Which would you choose to use for a pay-for-download service? Why? Which is cooler? Has better music? Has a cooler logo?
Thanks.
Forget about “cool”. That’s exactly what whoever owns Napster now (Roxio?) is trying to cash in on.
That said, Napster does have a cooler logo.
But I wouldn’t use it. Both iTunes and Napster serve music in encrypted formats, making the downloaded tracks all but useless for anyone who listens to a lot of music in cars, airplanes, or while jogging… but at least you can get around iTunes’s DRM by burning the tracks to a CD, then ripping them back as MP3s. Napster’s license agreement prohibits doing that.
You can burn tracks to a CD in Napster. You can also put them on an MP3 player. What else do you want?
Does Napster let you put your music on multiple computers and play them there?
(iTunes guy myself – it’s just so much easier to browse and buy stuff, and the AAC compression they use is noticably better than the WMA stuff Napster uses)
I don’t buy music from iTunes, I use it mainly for the streaming radio stations, which I just love.
Yes. IIRC, you can have music on up to 3 computers.
I’m a newbie to both Itunes & Napster. Itunes seems to be a little easier to browse & use, and I have not had any problems buying or burning music onto CD yet. The interface could use some enhancement, but otherwise few problems. As a previous poster mentioned, the AAC compression used by Itunes does seem to be a bit better, but you can also download MP3 and other formats, and at user specified bit rates. My main gripe with Itunes is that they don’t offer bulk rates or unlimited download subscriptions.
Napster is more eye candy and seemingly slower on my dialup, plus I don’t see any real discernible difference in their music libraries when it comes to popular music, even though Napster claims to have more. I also get spammed more by Napster. I quit using it altogether in favor of Itunes.
FWIW
Which MP3 players? I have a Palm Zire 71, a Rio Volt, a JVC CD/MP3 player for my car, and a DVD player that plays MP3s. As far as I know, there’s no legal way to get tracks from Napster onto these devices (other than as a regular old CD in the latter three players, but I sure didn’t spend $600 on them just to listen to music 13 tracks at a time).
Here’s the relevant part of the Napster terms of service:
You can access those with Winamp, WMP, or many other programs; iTunes just makes them easier to find.
Well, since an album’s worth of tracks from these services costs about as much as a real CD, I want what I’d get from a real CD:
- No ridiculous DRM schemes.
- A vast selection.
- Songs that have been losslessly compressed, rather than lossy compressed.
That only seems fair, since, as I said, a CD’s worth of tracks costs as much as a real CD. With downloaded tracks, nobody has to pay to stamp a CD, get a case, print liner notes, and physically ship it to a retail location. Instead they just pay a fraction of a penny in bandwidth costs for it to be downloaded. Gee, thanks for passing the savings on to the consumer. :rolleyes:
So far, thanks to the record companies, no service has been able to provide any one of the three things on my list…
Mr2001: read the next paragraph.
I use iTunes exclusively, being a fervent Mac user…
iTunes DRM is quite unrestricitve, all things considered–unlimited burns is a pretty good deal if you ask me. And despite what Microsoft will claim, AAC is an open format, a standard–unlike MS’s WMA crap.
Only downside I can see is from a buisness standpoint–as of right now, the only thing that works with the iTMS is the iPod. As the iPod is the #1 MP3 player, this may be less of a problem than it seems but it worries me all the same… I’d really hate to see Apple get locked out of ANOTHER exploding market.
iTMS all the way. Support snobby pretentious counterculture! And innovation.
neutron star: I understand your complaints, but really, online music services are geared towards people who don’t want the entire album. Just one or two songs.
For example, I bought Journey’s “Wheel In The Sky” off Napster. I’m not a big Journey fan, I just wanted WITS. The way I see it, I have two choices:
A) Spend $15 on a CD that contains “Wheel in the Sky,” plus ten filler songs that I don’t want, or
B) Spend $1 to get the song from Napster, and forget about the rest of it.
If I’m a fan of an artist or group, I’ll gladly buy a CD of their songs. But my CD rack is full of albums that contain a hit song that’s smothered in crap that I don’t like.
I saw that. How many portable MP3 players, car MP3 players, DVD players, and PDAs are actually “compatible” with those “security requirements”?
How am I supposed to get tracks I download with Napster onto my Palm, or onto an MP3 CD for my car/bedroom, without breaking the license agreement?
Which is exactly why I use them. It’s nigh impossible to keep track of decent Net radio stations otherwise. Reason enough to DL the software and give it a try.
Almost no car MP3 player or DVD players support it, and I’m not sure about PDAs. The Creative and Rio lines, plus Samsung (Napster) and Dell’s new players all should work with Napster. They have to support DRM’d WMA files. Unfortunately, this lack of support is a problem with all online music services (except eMusic), especially iTunes files, which will only work on an iPod.
Not sure about the other services, but most albums on the iTunes Music Store only cost $10, even when it’s got 16-20 tracks. A lot cheaper to buy the entire album than to get the tracks individually that way.
(here’s an example – Elvis: 30 #1 Hits has 31 songs, but only costs $10 for the entire album at the iTMS)
Hmm. My Rio Volt plays regular WMA files, but I doubt it supports the DRM kind.
True, but at least with iTunes, you can burn the tracks to a CD and rip them back to MP3s without breaking the law. If you’re gonna break the law, you may as well just get the tracks for free from a P2P service, then mail the artist a quarter (which is twice what he’d get from iTunes or Napster).
Ares.com. It’s based in Spain, no worries of the RIAA shit. No spyware (Gator) that you get with Kazaa or iMesh. been using it for over 6 months and no problems.
For what it’s worth.
Ares.com doesn’t have any software or music on it. I was able to find a program by Googling for “ares p2p”, but it’s just another Gnutella client - doesn’t matter whether it’s written by Spanish programmers, it’s still illegal to trade copyrighted files with it.
FWIW, there are distributions of Kazaa that don’t have spyware (though they’re harder to find now that the original makers of Kazaa have sued), as well as other P2P networks without spyware.