Schiller, a Photoshop bake-off, and a greased pig. Plug.IN apparently focuses entirely on digital music, and as such, Mr. Lowe (who is intimately involved with iTunes and its Music Store) was dispatched to handle the Peternote-- which featured, if anything, even fewer surprises than the CreativePro's Gregnote.

Peter reportedly voiced Apple's position that "the way to go after illegal file sharing services is to compete with them" by offering consumers an inexpensive alternative to the pitfalls said illicit services invariably include-- namely, unreliable encoding, poor connections, a lack of previews, misnamed files, and the "bad karma" that comes along with stealing. Interestingly enough, many people seem to be reporting this as "news," whereas we're pretty sure that Peter was just parroting the exact same points that Steve made back at the iTMS launch. Hence the whole "rehash" thing.

Of course, there was some newer stuff, or at least older stuff reiterated in a pointed manner: "If digital distribution is about one thing, it is about being simple... and it needs to be consistent... Web is not the best interface to enjoy music." Hmmm, suppose that was directed at anyone we know? Meanwhile, Peter confirms yet again that iTunes for Windows is still "on track to launch by the end of this year," and that it's Apple's "intention" for the Windows version to keep the same broad usage rights that customers with the Mac version enjoy. Which means that BuyMusic.com will probably die bleeding from its metaphorical eye sockets mere days later-- assuming that it hasn't drowned itself in its own incompetence by then.

And speaking of leftovers, who wants yet another helping of BuyMusic slapstick? Faithful viewer Kimball Larsen pointed out a customer experience detailed in, well, detail over at Scriptygoddess, and it would be truly funny if it weren't so utterly and irretrievably sad. In addition to describing some of BuyMusic's unforgivable user interface absurdities (if you buy an album, you still have to download-- and register via password-- each song individually), the author relates her nightmare in trying to do something we iTMS users take for granted: burning her purchased music onto a CD to play in the car. Turns out that under Windows 2000, the only CD-R plugin for Windows Media Player supported by BuyMusic is Roxio's, which crashes every single time the author attempts to use it.

That wouldn't necessarily be a problem if she could just burn the disc from her husband's XP system, but of course BuyMusic only lets you burn CDs from the computer you use to buy the song, even if you're allowed by the DRM to download it to another computer or two. Since she is effectively unable to burn her music to a CD, she threatened to involve her credit card company, which finally prompted BuyMusic to refund her money. Well, most of it. Until she complained again and they refunded all of it. Yeah, this is a business that'll flourish.

So what's the moral of this story? Well, it might be this: don't use Windows 2000 and BuyMusic.com when you admit you have a Power Mac G4 "collecting dust" because you "have no software for it." Surely that counts as a crime on some sort of cosmic scale, right? We hate to say it, but it sounds like there might be a little bad karma at play here, too...