Opinions on the Napster service?

In My Humble Opinion
1

In order to be able to proof stuff for some clients, and also as a means of future-proofing my tech skills, I’ve purchased a new HP laptop (zt3101 if anyone cares). This machine will supplement my Macs, not replace one, which puts me in a bind —I already have 3 machines signed in under my iTunes account, but I’d still like to have much of that music on my new Windows laptop.

I figured I could use Napster, with their premium service, and download however many of the songs I feel like having in the “tethered” form. Does anyone here use this function of Napster? If so, how do you like it?

I see that I can integrate Napster into Windows Media Player, which is good —I like to use integrated system tools as much as possible. And it looks like with WMP9 Microsoft has finally reached a decent level of usability (building playlists in previous versions drove me to conniptions, but that was years ago).

With these subscription downloads, will the songs play if I’m not connected to the Internet? If I start up the laptop on a plane, will the songs play, and not need to go online to verify anything?

I already have an iPod, but were I ever to get a WMA-compatible music player, can the subscription tunes be transferred to it?

Thanks a lot in advance!

2

Bah, something ate my reply. So I’ll try to re-type it…

In my personal opinion, I love iTunes. It’s a really great service, and if you already have an account set up with them, don’t bother with Napster. iTunes will run on Windows (I haven’t used a Mac in 3 years) just fine, so that’s the way I’d go if I were you.

I believe the 3 machine limit is only with regard to having the ability to play the protected AAC files. Once you’ve purchased them, they’re yours, and you can listen to them wherever you want. My suggestion would be to copy all of your MP3s to your new Windows machine en masse, then burn CDs with the protected, downloaded AAC files from iTunes (using iTunes to burn it) then rip them on the Windows machine (using iTunes if you’d like). Don’t even bother with Napster.

Just my 2 cents. :slight_smile:

3

You can transcode your protected AAC files to MP3 without burning anything, either:

  1. Open iMovie. Import the AAC file as a soundtrack.
  2. Use iMovie’s “Export” command to save the sound as an AIFF file.
  3. In iTunes, import the AIFF file from step 2, then use the “Convert to MP3” command to make an MP3 from the file.

There’s a fair bit of cruft involved, but at least you don’t need to burn anything.