Best Music Download Service?

[R. Scott Wooley OD]

I haven't begun to use music download services, but anticipate starting soon. I know there are a tone of them out there. Some make you pay per song and/or full CD, and some are download as many as you want per month.

What service(s) do you use, and why do you you like them the best?

Scott Wooley

 

[Matt Judd]

itunes is definitely the best.

however, try www.mercora.com for a neat sping on downloading

 

[Ben Wheeler]

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I'm a big fan of the customized internet radio stations on www.music.yahoo.com. The basic level is free. You can set up several stations for different music genres using multiple accounts. I find it's best to only rate the artists and not the song or album. If you like to download bitTorrent is a good basic program.

 

[Mike Sandy]

I'm a big fan of simply stealing them via LimeWire.

If I absolutely cannot find my song(s) there, I may break down and purchase them from iTunes.

I need to look into some of the services listed above, however.

 

[J Sunday]

A huge issue with this is DRM (digital rights management). There are several highly restrictive sites that have gone under and now customers are unable to play their legally purchased music. Even if they do survive, they can be restrictive as to whether or not you can burn them to a cd, play them on specific mp3 players, or whatever else you might take for granted.

I know itunes is starting to have some DRM-free songs, but the bulk is still restricted in some way. Not as bad as a lot of others.

Amazon was supposed to be starting a new DRM-free site for music.

 

[Ben Wheeler]

Limewire is a good program that's been updated somewhat over the last 7 years. But that is kind of old school now. http://www.torrentportal.com/ or other websites combined with the bitTorrent program seems to be the best combo to easily find what you want to download. There are websites that show how to tweak the settings to get it to download faster. many of the files are copyrighted so it's up to you if you want to download them. songs, whole albums, and groups of albums by the same artist can be downloaded with a few clicks. torrent downloading is the new way to go. it's much faster than using the old networks. Torrent downloading is the new way to go.

I'd like someone's opinion on iTunes compared to other software to play mp3s on the computer. I've looked at iTunes on other peoples computers it does a pretty good job of organizing files if you don't carefully name and organize your files yourself in folders. If anyone would like to give me any comments on how good of a player it is I'd like to know before i buy an iPod. I use jetAudio player now b/c it has a small toolbar mode and doesn't use a massive amount of system resources, so i can multitask easily.