December 9, 2006 [LINK / comment]
Since our iPod's connectivity has become too unreliable to even bother with trying to update the songs, I haven't been buying any songs from Apple's Music Store lately. After picking up a Guitar World special edition featuring the Rolling Stones, however, I got inspired to build up my iTunes library with a few old Stones tunes.* To my dismay, I came across a warning that you can't buy songs unless you update to iTunes version 7.0, which requires Mac OS X 10.3.9 ("Tiger"). Such an upgrade would stretch my old iMac's capacity, however, which left me in a quandary. After doing a bit of searching in the Apple.com discussion forums, I learned that you can buy songs with version 6.0.5 of iTunes for Mac, which works with Mac OS X 10.2.8. Whew! See apple.com.
* From that magazine, I learned that the guitars on "Jumpin' Jack Flash" and "Gimme Shelter" were tuned in "Open E" -- E, B, E, G#, B, E -- rather than the standard E, A, D, G, B, E. So that's how they did it! A casual listener would probably never guess at the sophisticated tuning and playing techniques that go into some of those rock classics. Say what you will, Keith Richards is truly an inventive virtuoso guitarist. I hadn't played my guitar at all in over a month, and my finger tips are really sore right now.