Excellent, thanks. The card says it has no value until activated at the register. Since I assume the person who gave it to me bought it in late 2006, it should still be good.
This thread inspired me to do a little research. I found a link saying that Apple will close your iTunes account if you email them, which was one of my original reasons to avoid using this gift card. Wikipedia says Windows Media Player for Windows Mobile will play AAC files, but there's a document on the Microsoft knowledgebase that says Windows Media Player 11 (desktop version) won't play .M4A files, which it says use AAC. Would a music file be called "songname.AAC" or "songname.M4A", or am I completely off track here? If I could figure out that I could treat AAC files like MP3s (play them on my computer, on my phone, and burn them to CD), I might use the gift card myself.
Also, do you know if every song is available without DRM for $1.29 or just a selection?
The AAC format is more formally known as MPEG-4 Part 3: Audio, thus m4a. MP3 is named so because it's MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3.
You can play MPEG-4 video (usually mp4) and audio (AAC) files in Windows Media Player if you install the MPEG-4 codecs. Microsoft isn't too interested in directly supporting such ISO standard video and audio formats that compete with their own formats. I believe FFDShow is what you're looking for.
Also, do you know if every song is available without DRM for $1.29 or just a selection?
Only for those labels that have allowed Apple to make them available that way. And the songs are 99 cents now just like the rest.