I-tunes, Napster etc etc

[Chris71]

Can anyone give me an idiots guide to the music download sites these days?

Do they tend to have a subscription or is it pay per download? (presume the free ones have gone!)

Are they secure? Sound like an old git, but I'm still quite weary who I submit my card details to online.

Do they download conventional audio files? This applies mostly to i-tunes I guess..... I seem to remember they have a specific i-tunes format rather than MP3 or whatever. Fine if you had an iPod, but not so good if you want to make up mix CDs or stick them on a conventional MP3 player. Also, don't hey have some sort of copy protection on them? I'm not interested in distributing them to anyone, but having had one hard drive crash wiping out my MP3 collection and having gone through several computers since I first got music files, it would be good to have something I can copy and transfer.

[deevlash]

Torrents...

[Kinky]

All legally speaking of course

K

[Chris71]

Such as.......

Had a play round with my misus' i-tunes account the other day and that wasgreat - all those random little tunes I'd never want to be seen buying the album of are suddenly within my grasp! The only thing is I believe that's i-tunes format only and write protected, I want an MP3 I can transfer (for my own wholly legal purposes, yes)

[Meeja]

Chris71 said:

The only thing is I believe that's i-tunes format only and write protected, I want an MP3 I can transfer (for my own wholly legal purposes, yes)

There are ways of "unlocking" iTunes tracks....

Easiest way though is to burn them in iTunes as an Audio CD, and then rip them back in as you would any normal CD.

Job done.

[Bunglist]

Cant you just run them through something like Easy CD extractor and then you can put it into whatever format you want.

This way seems to work with allsorts like APE files, Flac files, and most obscure stuff you dont seem to be able to play on anything else.

[PJR]

Some iTunes store music is not protected any more.. Although unprotected songs cost a little more. Apple would prefer that all music sold on the iTunes store was unprotected because DRM is generally unpopular. Im not a fan of it myself, but still, its not so bad either.

The easiest way to make it unprotected is well known.. Burn the itunes store tracks onto an audio cd, and rerip this cd into MP3's. There will be some quality loss, but many people would not notice this. It depends how critical you are about quality I guess..

P,

[Gompo]

Soulseek is quite good (free) and relatively easy to use. Like Napster was a few years back.