floonine

I wanted to see if anyone has tried the new "Napster" (in quotes because it isn't *really* the same thing).

I tried it out, and although free is always better for the price of a song, the downloads are fast and it comes with a cute little cd burner. I logged on, found the album I wanted, bought it, and had it on CD in less than 5-7 minutes. For a p2p, it sucks like high heaven, but in my opinion its the easiest way to find music to buy. Of course, the selection is limited to the library of the record labels involved, but its still a pretty big library to look through.

That's just my thoughts anyway... anyone else try it yet?

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How much did the album cost?

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Baldrick

I really wanted to try that "$9.95 per month for unlimted downloads", but they don't allow anyone outside of the United States yet.

Does anyone know of plans to expand outside the U.S. anytime soon?

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Speed_Gibson

anything that just offers propietary 128 kbps WMA files is something I will stay far, far away from. If they offered proper lossless formats like flac/shorten/ape for that price without any kind of DRM then I would pay in a heartbeat.

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H12

If I had, you know, DSL or something, then I'd be A-okay with this...but a 56k just doesn't cut it much.

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Destrox

I'm sure theres a way to re-encode the wma files you download into a more mainstream mp3 or ogg format easily.

which would also opt to remove the rights built into it (this is hopefull thinking here)

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tspikes51

More thread revivals for me, but I just signed up a couple of days ago. This has changed the way that I listen to music. For fifteen bucks a month, I can listen to most of the library (either streaming or download), and put whatever I want on my iRiver. It's really fast (even on a slow cable connection), and they have a pretty extensive library (I believe they have the big 7 and lots of indie labels). Plus, you can listen to user-created radio stations (and of course create your own). I've already listened to more Journey than you can shake a stick at, have gotten exclusive tracks (even a kick ass acoustic ver. of Shinedown's "Fly From the Inside"), and laughed at enough Rodney Carrington to make anybody sick. The only drawback is that the streams are 64kbps (I think) WMA, and the downloads are 128kbps WMA. Not quite loseless, but hey, you can't beat it for $15 a month.

Oh and if you don't have a compatible mp3 player, then you can just pay $10 a month and get all of the other benefits.

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grendel

there is, but that wouldn't be lossless.

i'm currently a $10 a month subscriber, but i've only been signed up for 2 months and don't know how long i'll do it. it's a nice interface, though.

grendel

incidentally, i thought the stream was recently bumped up to 128kbps WMA, but i could be mistaken.

skinnymofo

my feeling on all these buy music online places itunes and windows media player included are that, if im going to pay 10bucks for a cd i might as well just buy it in the store for 12 and get a booklet case and extras.
128 is rather low quality for tastes as well
i heard that 15 a month for the napster is just for a mp3 player right? and coded different so as you cant really take as much as you want and burn cds with them?

grendel

well, it's certainly no substitute for buying/owning the CD, but for some random single tracks that my wife wants on her mp3 player, $10 a month is a reasonable deal.

fallsauce

I'm not signed up, since I don't live in the US, have a credit card, or unlimited bandwidth. But I like the idea of finding new music and then able to get the whole album, (I download a Sister Hazel song off music.download.com, I don't think their album existes in NZ.)

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keyshawn

The thing i'd be worried about though, is - when you cancel your subscription [or if the company goes under] , all those songs that you've had are gone - it's kinda renting them....

If i would have to pay for DRM'ed laced music, i'd go with itunes. At least, there, you pay the song once and get to keep it [although you can only transfer it to a few computers; which puts you in a bit of a mess if you reinstall windows a couple times].

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Hardknock

A little off topic but I still think that Shawn Fanning was a pussy for not taking it all the way to the supreme court.

I'll never use Napster.

Locke00000

I did use napster for the free 2-week trial, and using the winamp workaround converted a ton of music to non-protected mp3s. Its simple and I was able to cancel before the trial was up without anything being charged (but did have to give them a credit card # when signing up). Its pretty simple to do and gets a lot of music fast (though encoding to mp3 is real time which sucks)..I would never pay to rent my songs though..