Hi and thanks for your replies. The HTC Desire I have is quite happy to play most things so I am cool with that. It's the difficulty that iTunes creates when you need to export music for other hardware to play. Essentially this comes down to having to burn CDs although a virtual CD player makes that task a little easier. Even so, you end up with tracks that have odd titles, missing tags and other strangeness. The main frustration is that they haven't licensed their decryption and m4p file format to any third party which means you have to jump through unreasonably tight hoops to get your music away from iPods, Itunes and so on. Some people have compared it to buying bread from Tescos only to be told it can only be toasted in a device from Tesco - you get the idea. I am a part time musician and fully support any efforts retaillers make to ensure artists get paid for their work. But I don't like the way Apple have used it to lock our music to their hardware.

Hi, I want to sue the pants off Apple for wasting so much of my time and making it so hard to use my music on non Apple hardware! Ha - wishful thinking I know but here's the problem: I have almost 5000 music titles on my computer around two thirds of which come from a cumbersome CD collection and rest from the iTunes store. I have 5 iPods of various types around the house so all was well until I bought an HTC phone. To play my music on that I had to export the tracks from iTunes which a) takes an enormous amount of time and effort and b) creates all sorts of cataloguing issues that I won't go into here except to say it makes the library difficult to use. It has taken many weekends of effort and I still haven't got things right.; missing album art, incorrectly labelled tracks and so on. The crux of it is that Apple say they are protecting the rights of copyright holders by encrypting tracks and saving them in a proprietary file format but what they are really doing is locking people in to using their hardware and that can’t be right. It’s unlawful in some countries and they have been sued for it in the USA before now. Is anyone taking action against Apple in the UK for this restrictive practice? I will add my name to the list if they are.

Yep - that's what I thought.

Looks like I fell for it - but is there anything I can do? I met a colleague from work at the Exeter Services carpark back on the 8th of JUne. I had to leave my car there while we travelled to a meeting near reading for the day. The signs in the carpark gave me a number to call inorder to pay for parking by credit card. I made several attempts to do this. Sometimes the number wouldn't connect, other times a recorded message informed me that the card was invalid. Not true, it's a good card that I continue to use. Running out of time we left my car in the carpark and I called my office, gave them the details and asked them to pay the parking fee. They tried but also couldn't get through. Finally, when they got past the automated system and spoke to a human being (remember those things?) they were asked for a sign number. Apparently it wasn't enough to know which carpark and the registration number of my vehicle - they wanted to know which sign it was parked by. So - the office didn't pay. Later in the day I returned and noted that there weren't any tickets on the vehicle and, even better, it wasn't clamped. I assumed it hadn't been checked. Two weeks later I received the demands for £50 with threats that if I didn't pay within 7 days, it would go up to £80. I don't have much and can't affort the fee but paid it anyway by credit because I figured £50 you haven't got is better than £80. I shouldn't have paid these cowboys a penny so my question is this: can I get the money back and of so, how?