iTunes Search with Amazon's DRM-Free store = Advantageous

There's no denying that Apple's iTunes Store is both well designed and chock-full of music, TV shows and movies for you to buy. It's also got a rather awesome Genius feature for playlist creation [whilst cunningly up-selling you more tunes via the Genius Sidebar]. However when it comes to buying music, a large proportion of it remains crippled (and at 128kbps bit-rate) thanks to the iTunes Store's FairPlay DRM. Sure, there's iTunes Plus: but the selection remains lacking thanks to the devious tactics of the record labels. Amazon, on the other hand has had a high-bitrate DRM-free store for sometime.

Thankfully, there's now a new option that allows you to make the most of Apple's excellent store: and then skip over to Amazon to actually buy the music: Advantageous. Simply run the Advantageous installer, and a script [added to your iTunes Script menu shown above] will take the currently-selected track from the iTunes store, open your default browser and load the relevant Amazon search page.

It's a neat, and above-all free, timesaver that may just provide an incentive for iTunes Store addicts to go DRM-free. Advantageous requires Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, and iTunes 8.

[Via BoingBoing]

Tags: drm-free, freeware, iTunes, music, search