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Burn A Song For 99 Cents
tusixoh writes "CNN is running an article about an online music company, Listen.com, who has signed deals with Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group allowing users to burn songs from both companies' catalogs (more than 75,000 available tracks) on Listen's Rhapsody music subscription service for 99 cents per track. Until now, Rhapsody had primarily offered only streamed music to subscribers from all of the world's largest record labels as well as several independent labels." The upside of this, of course, is that it won't be necessary to pay for songs that are just "album filler".
I have two problems with this new service:
Their client, Rhapsody, is Windows only, and you can only burn
10 songs per month. Nice try, but lame.
Actually, there is something that pretty much does. eMusic has a massive list of music you can grab. They don't have all of the major artists on tap, but they have a lot of good music there from small/indie artists. 10$ or 15$ a month for unlimited completely legal mp3's (and no I don't work for them, just happy with the service). I have been using it for about 2 months now and it has worked great for me. I have downloaded around 10 gigs of mp3's so far and have listened to a lot of music I doubt I would have heard otherwise.
EMusic, for that same price, lets you download fully unlocked standard MP3 files.
$9.95 a month gets you unlimited downloads - not an additional 99 cents per song. You can burn 'em and do anything you want with 'em.
Emusic a very underrated site, now that their big-advertising VC stuff has gone. Really wonderful. (NO I'm not affiliated.)
I believe that thier 10 tracks a month is only refering to their subscription service which is $9.95 a month. This new service would be pay as you go $0.99 per track. Also if you dig a bit deeper on thier site you'll find it's not even available yet.
According to their website, these guys are distributing music from .MP3 format -- they use lossy compression, which devastates the quality of the audio.
If you want to see how bad the loss is, load up CoolEdit or Audacity and view your mp3s under "Spectrum View" with a range up to 22050 -- I promise that just everything above 16000 will be missing and black, though the original CD audio will have all that quality intact. It's what gives MP3s their "flat" sound on any decent equipment.
I know CDNow uses the original data for their custom CDs, so just buy it from them.
I will never pay a single dime for crippled formats.
314-15-9265
Read the FAQs. This is horrible. You can't even burn one average-sized album onto a CD. Not to mention the proprietary CD burning component isn't available yet.
if and when Palladium and trusted security prevents the average non-techie home Windows user from burning his or her own CDs
And that's a big if, to which the answer is "probably not." Microsoft has repeatedly stated that Palladium will not interfere with any applications that don't know anything about Palladium, such as CDex or CDRDAO. The only way your scenario will play out is if a future version of Windows places CD audio extraction and recording into a Palladium vault, which I don't see as likely to happen given the big stink that users raised about CD writing software not working with Windows XP. Microsoft doesn't want another black eye.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Wrong!
There's no information on Listen's site about Rhapsody 2.0, which will feature burning. The FAQ you list applies to their current service, specifically the Naxos Classical subscription.
The new service will have no DRM, and you will be able to buy as many tracks as you want at 99 cents each. The interesting thing is that they are going to stream PCM audio directly to the burner. So, DRM won't be the issue, buffer underruns will be when their streaming servers can't keep up with your CD player!
Maybe they'll apologize on the day the former Napster founders apologize for developing a company devoted to accomodating copyright infringement. Or maybe when they get a signed apology from the top 10000 p2p music pirates, they'll apologize to Apple. Give me a break. People keep saying they'll stop trading illegal copies when they have the option to pay for them online. Now that the day has come, they're making up stupid excuses to continue not paying.
Vote for Pedro
1) the FAQ is OLD. We're launching on Monday with what we call "a la carte" CD burning. This means you can burn as many CDs as you want. No monthly restrictions, no restrictions at all.
2) The audio format on the CD is regular redbook audio. No DRMs, no restrictions. They're yours after you pay the $.99
3) If you want to check out Rhapsody without paying, just register and download it if you want to see the artist list. You can listen to 30 second clips and a selection of radio stations without paying us.
(remember that this is not released yet. wait 'til next week. ok, back to QA...gotta burn me some CDs ;)
Uh...
If you read the fine print, only WINDOWS users are allowed the priviledge of paying for Listen.com's 'service', so the 'day has come' for them I guess (any Windows users want to comment). Fact is, I don't download copywritten material I don't already own, but even if I wanted to buy Listen.com's music, I can't.
"That naive cube! How long must I suffer this!" --Sheldon J. Plankton
While I don't think this is a good idea (CDs are over priced, and they CD Burning option isn't even available yet on this site) I do think they're heading in the right direction.
Take into consideration that most people pay a flat rate for thier bandwidth and don't use all of thier available bandwidth every month. Also, they are also paying for bandwidth.
Also consider that you don't have to pay for gas to goto the record store, and with blank CDs going gor about 30 cents now, there's the money you would have spent in gas. And you don't even have to leave the house! Nor do you have to wait for the CD to be delivered.
I could see this idea working if they got rid of all the DRM crap and let people download plain old high quality MP3s.
I like the concept of EMusic a lot - in fact, I was very tempted, until I noticed they only provide 128kbps MP3s.
Maybe I'm being pedantic (maybe I'm just lucky to have good ears), but 128k mp3 is _not_ "CD Quality". In fact, sometimes its not even listenable (to me - if I really want to hear something, I want to hear all of it, properly - not "most of it under 17khz, and an aliased mush on the top")
So its OK as a 'preview' service, but you're still going to have to fork out for a CD if you want quality versions of the music you like - and I think thats the way EMusic intended it.
You acknowledge that Listen may issue upgraded versions ... from time to time, and may automatically electronically upgrade the version of the Application that you are using on your computer. You consent to such automatic upgrading, and agree that this Agreement (as amended from time to time) will govern all such upgraded versions.
In effect, you agree at the time of initial installation of the software to all future installations of software from them. You are also bound to any and all future EULAs by agreeing to the first one, as borne out by:
13. Modification
Listen may modify this Agreement at any time in our sole discretion. A change of terms notice will be posted at the top of this Agreement located at [URL nuked], and we may also notify you by email in some instances.
Nice. They automatcially update your EULA, but reserve the right to not directly inform you about it -- it's up to you to periodically check in.
They might be getting some of the content distribution stuff right, but they're lousy on customer service ... and rights.
Hehehe, you must not watch much DVD pornography, then :) It's been said time and again -- porn always seems to drive technology. Lots of adult DVDs these days have multiple camera angles. Sometimes they do a crap job (i.e. to keep one "angle" you have to switch angles around as each stream has edits in them where they switch to different cameras), but sometimes they do pretty well with it.
I don't know if I'd want a pornography director to bother with multilingual audio and subtitling, though. Pornography with 5.1 audio? "Man, oh, man, it sounds like she's right there in your living room, er, moaning and stuff!"
Read my stuff.
Uhh, did everyone miss the fact that there's an additional charge of $9.95 for every month? 10 tracks for just under $10 doesn't sound so bad, but it actually costs me at least $19.85 for those 10 tracks. It costs me more than that, actually, if I don't find those 10 tracks I like within a single month. So this is just like Pressplay, where you have to subscribe to their service (which lets you listen to the music) before they will even sell you anything.
Methinks this is crap. 99 cents sounded good until I read about the required subscription.
This is not the greatest sig in the world, no. This is just a tribute.
This still isn't good enough. Why? Oh, god, let me count the ways.
In conclusion, I'm sticking with the indies. Go, baby, go!
12. Is Rhapsody available outside the U.S.? Due to licensing restrictions, Rhapsody's on-demand music subscription service is available to U.S. residents only. However, anyone, regardless of his or her geographic location, can take advantage of our free radio stations, which feature professionally programmed stations. We are working on expanding our subscription service outside of the U.S. in the future.
Woopty Doo Basil, what does it all mean?!