This is the big problem with DRM and why I will not buy music with it. If people stop supporting your DRM version you have to buy your music all over again to use a new device. It is one thing to buy the music again if a new format comes out that is better. CDs are better in many ways than records. They are more convenient than records and they sounds better. The new DRM makes no improvements in sound quality and makes things less convenient than the old DRM it is just stupid. I can easily imagine in 10 or 20 years even apple is no longer supporting their DRM scheme then what do you do with your DRMed files.
I place to check for compatable sites, are on the player’s site. They will tell you what sites work with their players. Don’t forget to check the message boards for those players. I’m sure it’s in the FAQs section also.
Based on history, I don’t think he can take good enough care of something for me to spend $150 on it. $50? Maybe. But not much more than that. I only want to spend what I can afford to lose on electronic gadgets.
Burning/ripping CDs is a fine method for me to use with the player I have, but my son has different musical tastes from mine. I don’t think he’s going to want to load up an mp3 player with Madonna, Dirty Vegas, and The Rolling Stones.
He mainly likes hip-hop or any of the ultra-current top-40 stuff, and I don’t own any of that. Besides, a ten-year-old owning uncensored music on CD worries me. I monitor what Playstation games he plays and what movies he’s allowed to see.
Another problem I have is that I live out in the middle of nowhere. I don’t have the option of DSL or cable internet access. What I have is faster than dial-up but much much slower than DSL. That seriously limits my music download capabilities. I can’t even reliably upload digital pictures to Walmart or Walgreens for developing; it takes forever and tends to get stuck. I can’t watch streaming video, which means I can’t really enjoy any of the links to YouTube on the Dope. I could get satellite internet, but for our family’s usage, it’s prohibitively expensive.
After a day of thinking about it, and talking to my son about it, we’ve decided to wait on the mp3 player. Instead, I took him last night and let him pick out two new playstation2 games, a case to keep all his games in, and a wireless controller for the console.
This doesn’t mean I haven’t gained some valuable knowledge from the replies to this thread, though. A lot of my curiosity has been satisfied regarding how the whole iPod vs. everything-else-in-the-world works. Thank you to everyone who took the time to look up & post links and answer my questions.
How about a small FM radio with headphones? They have them about the size of a pack of gum. He can tune into the closest top-40 station and hear all the raunchy lyrics (even the radio stuff is pretty damn bad.)
Or…I got my daughter one of these:
It’s tiny, holds about 500 songs, has an FM tuner, and can also record songs off the FM tuner. It costs $119 which isn’t too bad. It runs for months on a single AA battery. No hard drive to go bad either.
That sounds like a good alternative. I bought him a jacket last year that had an FM radio that snapped to the sleeve and played through speakers that were embedded in the hood. He’s out-grown it, but he really liked it while he had it.
Isn’t that the truth! I don’t mean to sound like a fuddy-duddy, but c’mon! That song by Akon called “Smack That,” for example? The adult part of me kinda likes the beat and his voice and even the provocative lyrics, but the parental part of me cringes whenever it comes on, and I find myself having to bite my tongue lest I say something like, “The kids these days and their music…nothing but filth. And that MTV, too! Nothing but naked people talking trash!” Sounds like my grandfather, who forbade me to watch MTV under his roof. That was back in the eighties, too. If he weren’t already dead, he’d have a heart attack if he saw what it’s become.
I think you missed part of what we were suggesting. You can purchase songs from iTunes (either individually or by the album-full), then create your own audio CD from those songs. Then, you put that CD back into the computer, and iTunes recognizes all the song names and everything (because it created the CD, it recognizes it from before. A different computer wouldn’t know the song names because that info isn’t encoded onto an audio CD).
Then, you simply “rip” the songs from the audio CD, into your music library in iTunes, but in plain vanilla unprotected MP3 format. These files can play on any MP3 player. It’s not a bad option if you’re not buying a ton of songs from iTunes, which you won’t be anyway with dial-up. You can either buy the blank CD-Rs in bulk fairly cheap, or you can use a CD-RW disk and re-use it.
My son turned 10 just the other day…
…and we got him the $149 2GB iPod nano.
(Actually, I told my sister before Christmas that we were going to get it for him, and she and my mother volunteered to split the cost between the two of them, and call it a dual Christmas-birthday present, which put it into a reasonable price range for them.)
Anyway, my reasoning was as follows:
–we wanted to give him an iPod, because we like Apple stuff, and use a Mac for our home computer; and
–we didn’t think he’d be happy with the iPod Shuffle, because it didn’t have a screen, and it would be worthless to him if he couldn’t pick his songs.
I am a little wary about giving him such a fragile, expensive gift at his age, but we intend to oversee his use pretty carefully. For one thing, he won’t be taking it to school with him.
I’m curious about how long it takes on average to download the iTunes software?
What kind of internet connection do you have?
My internet service is a wireless signal sent from the nearest cell tower. I’m supposed to be getting 128 but it really hovers just above normal modem speed most of the time because of weather conditions and whatnot. In other words, my internet connection is about as reliable as a cell phone call. I’ve been “dropped” before.
The iTunes software is 35MB. So far, 20% of it has downloaded and the estimated time remaining is 40 minutes. I’m guessing that song downloads will take between 5 and 7 minutes each.