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Sorry. Jamaica grows the most theraputic stuff. To say nothing of the marketing program

Anyone want to bet that in 3 years you'll be seeing something like this on Zimbra's main page?

Anybody want to bet that nobody in the current company will be doing anything related to their current job in 3 years?

Anybody want to bet that Yahoo hasn't learned anything from previous mistakes?

But I'm not bitter or anything.

The problem with OSS is that there are just too many choices.

You're entirely right. Thank god that with closed source, there's only one media player to choose from. And only one web browser. I'm so happy that there's only one closed source mail client too!

I would make my point further, but my comment would be rejected as spam...

It's not preferential. Other companies can make products that interoperate with PlaysForSure.

Really? Then show me where I can get a software player not made by Microsoft capable of playing PlaysForSure Media!

• Nullsoft Winamp
  Can I play my purchased music from services such as the new Napster, MusicMatch, MusicNow, or BuyMusic.com through Winamp 5?
  Yes. Yes you can.
• Amazon Unbox video player
• Musicmatch Jukebox

In particular, show me where I can get one that works on operating systems other than Windows!

In contrast, other software companies are prohibited from licensing FairPlay. Some companies want to license FairPlay so that their software can play iTunes Store media, but Apple refuses to license their DRM.

That said, I'm not sure if I agree with Norway's decision to ban FairPlay. This might be excessive regulation.

Also, since the thing supports MP3 and AAC and uses USB to connect, why won't Microsoft support the Mac? It should be trivial to do

If some Mac users are interested in the Zune (and aren't interested in their music store), is there a good Mac alternative to iTunes that can be bundled with the Zune?

Have your tried http://www.musicmatch.com/
I have over 25K mp3s and it works great and uses about 40MB RAM.
It seems to be getting a bit worse with each new release thou.

I have seen many posts wher Ipod users rave about how Itunes remembers what tracks they listen to and rank or suggest playlist based on your listening habits.

Well, you can rank your music. This affects the algorithm that iTunes uses for the shuffling. The online store also has a feature where it suggests music you might like based on what you've purchased and/or are listening to at the moment. (The latter part is togglable.) This is pretty similar to what Amazon does with books.

Personally, I've never used either feature. There are a few long dissertations I ripped from CD that I tell iTunes never to send to the iPod, but that's about the extent of how I let it interfere.

I said I didn't buy an Ipod, you're assuming I haven't even seen one?

Seeing one and using one are two separate things. <morpheus>iPods are like the Matrix. You cannot see what it is. You must experience it for yourself.>/morpheus< Err... I mean that iPods are very much about ease of use. If you're looking to "see" lots of features, you're going to be disappointed. But in actual use, they hold up extremely well.

I have experienced plugging in a few Nanos in to PCs. It does not show up as a hard drive.

I don't know about Nanos, but I know it works on Shuffles and regular iPods.

Can you plug your Ipod in and use windows media player/winamp(without hacked plugin)/music match to sync tunes?

Music Match has had an iPod plugin for as long as I can remember. (Obviously, it can't play Windows DRMed music, but that's a different problem.) I don't know enought about WMP to answer your question, but dragging MP3s to your iPod does work.

Ten Hands splintered into MANY other local and not-so-local acts. For example, drummer Earl Harvin start his own rock band (Rubberbullet), wrote and toured with Seal, and has one of the better jazz combos in N. Texas. Paul Slavens went on to play in various electic bands and do a LOT of solo performing, and now has a very cool music show on Sunday nights on the local NPR outlet (FM 90.1, KERA). Mike Dillon went on to Billygoat, and is now in Hairy ApesBMX.

http://www.mmguide.musicmatch.com/artist/artist.cg i?ARTISTID=863933&TMPL=LONG

Um, no, they licensed it from Dolby. The DRM is something dolby allowed for in the spec, Apple is one company that does it but so is InterTrust.

After listening to Apple's Q1'05 Earnings call I have to say that I am concerned that the music stores besides iTunes will soon go the way of so many dot-coms. Here's two reasons:
- Apple stated in the call they have 70% market share in on-line downloads.
- Apple stated in the call they posted a small profit on the sale of now >230,000,000 songs (admittedly, these were not all in Q1'05).

If the $0.99/9.99 model is so razor thin that one company with 70% of the market is eaking by, how can six other companies who share the remaining 30% of the market hope to survive?

Napster seems to be in the lead (don't they have about 10% market share?) but it is primarily due to the subscription model they have, not selling tracks/albums. Sounds like an opportunity for Apple to swoop in and service the sub-market for subscribers to me.

But back on subject, the Creative statement that they have some type of advantage because their player submits to the DRM of half a dozen music stores that are loosing money just says to me that Creative is tightening their seatbelt on a sinking ship.

It's just MS's WMA format that iTunes can't play, but neither can any other player anyways.

That's not exactly true.

I don't see other popular media players using the standard windows UI. Do you?

The above is a moot point, anyway. Keeping the UI of an application consistent with the UI of all the other apps on a particular OS is very important if you want to increase the rate of adoption. Media players are an exception because just about every media player fux up the UI to a confusing level.

Take the look and feel of another popular open source media player as an example. When my mac buddies look for a video player capable of playing mpeg-2 (or whatever file-type it is they're having problems with that day) if I point them to VLC, they love it! It looks and feels exactly like any other mac application they use, from the metal UI, to the menu at the top of the screen, to the double-clickable .app bundle and high-res icon. They end up accepting it alot more easily than an application that didn't fit the Mac look and feel. Similarly, when you run VLC in Windows, it LOOKS and FEELS like a windows app, and on linux, it LOOKS and FEELS like a linux app. Hell, on BeOS, it looks and feels like a beos app.

I think it would be a step backwards for FireFox to consolidate on a single theme across all platforms.

While most of the tested codecs/formats showed good performance at 128 kbps, this test alone shows that none can give transparency ( transparency == unability to distinct from the original source for most people and under good conditions) at this bitrate, contrary to what many think. People who think this is important should demand higher quality files from famous online music services (like iTunes Music Store).

This listening test gives very useful information for those that rip and encode their own compressed music files, but it might not give an accurate representation of the quality of online music store files.

1. Trillian Pro - I use AIM, Y!, ICQ, IRC, and MSN chat clients. I use Trillian to notify me of updates to RSS feeds. I also use it to check POP3 e-mail accounts and Y! and HoTMaiL accounts. I also order my buddy list into Groups and Sub-Groups. Trillian also logs all chats which comes in handy on occasions. I also download the Aikon3 skin for Trillian. Trillian support secure profiles in case you have multiple people using the same install of Trillian.
Trillian website
Aikon 3 website w/Trilliain screenshots

2. Firefox - Light-weight, pop-up blocking, tabbed browsing rocks. And the plugins are very useful. All web designers should use the "Web Development" extension for Firefox. It allows you to automatically resize any webpage, disable images, cookies, java, ..., validates, and so much more. Save a lot time for the web devs. The "EditCSS" extension is cool because you can run your own CSS on other people's websites (make Slashdot fit your blog theme). Oh, and the Mozilla Google Toolbar for Firefox is a "must install". (I also install the Google bar for IE).
Firefox website

3. Microsoft Powertoys for XP (TweakUI) - A Microsoft download that allows for extra and powerful control of XP. Basically, it allows you to make some neat changes to your Registry that allows for increased productivity and usability. Tweaking XP made easy.
Microsoft Powertoys website

4. Versaverter - a neat little units converter that came in very helpful during my Engineering education. It has virtually every unit imaginable.
Versaverter website

5. Winamp5 - Light-weight MP3 player. Also play other media formats both audio and video. Skinnable, scalable, dockable, and extendable. I use only this program to playback MP3's. I like docking my Winamp screen at the bottom of my monitor. It's only about 20 pixels high. I also like right-clicking an MP3 folder and selecting Play in Winamp.
Winamp website

6. BS Player - Light-weight Video player. Playback video in half-time, double-time, resizable video screen, skinnable, commandline support, and more. My favorite video media player as I haven't found a player that gives me more control of the video I am watching.
BS Player website

7. Colorpad - tiny little .exe and GUI eyedropper utility. Use the eyedropper to get the HEX or HTML value of any pixel on screen. I don't think there's any current support for this app. Still, it's very handy and takes up little screen area with the right skin.
Colorpad @ Deviant Art

8. Winzip - compress and decompress files. Duh.
Winzip website

9. TravelAxe - Find cheap hotels from around the world. Puts information from popular travel websites into a sortable spreadsheet. Sorts by price, 1,2,3,4,5 Star rating, and more.
TravelAxe website

10. Musicmatch Jukebox - The only reason I install this software is to convert my audio CDs into MP3 archives. That part of this software is powerful and flexible. Don't use it for anything else.
Musicmatch website

but instead focus on deception and ad hammering

Is that the fine was becasue the EU said that bundling Windows Media Player with the OS hurt competition. However, I pay for my Music Match software because I like the way it rips CDs to mp3s, burns CDs, and manipulates playlist better than Windows Media Player. Of all the places where a better competing product could kick Window's butt the media player is certianly one of them.

as many songs as they want each month for $9.95.
Check out online radio from MusicMatch. It cost less, and it works nicely.
I am a happy subscriber.

MusicMatch radio
and/or it's for-pay upgrades
already do something like this.

Didn't HP have a deal with MusicMatch to distribute the MusicMatch Jukebox? And doesn't MusicMatch also have an online music store? Oof.

~~~~~~~
MUSICMATCH JUKEBOX SELECTED AS DEFAULT MEDIA PLAYER ON HP PAVILION AND COMPAQ PRESARIO COMPUTERS
-- Digital Jukebox Inventor Continues to Secure Default Jukebox Position Over the Competition --

SAN DIEGO - July 1, 2003 - MUSICMATCH, Inc., the global leader in personalized music software and services, today announced that its award-winning music player will now be included as the default media player on HP Pavilion and Compaq Presario desktop and notebook personal computers.

Full press release here.

D R M only inconveniences those of us who pay for our music. The pirates will go on using uncrippled formats. DRM is precisely as effective for anti-piracy as the Evil Bit is for security.

It's not even about copy protection. It's about keeping us on the "new format treadmill", and locking us in to specific playback hardware/software.

Don't be fooled. Take a stand!

As near as I can tell, Napster 2.0 is a store first and a jukebox second. Its jukebox tools are sorely lacking compared to iTunes, and its biggest omission is that it doesn't even include a CD ripper.

iTunes outclasses Napster in almost every way that counts. It would be more fair to compare iTunes to the new and improved MusicMatch, which added online music shopping about a month before iTunes for Windows was released, and compare Napster to BuyMusic instead.

According to Musicmatchs's Web Site, the service is for US residents only. There is a clear screenshop of there music store, and it looks like crap compared to iTMS.

MusicMatch

I don't recall slashdot mentioning this service. Downloads are $.99 and it seems comparable to what I know iTunes has. They also have nice commercial-free radio stations that let you skip songs you don't like.

I can download MusicMatch Jukebox for free, and it encodes to MP3.

Isn't that adware? If not, doesn't it lock up after a couple dozen encodes, forcing users to upgrade to the "Plus" version? I haven't used MusicMatch Jukebox, so I'm just parroting the restrictions that have come with some other MP3 encoding programs. And why does the documentation call 128 kbps "CD quality"?

Mac users get iTunes for free, and it encodes to MP3.

The iTunes MP3 encoder is not free(beer) but rather included in the price of Mac OS X.

There is no reason for Windows Media Player, which is also free, not to encode to MP3.

As with Apple, Microsoft could include an MP3 encoder license in the Windows XP package, but then that would increase the price it has to charge OEMs by a few U.S. dollars per copy.

MP3 is useful only for one purpose: transcoding higher-bitrate .ogg files down to a lower bitrate for use on pocket MP3 players. (Transcoding down doesn't introduce nearly as many extra artifacts as transcoding to similar bitrates.)

Whitepaper here:
http://www.musicmatch.com/info/company/press/docs/ personalization_whitepaper_021106.pdf

This is what Musicmatch MX does.
If there's a song you like you can click on the cover art in the player which will open the browser at the album's page on their webshop.

I have a Streamium MC-i200 in my garage (yeah, I spend a lot of time there). Here's the environment: Connected to the Ethernet port is a D-Link DWL-810 Ethernet-to-wireless bridge, which talks to a Netgear MR314 in my upstairs office. Also in the office is a media server, which is simply an old PC with a big hard drive. Finally, I have an old notebook that sits on my A/V tower downstairs, with a Y-cable from the stereo minijack out to an unused set of audio ins (MiniDisc, I believe). The notebook is perfect for playing Rhapsody through my main receiver.

With that out of the way, here's a quick review of the Streamium:
Good
- Ability to play MP3s from media server anywhere on your network.
- Limited Internet streaming capability. Rhapsody or something similar is needed.
- Really good sound, with decent bass thump.
- Remote control is handy when I'm working underneath the car and want to change tracks.

Bad
- Requires a special version of MusicMatch Jukebox on the "server" PC, even though I had already paid (yes, I paid) for the full version of MusicMatch. Now I have two versions on my music server. This server app must be running for the Streamium to find it and play music from the hard drive.
- Horrid navigation. My music is stored in folders, with an artist at the top level, and album folders underneath. It's a chore to page down through the alphabetized list of artists. So I play more Geoff Achison than I would like, and less of the Zombies.

Bottom Line
- While this is a good first step, $500 is far too much to pay (I evaluate this gear for my job). For that jack I'd buy a two-year-old notebook, PC speakers, and slap in a wireless card.
- Keep an eye out for a Digital Media Adapter from Linksys, which should be released soon. It, too, sits on your A/V tower, hooks into your receiver, and should have an out to the TV, so you can navigate playlists and such on the big screen.

BTW, the Wall Street Journal reviewed the Streamium last month. Yup, you gotta have a subscription.

Hope this helps.

-Ray

Music Match MX is the best. They found the correct way of providing this service. Both sound quality and pricewise. For me the sound quality is much more important though. Other than MX, I did like emusic.com but their 128 kbit Mp3's were awful for me.. I am still subscriber for them too.

Music Match MX, I think, uses MP3pro instead of Mp3. That probably explains the good quality. If you select CD quality for MX, the sound quality satisfies me. I am usually satisfied with 256kbit Mp3's minimum.

MX Gold ($3/mon) gives you something like a radio, you select an artist and listen to similar artists. You can skip songs if you want. Great for new music discovery. But MX also has a Artist on Demand feature if you buy the platinum service ($5/month). So you can only listen to songs from one or more groups. You don't get to select the songs, but you can skip to the next song if you want. Usually first songs are the popular ones.

You can create your radio stations based on artists, era, genre, and select the weighting of these. The system works great for me.

Interesting that not many /.ers seem to pay attention to the technology of this question - how to discover new music. Some companies have very interesting takes on the statistical/technological aspect to this question and beyond. There's a very interesting whitepaper at musicmatch.com -- completely aside from their MP3 jukebox software -- that talks about relations in the musical universe;

http://www.musicmatch.com/info/company/press/docs/ personalization_whitepaper_021106.pdf

You can see the results in their "Guide" at
http://www.mmguide.musicmatch.com/match/best.cgi

You can type in artists and albums and see what their "recommendation engine" comes up with.

There's no ONE way to discover new things. Nothing replaces going out and listening to new things, having friends, etc. but this is an interesting approach to augment that and to start new discussions.

Interesting that not many /.ers seem to pay attention to the technology of this question - how to discover new music. Some companies have very interesting takes on the statistical/technological aspect to this question and beyond. There's a very interesting whitepaper at musicmatch.com -- completely aside from their MP3 jukebox software -- that talks about relations in the musical universe;

http://www.musicmatch.com/info/company/press/docs/ personalization_whitepaper_021106.pdf

You can see the results in their "Guide" at
http://www.mmguide.musicmatch.com/match/best.cgi

You can type in artists and albums and see what their "recommendation engine" comes up with.

There's no ONE way to discover new things. Nothing replaces going out and listening to new things, having friends, etc. but this is an interesting approach to augment that and to start new discussions.

I'm sure there are exploitable buffer overflows in Vorbis too but as the format is so little used (relatively), hackers ain't looking for them. The day Vorbis is more popular than mp3 is the day the hackers change what they're targeting.

Much like people used to claim in days of old that certain message base formats (BBS / FTN message 'echoes') were faster than others, this is also a bit of rubbish. The format doesn't contain vulnerabilities; the players that implement the format have vulnerabilities. It is, in point of fact, perfectly feasable to assume that the same, if only slightly different vulnerability could possibly be exploited with the Ogg Vorbis format.

Unchecked buffers (read: lazy/braindead programming and poor code audits) are at fault here. MP3 is merely the current carrier.

But you're right; it is a feeble excuse to switch formats. It would be more apt to suggest that people switch to a different player, or use a different operating system, but I'm not going to do that.

Isnt a patent void when you dont try to enforce it

Is this related? Musicmatch.com offers subscription services for BMG, EMI, Universal, and Warner Brothers. This was noted on BMG's site in their news section yesterday.

As soon as you hook an 'MP3 Player' up to a quality playback system (somthing better than your PC speakers)

What makes you think that my sound card isn't plugged into a medium-high-end receiver and speakers?

it become obvious that it's 'way worse' not 'way better.'

NO. Tests performed by r3mix show that 192 kbps LAME encoded audio is transparent to the human ear. Your concept of "mp3" seems to be stuck at "128 kbps encoded with MusicTrash Jukebox".

lossy:

Conversion of the original analog sounds into 44.1 kHz stereo 16-bit linear PCM is itself lossy. Even conversion into 2.8 MHz stereo 1-bit PCM (Sony Super Audio CD) is lossy. It's a matter of how much loss you are willing to accept. For instance, the median *NSYNC fan wouldn't care if her copy of her favorite song was 64 kbps mono MP3.

they don't use this utility they will need to re-create (re-copy) their music CDs into their music library on their PC. Find out more information about this process at www.microsoft.com/ "You can also choose to turn off copy protection when you create your music collection, which can be done easily in any version of [WMP7.x or later]."

If you're lazy and use MS products just because they're already there, you're likely to keep running into this problem.

For $1500 bucks?? Dude.. you could have the same system on a PC for half the price--and more disk space!

Step1. Buy decent PC speakers like Creative DT's
Step2. Get a remote control for your PC
Step3. Use decent software like MusicMatch
DONE

Who do these scam arist marketers think they're fooling by slapping a PC inside a pretty box??

I'd much rather have a wireless network connected device capable of streaming the music off of my home machine and various other places on the net based off of my listening preferences. The thing I like about the radio is its ability to introduce me to new music. The thing I hate about the radio is its complete inability to know my preferences. Freeamp is a step in the right direction, but I still haven't managed to get any decent recommendations from it. Music Match makes an attempt as well, but their interface is practically unusable to me. And neither recommendation system is in the form of a net-enabled portable unit yet. *sigh*

Yes. MusicMatch Jukebox. It's ugly nagware, but it works.

If you haven't already done so, I suggest you invest in Musicmatch Jukebox and a fast CD/DVD-ROM drive like this Sony. It encodes at speeds up to 20x on a Duron 850 - a regular CD is mp3-fied in 3 minutes.

On a Windows box, you run a program to rip your CDs into MP3s. If you want to burn a CD, you use a program to convert them to WAVs, then you burn the WAVs to CDs.

Or you use MusicMatch Jukebox, which rips, does CDDB lookups, catalogs, organizes, plays, converts, and burns to data (mp3) or audio CD, all in one convenient interface. Or any one of at least a half dozen other Windows programs that can do what iTunes does.

Hell, even Easy CD Creator 4 can burn an audio CD from mp3s (automatic conversion to .wav).

iTunes is pretty, though. I'll give you that.

Jenova_Six

It does work successfully on Roxio 5 but it can also be done with Musicmatch Jukebox.

Both programs tend to be a bit finicky with which MP3's they work successfully with though.

Precisely.

It's not WinXP we're actually discussing here, but Windows Media Player 8 (which will, however, be a part of WinXP.) However, it is a replaceable component.

WMP8 won't allow you to rip at anything other than 56Kbps for MP3s. 56KBps is ideal for Net streaming, which will probably be the last bastion of the MP3 format. Ogg Vorbis, WMA and the other competitors will oust MP3 eventually - but WMA's a pig to stream, and you can do Shoutcast from an ordinary web server.

And besides, why does Microsoft do this sort of thing? Legal problems. If they were to integrate a MP3 encoder that does the full range of functions, they could be seen to be killing off their competitors, and people would be complaining about it on Slashdot. On the other hand if they *didn't* integrate an MP3 encoder, they could be seen to be forcing people to use WMA - and people would be complaining about it on Slashdot. They can't win.

Who uses WMP for ripping under Windows anyway? No-one. I use, for example, the wonderful (and open source) CDex. Also, MusicMatch Jukebox is a good point-and-click package for the intelligent newbie (it can do VBR, among other things.) Either are probably used a lot more than WMP, or Creative PlayCenter, or RealJukebox - all of which are bloated, awful software.

WinXP hasn't crippled either package as far as I can see - these "problems" probably come from a missing (unincluded) wnaspi32.dll. NT series operating systems have never included this file by default, as it is not generally needed - except for back compatibility. It does, however, come with Win9x.

Can you say FUD? I knew you could.

musicmatch.com

I took a look at the article about Metallica's new Napster Proof CD. I have to say Metallica is really trying to make everybody pissed at them, aren't they? I mean, a 19 minute interview, and 55 minute song, at 128k encoding coming out to 56MB+. First things first, I have friends who made a Dance Dance Revolution (a great game for those who don't know about it) mega-mix, with all the songs together, totaling in at 109MB. While I was at school with my 10MBit ethernet connection, we saw several people, even one with a 56k modem attempting to download this massive file, so if people really want Metallica's song, they'll download it, or encode it at 96k to cut down the file size. Another thing that could easily be done, and I've done this to MP3's that some company has added their own stuff into it to identify where you got the MP3 from, you can convert the damn MP3 to wave, using many programs, including Music Match Jukebox, then use a wave editor, including the sound recorder that comes with windows, to edit it. If I had a copy of the CD, and wanted to make sure that people could get the song easily, I'd just allow 10 simultaneous downloads on napster, split the 56MB file into 10 5.6MB sections, and let people download the parts, and tell them how to put it back together if they wanted, or they could leave it seperated. Metallica is really going to screw themselves with this one. Let's see, no radio play, no music video, and no chance for concert play. Wow, who's really gonna care about a song like that when a lot of people who buy CD's, only buy them for a few songs. Long live the MP3 Revolution

Uum, isn't that the whole point of MP3, the internet and Napster/Gnutella??? You just killed your own argument because this artist (along with all the other unknowns who can't get a contract with a major label) CAN have immense distribution using the above tools -- possibly even better than Metallica.

I don't really like Metallica or Dr. Dre and never have, but I have found (through very casual use) almost a half dozen unknown artists that I know for a fact don't have contracts with major labels -- they're unknowns. I found them on MP3.com and they were there (I assume) for the exposure that MP3's and the internet brings.

I also have to weigh in on the argument that downloading an album's songs through Napster is easier than encoding MP3's from your own CD: In reality this is far from the truth. Check out MusicMatch.com -- I download their Jukebox software and I can encode my own MP3's from my CD's. OK, but it's really slow (records only as fast as the CD would normally play which means about 1 hour recording per CD). Forget that, go to Napster! I go to Napster and after doing searches for days on different artists, only 10-20% of the songs are downloadable (I'm on a T1)! After several days, I only have maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of each CD I wanted to record in my library. I go back to MusicMatch.com and discover -- gee, if I pay $29.99 ($39.99 for the shipped, boxed version with some hardware extras for stereo hookup) I can download their Jukebox Deluxe which, among other things, allows you to record CD songs at up to 5x normal speed. I get that and within 10 minutes I'm recording my CD's songs ... but now at a rate of about 10-15 minutes per CD ... and it's automated (just leave it alone and continue surfing the web, reading e-mail, and other stuff until it spits out the CD).

The average speedup was about 3.5x faster than before. And ... I got all my songs in MP3 format in an organized way ... many of them were smaller than the ones I downloaded through Napster (same MP3 quality like 128, 192, etc.), so I just ended up tossing the few I was able to download in Napster anyway.

I guess the final point of this story is that the artists need to realize that this is here to stay and they need to start offering their songs via MP3 direct to their fans (at a substantially reduced price/song like maybe $0.50/song). If they don't they just look like dinosaurs and if they attack Napster/MP3.com and their own fans, they just look like a**holes.

Uum, isn't that the whole point of MP3, the internet and Napster/Gnutella??? You just killed your own argument because this artist (along with all the other unknowns who can't get a contract with a major label) CAN have immense distribution using the above tools -- possibly even better than Metallica.

I don't really like Metallica or Dr. Dre and never have, but I have found (through very casual use) almost a half dozen unknown artists that I know for a fact don't have contracts with major labels -- they're unknowns. I found them on MP3.com and they were there (I assume) for the exposure that MP3's and the internet brings.

I also have to weigh in on the argument that downloading an album's songs through Napster is easier than encoding MP3's from your own CD: In reality this is far from the truth. Check out MusicMatch.com -- I download their Jukebox software and I can encode my own MP3's from my CD's. OK, but it's really slow (records only as fast as the CD would normally play which means about 1 hour recording per CD). Forget that, go to Napster! I go to Napster and after doing searches for days on different artists, only 10-20% of the songs are downloadable (I'm on a T1)! After several days, I only have maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of each CD I wanted to record in my library. I go back to MusicMatch.com and discover -- gee, if I pay $29.99 ($39.99 for the shipped, boxed version with some hardware extras for stereo hookup) I can download their Jukebox Deluxe which, among other things, allows you to record CD songs at up to 5x normal speed. I get that and within 10 minutes I'm recording my CD's songs ... but now at a rate of about 10-15 minutes per CD ... and it's automated (just leave it alone and continue surfing the web, reading e-mail, and other stuff until it spits out the CD).

The average speedup was about 3.5x faster than before. And ... I got all my songs in MP3 format in an organized way ... many of them were smaller than the ones I downloaded through Napster (same MP3 quality like 128, 192, etc.), so I just ended up tossing the few I was able to download in Napster anyway.

I guess the final point of this story is that the artists need to realize that this is here to stay and they need to start offering their songs via MP3 direct to their fans (at a substantially reduced price/song like maybe $0.50/song). If they don't they just look like dinosaurs and if they attack Napster/MP3.com and their own fans, they just look like a**holes.

Uum, isn't that the whole point of MP3, the internet and Napster/Gnutella??? You just killed your own argument because this artist (along with all the other unknowns who can't get a contract with a major label) CAN have immense distribution using the above tools -- possibly even better than Metallica.

I don't really like Metallica or Dr. Dre and never have, but I have found (through very casual use) almost a half dozen unknown artists that I know for a fact don't have contracts with major labels -- they're unknowns. I found them on MP3.com and they were there (I assume) for the exposure that MP3's and the internet brings.

I also have to weigh in on the argument that downloading an album's songs through Napster is easier than encoding MP3's from your own CD: In reality this is far from the truth. Check out MusicMatch.com -- I download their Jukebox software and I can encode my own MP3's from my CD's. OK, but it's really slow (records only as fast as the CD would normally play which means about 1 hour recording per CD). Forget that, go to Napster! I go to Napster and after doing searches for days on different artists, only 10-20% of the songs are downloadable (I'm on a T1)! After several days, I only have maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of each CD I wanted to record in my library. I go back to MusicMatch.com and discover -- gee, if I pay $29.99 ($39.99 for the shipped, boxed version with some hardware extras for stereo hookup) I can download their Jukebox Deluxe which, among other things, allows you to record CD songs at up to 5x normal speed. I get that and within 10 minutes I'm recording my CD's songs ... but now at a rate of about 10-15 minutes per CD ... and it's automated (just leave it alone and continue surfing the web, reading e-mail, and other stuff until it spits out the CD).

The average speedup was about 3.5x faster than before. And ... I got all my songs in MP3 format in an organized way ... many of them were smaller than the ones I downloaded through Napster (same MP3 quality like 128, 192, etc.), so I just ended up tossing the few I was able to download in Napster anyway.

I guess the final point of this story is that the artists need to realize that this is here to stay and they need to start offering their songs via MP3 direct to their fans (at a substantially reduced price/song like maybe $0.50/song). If they don't they just look like dinosaurs and if they attack Napster/MP3.com and their own fans, they just look like a**holes.

There are plenty of places to get hosted besides mp3.com. I almost started a service myself, but didn't have the bandwidth to do so, or the resources to ship band CDs. However, there are lots of places like mp3.com which will host your music and some will sell cds.

CD Now is starting a program much like mp3.com set to open shortly.
CDuctive hosts indie artists.
eMusic may be able to help you, but they're pretty big.
Live365 will host 365mb worth of mp3s (in 56kbps encoding) and stream them 24/7 for you. Who says it can't be your own stuff..
Cruch Music is for British dance/techno musicians
Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA) will definetly sign you, for a slight fee, but they can sell your music per track.
MusicMatch might sign you
WorldWideBands for those musicians around the globe.

For more info, check out a backissue of WIRED magazine, entitled "I Want My MP3". Right now it's a musicians market on the net.

This can be viewed two ways: one, a major international organization is making a step in a productive manner that could, hopefully, get other countries to move in that direction, and two, they made a law to charge you for something that was already free. To my knowledge, it has always been free to rip music from CDs for your personal use, granted that you own the CD as well. There is a whole website devoted to mp3s that promotes a product, MusicMatch, that is available at www.download.com.