I just got a brand spankin’ new .mp3 player in the mail. Nothing too special - an Audible Otis, free from Audible.com with a one year subscription. Still, it’s the nice and new and I’m excited! I want to download stuff and listen to it!
What I’d like to do is go to Amazon.com or some similiar place, pay the cost of a standard CD, and download the damn thing so I can listen to it right now! Alas, I can’t. Last time I checked into legal, fee-based music downloads, the @$@# music companies were so afraid that we were all going to totally bypass the system and freely distribute music files that they weren’t even going to look into the technology. Never mind that any yahoo who wants can buy a CD, rip it, and email the files to everyone he knows.
Try looking around. I’m not sure how widespread some of these services are, but there’s one called Rhapsody (IIRC) that has licensed “real” music and made them available for download.
AOL is working on such a service, as are a couple other companies whose names I’ve completely forgotten.
The point of MY .mp3 player is that I can download stuff from Audible.com to the player and listen to it when I do my daily run. I don’t like running. If I get bored, I tend to fixate on how uncomfortable running is. If I have something to listen to, I don’t get bored, and the time goes much faster.
I’m also an NPR junkie. Audible has All Things Considered available for download for a reasonable monthy price. So far, I’m loving it.
Why a .mp3 player as opposed to a standard tape, radio, or CD player? I have nothing on tape, so tape is out. Radio stations in my area suck, and even if they didn’t, you run into the “gee, I should run at 3:00 so I can listen to program X…” mentality, which usually amounts to me waiting until 3:00 then getting busy and not being able to run. CD players skip badly while running, and burning CDs is costly.
Me bitching about not being able to download music is really not that big of a deal; music tends to interfere with the my running rhythm unless I spend a lot of time carefully picking out individual songs and such. I don’t like doing that. Have I mentioned I’m an NPR junkie?
Um, not the good CD players. Mine can tolerate just about any physical exercise I do with it on. And burning CDs is cheaper than buying ‘real’ ones. But you know that already.
Hmmm… the last time I bought a “sports” CD player I returned it after a week because it skipped horribly. 'course, that was 2 years ago - maybe the technology is better now?
Regardless, for my uses, an .mp3 player is better. I want to download something, listen to it once, and throw it away. Perfect for an .mp3 player. I already have a week’s worth of All Things Considered on CDs wasting away in my garbage while I waited for my .mp3 player to arrive.
I’ve got a CD player that also plays mp3 tracks. A description (from Best Buy…) is here: http://www.bestbuy.com/detail.asp?e=11123462&cmp=KA14028. The advantage is that I can burn over 11 hours of music onto a single CD with no perceptible loss of quality (I should note that my ears aren’t the best, though).
It was interesting to choose the best 11 hours of music from my CD collection. I was amazed at how many CDs I own in which I only really wanted one or two tracks…
A CD/MP3 player is also great for audio books in the car. I can put two whole audio books onto a single CD. No more fumbling with cassettes on those long road trips.
I too am disgusted that when I try to do a perfectly legal thing like purchase individual MP3’s, I can find nothing.
They’re shooting their own foot. I would love to buy a CD image (not even MP3’s. Why not a bin/cue of a CD?) and burn it for a reasonable price, but they don’t offer this (or do they? I haven’t searched recently because the sites that come up pretty foul), so I end up scouring the newsgroups.
I think there’s a lot about the music industry that is privileged information, at least I’m not privy to it. Why is it that a CD is so expensive ($10-15) – I suppose they have to pay royalties and pay for marketing. That’s good. But why is a cassette of the same album $6.99? Um… Maybe a CD is more expensive to make? Nope, I don’t buy that. I’m sure CD’s were more expensive to make in 1985 when these price points were set, but these days they’ve gotta be cheaper, and a CD image download would drop the production cost to almost zero.
There’s plenty of folks out there who want something for nothing, but they’ll get it no matter whether or not the music is sold online. Lack of Internet didn’t keep me and my friends from trading tapes in my youth.
This should be seen as an untapped market; there should be enough folks who would welcome the convenience and more reasonable price that they would come out ahead, even if piracy is accounted for.
Uh… I guess I’m rambling. Sorry. It’s a sore subject with me.
Oh, Athena, those sports players are really nice these days. They play the disc slightly fast and cache about a minute of the music, so they have plenty of time to unscramble themselves before the music reaching your ears is interrupted. I work out regularly with mine and have zero complaints.
