This is *NOT* a Pay Per Post or ReviewMe.com ad. I'm doing it of my own free will in part because I don't believe in blogging about something when wads of cold, hard cash are involved.
I tried Amazon MP3 last night.
For those that haven't heard, that's Amazon.com's new DRM-free music download service. The prices vary, but you can download a song for under a dollar or an album for (on average) $7.99 and download it as a crystal-clear 256kbps mp3 file (or set thereof, if you download an album).
The significance of the songs being DRM-free is that you can take the file and burn it to a CD, copy it, put it on mp3 players. Anything. You could even put them on file-sharing services. BUT DON'T or we'll likely lose this wonderful tool we've got.
Now, I'm one of those holdouts that still prefer buying CD's to downloading my music off of the web. In fact, before this the closest I'd ever come to buying music online was ordering a CD off of Amazon. So needless to say, I was new to this...
Anyways, last night I wanted to download Feel Good Inc. from Gorillaz. It got stuck in my head, long story. Anyway, I hopped on the site, got to the page for the album it was on easily, and clicked the "Buy MP3" button next to the song.
Now, the next steps may not be exact, but you'll get the idea.
I was prompted to download and install a small application that would set up the mp3 file and automatically put it in your iTunes or Windows Media Player library. So I did.
Next page I got was the download of the song. It doesn't send you the mp3 file itself, but a different file. From that file, the program I'd just installed placed the mp3 file in my My Music folder in a folder named Amazon MP3. The program then deleted the file that was originally downloaded, leaving just the mp3.
I opened Media Player and there it was in my library, just like it said it would be.
When I connected my Zune, I had to manually add the song to it's library. No shocker really, the Zune software in it's current design sucks. Whenever I rip a CD in Windows Media Player I have to do the same thing. Can't blame Amazon for that.
All in all, I was happy with the experience. So much so that I might just finally stop buying CD's and download my music.
2 comments:
I dig it. I have always been annoyed that if I BOUGHT a song, I could still be limited to how I chose to use it.
I also have a bad case of the you-know-whats about CD's which pop up their own players so you can't rip their music to your hard drive and use it the way you want.
You can get around the CD pop-ups rather easily. On any version of Windows before Vista you can hold down shift when you put in a CD to prevent auto-play. Even if it comes up, you can close it and still do all that stuff in WMP (or whatever you use) manually.
But yea, I agree with ya 100 percent.
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