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Digital Music Stores Reviewed
Kozz writes "If you've thought about trying the new Napster 2.0, or perhaps MusicMatch, or even WAL*MART music service, you really need to read this review at BBspot.com. Brian takes a break from his standard satire fare and writes a comprehensive review not only of the previously mentioned stores, but also of BuyMusic.com, eMusic, Apple iTunes, and RealOne Rhapsody. It breaks down the features of each service, the prices, restrictions, general pros and cons, and really gives you an idea of which one(s) you should try depending on your needs."
Why didn't you use iTunes? Most (all?) audible.com content is available on the iTunes Music Store and iTunes has excellent support (in my experience) for CD writers.
apple has a fairly liberal usage/rights policy with their music. but, there is an easy way to overcome this. after downloading an album, burn the album to cd, but choose to burn an audio cd. next, you'll need cdda2wav and bladeenc (or lame, not playing favorites here) easily obtainable at fink, or on any linux box. after you burn the cd, pop it in the computer. from a terminal, simply run cdda2wav dev=/dev/cdrom etc. then when it's done, run bladeenc on each file. (make a perl, bash, applescript, etc, to automate. i'm thinking of writing a cocoa wrapper for it.) you're left with 128kbit mp3's. sounds fine. so, you can use your mp3's wherever you'd like. is it something granny can do. no. is it 37337? hardly. i gotta figure that apple knows this. they can't be that stupid.
i don't know if you can do this with any other service. this alone makes iTMS a great choice. i know with any windows media format you're gonna have lots of restrictions.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Forget the 40 song limit -- it used to be 'unlimited', which in practice meant 2000 tracks a month.
At one point the download manager files were an open format, and they encouraged third party download managers...
Then they decided to encrypt the files, and to their credit released download managers for Windows, Mac and Linux at the same time.
Unfortunately all three were riddled with bugs and oversights. To this day the reliability of downloads is decidedly sub-par.
If you do use EMusic, there's a perl script available which will decrypt the files and launch wget for you -- it's far more reliable than the official download manager.
But personally I ended my subscription when the new limits were introduced... more because of their lousy approach to customer service than anything else. (They actually had the audacity to remove the message boards completely when they announced the changes).
No need to VNC - Poisoned is an OS X frontend to giFT, which can connect to the Kazaa FastTrak network.
A Minesweeper clone that doesn't suck
128kbps Listening Tests Results on HydrogenAudio:
Link
Copyright. Lets take the Beatles as an example. Apple Corps (the record label) own the Beatles tunes, the recordings of these tunes are licensed to EMI Europe for sale through out ECMA, and to Capitol Records (basically EMI again, but a legal entity in it's own right). Sony own the lyrics.
So, a record label usually owns the rights to a particular recording of a tune, the tune itself belongs to someone else and the lyrics and belong to a third party.
Now US record companies (even though they tend to have European branches, or they are owned by European labels) only have the rights to sell recordings within the US (and maybe Canada).
So when iTunes, MusicMatch, Walmart et al deal with the labels they are only licensing the rights to resell the tracks in the US. If they sell outside the US, they're breaking their license agreement. Want to know why you can't search on lyrics in stores? Because they'd need to license the lyrics from yet another company.
Why is this such a pain? Mainly because the US labels won't share with Europe, and vice versa. Each region has to show its own profit, and sharing is bad for that. The licensing and royalty rules are horribly complicated, I've spent a lot of time doing various reporting tools for music promotional sites to cope with this.
unsigned? i think you mean non-riaa-signed. there are lots and lots of non-riaa labels run by folks who sign bands because they like the music, not the sales projections.
if yr looking for non-riaa music, try:
cd baby
the associatio of inedependent record labels
riaa radar
southern records
your local college radio station
or my local college station
that should keep you busy... and the riaa labels idle.
2 1337 4 u!
That's not true -- with Wal-Mart's music downloads, you can only listen on one computer. I downloaded a song on my laptop, then when I copied it to my desktop and tried to play it there, I got this "License Acquisition" dialog box:
So it's pretty clear to me that I'm only allowed to play a song I downloaded on one PC (although I'm allowed, according to the download page, to back it up to a couple other computers, whatever they mean by that).
You can buy some music that is RIAA free. The site RIAA Radar helps you avoid paying indirectly to the RIAA.
RIAA Radar
Or you can pay to download Music with no DRM that is RIAA free from MagnaTune.
MagnaTune
Religion is the main cause of atheism.
I don't know how the slashdot crowd has slept on this one so long but there is a service called Audiolunchbox that has DRM free music available for download. It's all web based so it is platform independent and the files are available in OGG or MP3 formats (192k variable mp3 and level 6 variable OGG i do believe) and the kicker is that all the labels are independent...i hope everyone picks up on this and soon