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[jough]

Yeah, I'd rather get four times as much on my portable player than worry about perfect fidelity.  The WMA is "good enough" at 128kbps (they say that 96 is acceptable-sounding, but I say they're damn dirty liars).

Considering that I'll use the micro-drive player to drown out the din of the train, and mostly play things like Katrina and the Waves, I think I'll be fine.

I just wish there was a reliable and easy way to get access to a decent selection of mp3s at a reasonable price.

[arkabee]

Dude, I said LEGIT.

I would not give these people my CC#.  Puh-lease.

i got a gift certificate from a friend.  the service is nice.

"Using of the available electronic payment systems: "PayPal", "WebMoney", "Yandex.Money". You may find payments conditions and other information on the payments/replenishments in the appropriate sections after choosing subscription type. Automatic account replenishment interface is also available."


edit:
and yes, they are rather friendly and pleasant:
"Please, spend several minutes to pass the tour now, and save your time in the future."


edit^2:
this is a good read:
http://www.museekster.com/allofmp3faq.htm#Is%20Allofmp3%20legal?
as i googled for allofmp3, various reports abound.

but, to get to your outrage, from museekster.com's faq:
"
Q- Is it safe to pay by credit card?
A- "I am not going to let my credit card number fall into the hands of Russian mafia". This phrase will appear in almost any discussion about Allofmp3.

Credit card payments are processed by Cyberplat a third party payment processor in Russia that has an excellent reputation, earned the trust of Diners Club as a qualified processor, and operates completely securely.  

We have been in contact with lots of users. No one has ever reported credit card abuse as a result of payments made to Allofmp3. You are quite safe using your credit card with this company.
"

[jay-ell]

No one has ever reported credit card abuse as a result of payments made to Allofmp3.

If I were a terrible, horrible person, I would say that this is because the Russian Mafia staples their lips shut before they can complain.  

Good thing I'm not.  

I stick with iTunes, and I am fairly certain there is a way to export in .mp3 format.  Pedro?  Do you know?

[Bozack]

I stick with iTunes, and I am fairly certain there is a way to export in .mp3 format.  Pedro?  Do you know?

Sigh.
There were third-party applications, but the new version of iTunes fucked them over.I'll bet there will be new ones in a week or so.

[jough]

Even so, re-encoding into another lossy compression scheme will fuck up the sound quality of the files.

Napster seems to be pretty popular with the kids for easy conversion, since they offer a proprietary format that is non-lossy and indistinguishable from the CD.  I may give them a shot to burn CDs and then rip them into MP3, which I may then do with as I please.

[arkabee]

No one has ever reported credit card abuse as a result of payments made to Allofmp3.

If I were a terrible, horrible person, I would say that this is because the Russian Mafia staples their lips shut before they can complain.  

Good thing I'm not.  

ok.

[Pedro Picasso]

Jough, I don't know where you buy your CD's but around here they start at $12.  Personally I'm an iTunes man.  There are some annoying things such as those previously mentioned, but overall it's a good system.

The only ways to convert Apple's version of AAC are to use circumvention tools like PlayFair made illegal by the odious Digital Millenium Copyright Act, or to burn your songs to CD and then rip them to mp3.  (There's a setting in iTunes preferences which allows you to rip to several formats and bitrates.)  I've done this a few times, and I haven't noticed any loss in audio quality.  Still, I don't have the best ears, so you might not want to take my word for it.  

Fortunately, it only costs $1 + a blank CD to try out this manner of purchasing music, so I recommend you try it yourself.  Really, what else were you going to use that CD for?  Apple's hidden rules for burning music purchased through iTunes are as follows.  When you purchase a song (or set of songs), you can put it into a playlist, and then burn a CD from that playlist.  If a playlist contains one or more songs from the Apple music store, then you can only burn that playlist to CD 7 times.  Thereafter, you will not be able to burn that playlist until you add songs to or remove songs from it.  This is easy to get around for those who are determined to do so, but lax enough to make you not really care to get around it.

So yes, buy+burn+rip is kind of a hassle, but it's not too bad, and if the dinosaur kings didn't determine what your player could and could not accept, then we wouldn't be in this mess.  Also iTunes is a joy to use as far as organizing music and playing it from the PC is concerned.

[Pedro Picasso]

Another kind of strange rule involves audio books from Audible.com.  You guys might not care about this but, I want to describe it, and it might interest you.

Many people in my office have iPods.  Several of us now belong to Audible.com's pay-us-for-books-every-month club.  I found out that I can put my purchased books on my iPod using iTunes.  I can put my co-worker's book on my iPod using iTunes (if he types his password for me).  But I cannot put audio books from three different accounts onto my iPod at any given time.  The little doo-hickey is programmed to only accept two Audible.com accounts at a time.  I haven't found any documentation on this anywhere.  That's just the way the thing works.  Incidentally, while I enjoy their products, the no documentation thing is just how Apple works.

[jough]

Yeah, to all of the Microsoft h@t0rs out there, at least they provide lots and lots of documentation for their work.

AAC is pretty bad sounding already, at least at the bitrate that iTunes uses (which is very low).  I've heard tracks burned to CD from iTunes and they sound horrible.

Converting from one lossy compression algorithm to another just makes things worse.  AAC and MP3 are both lossy, but in different ways, so you wind up with an extremely flat wave with neither highs nor lows.  Ugh.

So iTunes is out - even if my player supported AAC the quality issue would be enough for me to not use them.

New release CDs are often under $10 at Best Buy and Circuit City around here - many of the more obscure bands (i.e. those I like) are even often $7.99.

But I generally will buy from a local mom & pop if I buy a CD at all, and they generally beat Best Buy by a dollar or two.

So even $9.95 per album, which is what Napster charges, is about the same price as most CDs, which are much higher resolution and a tangible item.  I can't believe people are paying a dollar a track - if you buy one of those sound effects discs with 99 very short tracks does it cost you $99?

At least Napster and BuyMusic offer deals for a whole album (although BuyMusic charges more than Buy.com does for some new release CDs - i.e. Prince's new album is only $10.99 on CD, but $12.49 for the downloaded WMA version).

As I said, LimeWire works just great for me - I can download high bitrate MP3s and do whatever the hell I want with them.  It's just sometimes harder to find some tracks, and quality isn't guaranteed.

I'd be willing to use a legit service that offered the same product but with guaranteed quality and convenience (i.e. I just log on, select what I want, and download it at high speed).

Since I haven't yet found a legit source to download unrestricted MP3s, I have no reason to not use file sharing programmes.

Is the RIAA aware of how much revenue they're losing with their DRM techniques?

[Pedro Picasso]

Is the RIAA aware of how much revenue they're losing with their DRM techniques?

No, they are not.  I get the impression that each level of management within the big five is witholding this information from the level above it in order to keep their jobs.  There's a lot of nodding and agreeing going on in those buildings.  I'm sure the Peter Principle has something to do with it.


If only there were some way to harness this power for the forces of good!

[CortJstr]

There have been several stories in the news about the strange pricing for new albums on CD vs. downloads. And some artists are keeping as much of their catalog off of iTunes etc on their own which puts another kink into things. And since Sony now has its own alternative I wouldn't expect to see many Columbia artists on iTunes now.

I've heard that Real's option is surprisingly good but I can't bring myself to trust Real. Plus then I'd have to actually install RealPlayer on my system which I know would be a huge mistake.

So right now I still think the best option is to find the discs Best Buy is selling at a loss and just grab those. Although lowest-advertised-price regulations from the RIAA make that more difficult that it should be.

[slink]

Look what I just found today thanks to del.icio.us.