Apple lovers can finally download their favourite music and videos from the iTunes store which was made available to users in Malta and 11 other countries.
The world’s number one music store was previously not available to the Maltese, some of who beat the system by providing a foreign address to set up their account. However, this did not always work.
Starting yesterday, users can download and purchase music through iTunes in Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.
The application is free for one’s Mac or PC. It lets users organise and play digital music and video via the computer.
Maltese user Jonathan Muscat said its introduction for Malta was a major step forward for music lovers and “Apple freaks” like him. He said the introduction of iTunes across Europe should significantly improve Apple’s reach and its availability in countries like Malta was “brilliant”.Another user, Andrew Azzopardi, said that before yesterday he had to “unfortunately” download all his music from other sites and then add them to iTunes.“I either had to download music from sharing sites or from CDs... a real nightmare,” he said.
He added that iTunes was faster and made sense especially for people like him who had very little time on their hands. Another Apple devotee, Jason Borg, waited till 12.30 a.m. yesterday to confirm a message he saw on Twitter that Malta was one of the new EU countries where iTunes will become available after an absence of between eight and 10 years. As soon as it opened, he downloaded an album by Nick Cave, a rare acquisition. Mr Borg said songs downloaded from various other sites were not good quality music files so iTunes was a breath of fresh air for his passion for music.
But not everybody was enthusiastic, and Alfred Bugeja criticised the virtual store on times ofmalta.com“What a joke. The music store has less than half the catalogue of music found on the UK store. There are no ringtones, no iBooks, no movies, no TV programmes and the podcast catalogue is abysmal. I’ll stick to my UK store account, thank you very much.”What makes the iTunes Store such a hit? For one, there are over 18 million high-quality songs priced at just $0.69, $0.99, or $1.29 each.
The iTunes store can be accessed from one computer, iPod touch, iPhone, iPad, or Apple TV.