Vista tweak enables iTunes downloads authorisation

By Simon Aughton

Posted on 1 Feb 2007 at 08:26

Early adopters of Microsoft's Windows Vista have discovered that they are unable to play songs purchased from Apple's iTunes Music Store without tweaking Vista's settings.

While iTunes will happily play DRM-free songs that have been ripped from CD, when it tries to play a purchased track it prompts the user to authorise it by entering their Apple ID and password. And although iTunes then says that authorisation has been successful it continues to refuse to play the relevant songs.

In an email to one disgruntled user Apple acknowledged the problem, adding that it 'hopes to have a Vista-compatible version of iTunes available soon'.

However a solution has been found and reported on Apple's own support forums.

'From Vista, right click on the iTunes.exe program icon located in the iTune folder in the Program File folder and select Properties,' lamboguy notes. 'Click on the Compatibility tab and enable the "Run this program as an administrator" checkbox. Click on OK.'

iTunes will then automatically run with admin privileges and authorisation will be permitted. lamboguy adds that same trick will work with other XP applications that do not 'run quite well' in Vista.