For $15 a month, you can put songs onto an MP3 player. The $10 a month allows you to download special Windows Media player files that can only be played on the computer they were downloaded from.
Converting songs to .wav or .aiff and back to .mp3 from the original format to remove the license is a pain AND it does lower sound quality.
But can you only put something like 30 - 50 songs on at a time? And if you stop paying do you get to keep those songs, or is their a liscense on them as well?
I think the napster idea is pretty neat, but I don't like the lesser sound quality from download services, so I will keep buying CDs. When someone offers FLAC or SHN downloads, I'll probably start biting.
I believe even with the $9.99, you have to have the subscription to napster to continue to play them. My fiance has it and I know shes downloaded more than 50 songs. The only way I could play the files was to log onto Napster, then use Media player to play them. Having said that, you can use DBPowerAmp Aux Input to "record" it to mp3 which can be played on your IPod or whatever.. Like Jeff said though, it probably is a reduced quality ... though the non-musical person that I am, I can't tell much difference.
I was over at Bestbuy looking at an mp3 player. The clerk tried to sell me a napster card. The clerk volunteered you can convert the napster files to .wav files and then could keep them. I doubt they instruct him to say that to everybody. Could you really down load for a couple of months unlimited and then convert them all to .wav files for further play. He implied everyone was doing it. Didn't jump on it, but I have to admit it did make me wonder. What is the current law? I know the old Napster was found to be illegal. Is Kazaa or some other file sharing service still "legal". I haven't heard much about this issue lately.
Hey Jeff - does it lower sound quality when you burn some songs onto CD from iTunes, then rip them back to your computer in mp3 format later on, like to add to a mix CD or something? I haven't tried to do this yet so I guess I don't even know if it's possible with the licensing thing and all. I just don't wanna have to keep every song on my computer that I get from iTunes.
Napster has had a subscription service for some time available for roughly $10 a month, but you could only listen to the songs on your computer. There was no way to transfer them to a portable device, because there was no way to have the rights to that song "expire." Now that it's possible to have a song expire, even on a portable device, I'm guessing they believe it's worth a little more.
There has to be some easy and free way to make these songs permanently available even after you quit the service.
Not so hard. http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3189925a28,00.html or if you are on a mac - use audio hijack or wiretap.
then u back to the piracy thing you might as well had pirated them from the beginnning with out all the inconvience Rocket River
Yes it would. Re-encoding any media from one lossy format to another results in a loss in quality. Whether that loss is percievable depends on many factors. The less lossy the media that you start with is, the better results you will have.
nope....it is still illegal any service that allows you to download non-public domain music and not pay for it is going to be deemed illegal. Was looking into the allthemp3 service KingCheetah linked.... It seems interesting.....allows you to download a large variety of music for .02/Meg in a variety of formats. Vengeance......they offer downloads in FLAC format, or even 16bit PCM/44.1Khz(CD quality)...but considering the likely file size it might not be cost effective to do it that way.....if your average song in mp3 is around 5M, that is .10 a song......but FLAC is much larger IIRC....about 10x the size, correct? If so, that would cost about $1 a song in that format.
