Getting music on an ipod was always a pain unless you bought the music on itunes or ripped a music CD directly with itunes (yes, that was an actual feature. hard to imagine these days).

No simple drag and drop onto a mounted USB drive like all other mp3 players back in the day. Maybe more of a lock-in attempt instead of lock down, but related imo.

Anything you dropped into your computer's MP3 directory would sync to your iPod. It didn't matter where you got the music from.

The restriction was that an iPod would only sync tracks from one computer at a time, which was a demand of the music rights holders.

You can still rip CDs with Apple Music. In fact, that's the only use I have for that app (I recently lost a hard drive with music and I'm in the process of backing up all my CDs again).

> ripped a music CD directly with itunes (yes, that was an actual feature. hard to imagine these days).

These days? Last week (though WMP). My retired father's old computer died, his new one, no CD slot. Emails me from Australia asking how to rip his CDs for his media player. He's not an audiophile but he's not a technophile (and his blues music collection is sufficiently large that at least one of the blues radio stations in his city will on occasion ask him to borrow something because they don't have it in their library.

Told him to get a USB CD player and a card reader (his media player is on micro/SD).