Yesterday, June 6 Apple announce several products that they are going to be releasing later this year. Lion which is the next operating system for Apple, will be release in July for $29.99. In the fall upgrades to iOS 5 and iCloud will be released. The one thing that was released yesterday to the general public was the ability to transfer your purchase music to your iOS device without having to connect it physically to the computer. The process is fairly simple, however you may run into a few hang ups, or at least I did.
The first thing you will need to do is upgrade your iOS device to 4.3.3. Before updating make sure you sync your iOS device and back it up. Then you are ready to update, this is where I ran into a problem. When I tried to update I got the following error message “this device is not eligible for the requested built” If you get the same error message first click on “More Information” that will send you to the Apple Support site; “iOS: Resolving update and restore alert messages.” Go through the steps they suggest. If after following all the steps you still get the same error message (which is what happened to me) follow the steps on this Apple Support site. This does require you to work in the Terminal and you must have the administration password. It is pretty easy to follow and remember copy and paste or your friends. Once you have finished updating disconnect your iOS device from you computer.
Now on your iOS device go into the iTunes store and at the bottom you should see an icon with Purchased under it between iTune U and Download. On the right you can see the artist name and the number of songs you have purchased. You can download single songs, whole albums or everything you have purchased. Once you have started a download if you want to stop it temporarily hit the pause button. You can only connect your iOS device to one iTunes account at a time. I have a second iTunes account that I created by mistake, when I logged into that account and tried to download the music purchased on that account I received a message that if I continued my iPad would be linked to that account for 90 days. Since I only had two purchased songs on that account, i chose not to continue. As far as I can tell I don’t think it downloads in the background, so if you go out of iTunes and into another application the downloading stops. However when you go back into iTunes its starts back up immediately. so it is obviously caching the information. Besides the update snafu, everything else was seamless. I am looking forward to all the other updates especially iCloud. Nothing Apple is doing is new, but if we look at recent history it does seem to do things better.