Dyyryath
07-25-2003, 12:50 AM
When I first started hearing about places where you could purchase music online in a purely electronic form, I thought, "Damn, that sounds great!" I'm all about instant gratification and I never use the physical medium beyond using it to create electronic versions anyway. In the past, however, I always found something I didn't like about the various online purchasing sites.
Recently, Apple's iTunes Music Store (http://www.apple.com/music/store/) has gotten a lot of press. It's for Apple users only, though, so I had little interest in it. While I have a couple of warm, fuzzy feelings about the new G5s, they aren't nearly strong enough to push me into actually buying an Apple computer.
Now a new site has popped up which works much like Apple's: http://www.buymusic.com. I read about it somewhere the day it went live and thought, "That's nice." Last night, though, I got a little bored and stumbled across another article about it somewhere else. "Heh, maybe I'll kill a few minutes looking at it", I thought.
The first thing you need to know is: It's for Windows/Internet Explorer/Windows Media Player 9 only. As most of you know, I'm a Linux guy, but I've got a great little app called VMWare (http://www.vmware.com) that I use to run Windows under Linux. So, I fired it up, loaded my Windows XP machine (the virtual one, as it were), and proceeded to poke around the site a little.
I immediately discovered that all the songs you can purchase (whether as singles or as a complete album) come in .wmv format (Windows Media Player), and include DRM (Digital Rights Management) restrictions. These restrictions vary from file to file, depending on which company owns the rights to the track(s) in question. Essentially, these restrictions can be broken down into three different areas: (a) how many different computers you can listen to the file on, (b) how many times you can download the track to a mobile media player, and (c) how many times you can burn the tracks to an audio CD. Some are more restrictive than others, but for my purposes, all I cared about was (c). If I could burn the tracks to an audio CD, then I was satisfied (for reasons that will soon be apparent). Fortunately, every file I looked at on the service allowed this at least once.
The next thing that I learned is that the selection of tracks available is limited. If you are looking for new pop, hip hop, or country music, you'll probably be just fine. If you're looking for older or more unusual stuff, it becomes a little more difficult. I started out looking for stuff by The Cars. Couldn't find anything. Then I looked for stuff by a couple of other 80s bands. I found some things, couldn't find others. I was about to give up when I noticed the 'search by genre' button. Using it I found I was able to browse what was available rather than having to guess by searching. In a few minutes, I'd found an old album by Al Hirt that I wanted, a new album by t.A.T.u. that sounded pretty good (did I mention you can listen to 30 second clips of every song available?), and a Greatest Hits album of Jerry Lee Lewis' music that I just had to have.
I paid for all three (just under $30 altogether) using a credit card and downloaded them to my computer. After listening to them some, I decided to burn each one to a CD. This was absolutely painless. Put the CD in, select the files, click 'Copy' and away you go.
Now, earlier I was explaining that I didn't really have any use for physical versions of music, so why was I burning CDs? So I could turn right around and rip them to .ogg files under Linux. ;)
Of course, you could just as easily rip them to MP3s under Windows. Once you have the music in CD Audio format, you can do anything with it that you would normally do with an audio CD. Play it in your car, in your home stereo, in your computer's CD-ROM, or rip it to another compressed music format.
Each of these albums is now a part of the vast collection of MP3s and OGGs that live downstairs on my primary file server (about 80gb and counting). They are devoid of DRM and work flawlessly. I'm sure that the people behind buymusic.com (and especially the RIAA) aren't going to like this, but I'm not sharing them, so they can just piss off. I paid for these tracks and I'm not going to listen to them until the first time I need to reformat my box with a clean OS (which would make your downloaded licenses useless rendering the tracks inaccessible). The only reason I even considered buying these albums was because I was relatively sure that I'd be able to turn them into something more palatable than the restricted .wmv format they came in. It seemed like a risk worth taking just to see how it worked out, and I can now happily say that it worked out just fine. :thumbs:
I guess the whole point of this post is to let my fellow Free-DC buddies know that if you are interested in music, and have been wondering whether there was anything to be gained by using a service like this, then it might be worth your time to give this one a try. The DRM stuff is annoying, but pretty easy to work around, and with that out of the way, the rest of it is really a pretty painless (and immediate) way to purchase music. :thumbs:
Recently, Apple's iTunes Music Store (http://www.apple.com/music/store/) has gotten a lot of press. It's for Apple users only, though, so I had little interest in it. While I have a couple of warm, fuzzy feelings about the new G5s, they aren't nearly strong enough to push me into actually buying an Apple computer.
Now a new site has popped up which works much like Apple's: http://www.buymusic.com. I read about it somewhere the day it went live and thought, "That's nice." Last night, though, I got a little bored and stumbled across another article about it somewhere else. "Heh, maybe I'll kill a few minutes looking at it", I thought.
The first thing you need to know is: It's for Windows/Internet Explorer/Windows Media Player 9 only. As most of you know, I'm a Linux guy, but I've got a great little app called VMWare (http://www.vmware.com) that I use to run Windows under Linux. So, I fired it up, loaded my Windows XP machine (the virtual one, as it were), and proceeded to poke around the site a little.
I immediately discovered that all the songs you can purchase (whether as singles or as a complete album) come in .wmv format (Windows Media Player), and include DRM (Digital Rights Management) restrictions. These restrictions vary from file to file, depending on which company owns the rights to the track(s) in question. Essentially, these restrictions can be broken down into three different areas: (a) how many different computers you can listen to the file on, (b) how many times you can download the track to a mobile media player, and (c) how many times you can burn the tracks to an audio CD. Some are more restrictive than others, but for my purposes, all I cared about was (c). If I could burn the tracks to an audio CD, then I was satisfied (for reasons that will soon be apparent). Fortunately, every file I looked at on the service allowed this at least once.
The next thing that I learned is that the selection of tracks available is limited. If you are looking for new pop, hip hop, or country music, you'll probably be just fine. If you're looking for older or more unusual stuff, it becomes a little more difficult. I started out looking for stuff by The Cars. Couldn't find anything. Then I looked for stuff by a couple of other 80s bands. I found some things, couldn't find others. I was about to give up when I noticed the 'search by genre' button. Using it I found I was able to browse what was available rather than having to guess by searching. In a few minutes, I'd found an old album by Al Hirt that I wanted, a new album by t.A.T.u. that sounded pretty good (did I mention you can listen to 30 second clips of every song available?), and a Greatest Hits album of Jerry Lee Lewis' music that I just had to have.
I paid for all three (just under $30 altogether) using a credit card and downloaded them to my computer. After listening to them some, I decided to burn each one to a CD. This was absolutely painless. Put the CD in, select the files, click 'Copy' and away you go.
Now, earlier I was explaining that I didn't really have any use for physical versions of music, so why was I burning CDs? So I could turn right around and rip them to .ogg files under Linux. ;)
Of course, you could just as easily rip them to MP3s under Windows. Once you have the music in CD Audio format, you can do anything with it that you would normally do with an audio CD. Play it in your car, in your home stereo, in your computer's CD-ROM, or rip it to another compressed music format.
Each of these albums is now a part of the vast collection of MP3s and OGGs that live downstairs on my primary file server (about 80gb and counting). They are devoid of DRM and work flawlessly. I'm sure that the people behind buymusic.com (and especially the RIAA) aren't going to like this, but I'm not sharing them, so they can just piss off. I paid for these tracks and I'm not going to listen to them until the first time I need to reformat my box with a clean OS (which would make your downloaded licenses useless rendering the tracks inaccessible). The only reason I even considered buying these albums was because I was relatively sure that I'd be able to turn them into something more palatable than the restricted .wmv format they came in. It seemed like a risk worth taking just to see how it worked out, and I can now happily say that it worked out just fine. :thumbs:
I guess the whole point of this post is to let my fellow Free-DC buddies know that if you are interested in music, and have been wondering whether there was anything to be gained by using a service like this, then it might be worth your time to give this one a try. The DRM stuff is annoying, but pretty easy to work around, and with that out of the way, the rest of it is really a pretty painless (and immediate) way to purchase music. :thumbs: