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Online Music Stores Compared
prostoalex writes "DesignTechnica has a comparison of the leading online music stores. With the variety of services available they only concentrated on several top ones. Conclusion? 'If you simply want to download music from the charts, then Yahoo and Wal-Mart are your cheapest options. For your MP3 player, there are several options, with Yahoo the best of all. If you're an iPod owner... then you're stuck with iTunes.'"
"If you're an iPod owner... then you're stuck with iTunes."
That's bullshit. I have an iPod, and only a tiny fraction of my music has come from iTunes. I would think by now that everyone would be aware that the iPod is very capable of playing mp3s, regardless of where you got them from.
The review contradicts itself and contains factual errors.
eMusic allows MP3 downloads but iPod owners have to use iTunes?
No. You can use eMusic downloads on your iPod too.
iTunes downloads with fairplay are only playable in iTunes and on iPods?
No. iTunes downloads with fairplay are playable in any application that supports QuickTime. There's a very simple api for extracting the decompressed audio data from those files. The user must authenticate with the music store before the files can be decrypted, but that's it.
Been fairly pleased with Emusic. High-bitrate mp3s for 0,25USD. Yes it's a monthly subscription and they don't have mainstream crap, but other than that they're great. Did I say that they offer mp3s? And then there's allofmp3. 0,02USD/1Mb. Using a loophole in russian copyright legislation. Been operating for years.
"Democracy is three wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner."
For long, the best music store for me has been AllOfMp3
.WAV music, unencumbered by DRM, quite cheap and easly. (Oh and they have a damn lot of music).
I can buy lossless formated music, ogg or even raw
And also, there are a number of different ways to pay (in case you do not trust Russian stores):
-Credit Card
-Pay Pal
-Xrost
-Bank Transfer
-WebMoney
Cool uh?
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
eMusic does NOT require you to download their "music manager" (At least it didn't 2 weeks ago), though it is necessary if you want to download an album at a time instead of track by track. Another thing the reviewer didn't mention is that members get one free track every day for downloading their IE toolbar, and that it's the only service of the bunch that has no DRM whatsoever. As you might imagine, I'm a satisfied customer.
I don't understand the frustrating part. The author tries to make an issue of having to convert iTunes songs into mp3 or WMA. But why would you want to? iTunes also plays songs bought from the iTunes Music store.
The only possible reason to do the unweildy conversion is to get rid of DRM. But the author is willing to accept DRM from other stores and, IMO, worse conditions:
Napster You don't own the music, however, and if you cancel your subscription, all the tracks you've downloaded disappear.
Looks like once you start with Napster, you're also stuck with Napster.
Yahoo However, as with other subscription services, you only have access to the music as long as you maintain your subscription.
Same with Yahoo.
Maybe the full disclosure should be placed at the beginning of the article?
I have an iPod and use http://www.allofmp3.com/ ... much cheaper than any of the music stores reviewed in this article. 10 cents a track, no subscription, choice between many codecs.
Nice article, but it seemed to be stacked in favour of the larger players, iTunes, MSN and eMusic. If the world of online music was governed by five or so players it would be a dire world! Oh wait...it's dominated by the big four record companies...forgot about them! ;)
Currently, I'm using http://www.karmadownload.com/ as it seems the most geek friendly (and legit) site going at the moment. High quality MP3, no DRM, plus they support the independent artists. The only bummer is the Flash they use. Oh well, can't win them all.
" ... Maybe I'm mistaken, but isn't Fair Play a Microsoft thing, you know that little badge that shows up on their mp3 players and cdroms? Isn't Fair Play the CD DRM that Apple refuses to support? ..."
.m4a (everyone), and FairPlay encoded AAC with the .m4p extension (iTunes, the iTMS, and iPods only).
Umm, yeah, sort of, but not quite, exactly.
Microsoft's Fair Play program is a promotional tool used in some countries. It's a registered trademark of Microsoft, and basically gives sales staff prizes for selling software. For example, here's a link for those of you who speak Russian:
http://www.microsoft.com/rus/fairplay/
If you don't speak Russian, well, note the URL.
Apple's FairPlay is a DRM encoding/decoding scheme for music files. It's added onto Advanced Audio Codec format audio (which is not, as you hear often, a proprietary Apple format and works fine in many players) to create a file in the encoded format (which is proprietary).
So it's Microsoft Fair Play (TM) versus Apple FairPlay (TM). And it's AAC with the
The most annoying thing I find is that it's not even true.
.zip archives and you can re-download stuff as much as you like if you have an active subscription, the only thing I don't like about it is the 'subscription' model rather than the more traditional pay-per-song model).
iTunes of course is software that Apple provide that allows you to upload to your iPod (the sort of software you'd expect any MP3 player vendor to provide with their hardware), and there are 3rd party utilities - both commercial and free - that also offer this functionality.
This is distinct from the iTunes Music Store (iTMS) which was added after iTunes and iPod's had already been available for some time, but is a feature of the software (for logical reasons, as it would be much less user friendly if it had a completely separate application window).
You can of course use music from stores with the iPod. I buy from the iTMS, but I also buy MP3's from the outstanding Emusic all the time (I like the service as you get plain MP3's so there is no messing about with keys or authorisation, and you can entire albums as single
The 'problem' is that the iTunes Music Store only supports iTunes, which only (officially) supports the iPod (though unoffically it's possible to use it with a number of devices using 3rd party plug-ins), NOT that the iPod is somehow 'locked in' to the iTMS, which it isn't.
This is a premise that a 10 year old should be able to grasp, but is apparently way above the heads of Chris Nickson, the editors at Designtechnica, ScuttleMonkey and prostoalex.
According to this article http://www.museekster.com/allofmp3faq.htm AllOfMP3 is operating legallly in Russia. Near the bottom of the page, it says Moscow police investigated them, and prosecutirs found nothing wrong.
Love,
Jay and Silent Bob
Vertically Integrated? What the fuck does that mean?
It means you need to pay more attention to corporate terminology. Veritical Integration refers to the practice of aligning business units (or in this case software units) in such a way as to allow them to interoperate freely and easily. Sometimes that's a bad situation with Windows vertically integrated with Internet Explorer and MS Office.
In this case, however, it's a good thing. The iTunes software integrates from the iPod and CD/Ripping level to a well designed library that's been integrated with a Music Store, CD Burner, Hi-Fidelity music player, and Movie Player. (The latter is currently limited to music videos and trailers.) What this means is that you can use one easy to use application to handle all your music needs. The alternative is to download separate software packages to load the MP3 player, rip CDs, play music, play videos, burn CDs, and purchase online music. Such was the market before the arrival of iTunes.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I call bunk. Here is the US Code:
d e17/usc_sec_17_00000602----000-.html
http://assembler.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/usco
Pay particular attention to a), 2.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
I'm a big fan of Magnatune. There is some excellent music on their site. All of the 128k MP3s are available under a Creative Commons license. They have FLAC/OGG/AAC/WAV/VBR MP3s available for those who pay for the CDs. You can license all of music at very reasonable prices for commercial use. They even *encourage* you to share your downloaded CDs with friends. You can choose how much you want to pay for all of the music, but since 50% of the money goes directly to the artist; it makes it more worthwhile to pay a reasonable amount for the music (I pay what I'd pay for a CD in a store, since it's lossless FLAC files that I download).
http://magnatune.com/info/give/
It is ILLEGAL to use allofmp3.com from the United States, it is probably illegal from most other countries as well. As it is it's only specifically LEGAL in Russia, they just have a loop hole that allows them to put the burden of illegally using their site on the customer.
Regaurdless of this. Think about it. You aren't helping anyone by using this service aside from the guys in russia. The artist will NEVER see ANY of the MONEY you give them.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
Burn the CD, then it's yours forever, just as if you bought it from the store. RIP them from that burned CD, and the DRM is stripped. How is this escaping people's thoughts still?
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin