legal music downloads

Nickygoat

toasterman wrote:

You need a US credit card to purchase the music though. As my credit card is UK-registered, I can't use it to buy US tracks.
I believe this was covered in an episode of The Gadget Show where the guy on there tried to save money by using a French address to save money because of the cost of music in France, and conversion rate.
iTunes giftcards I'm not sure about, but I thought I'd heard Apple had stopped these loopholes by requiring users to sign in to download their music, and to have a credit card registered with iTunes too.

US ITMS gives you an option when you sign up to not enter a credit card. I think it's a sop to people who don't have credit cards (i.e. under 18s).
You do have to sign in but it hasn't made any difference to me.

toasterman wrote:

I'm burning as just normal audio tracks. Plays in other normal cd players.
Even if I import an mp3 (no copy protection) into iTunes and use iTunes to burn it back to a cd - doesn't play properly in my car without lots of seeking.
I don't understand it at all.

How very bizarre. No explanation comes to mind.

toasterman wrote:

Ah ha - nice one. I shall pass it on to the person who was asking me.
Can you vouch for either that it won't corrupt the data on the ipod? I don't see why it would if you just browsed it as an additional drive, but then I don't know enough about the ipod file system to comment.

Vouch for it? Of course not - would you if you didn't know someone else's system, or level of competence? I will say that I've never had any problems getting music off various iPods onto various computers (for legitimate reasons).
As long as you have a backup of the library you won't go too far wrong.
HTH

madlyn

right, here goes. if i buy the music i want from itunes, download it and store it on my pc, then use nero to burn it onto cd to listen to in the car or around home. All will be fine, yes????

superscaper

If you are making ordinary audio cds then it should mostly be fine (some older cd players have difficulty with CD-Rs though). If you are burning an MP3 CD (so you can have far more tracks) then you will need to be sure your cd players (in your house and car) will play mp3 files, not many do.

superscaper

I don't know the exact terms of itunes (I don't buy my music through them) but you should be aware that you will have a limited number of times you can burn a any particular track to cd, as far as I know.

madlyn

itunes it is then. thanks for all your help and advice folks, very much appreciated.

MercilessKiller

madlyn wrote:

itunes it is then. thanks for all your help and advice folks, very much appreciated.

Itunes is amazing. Got an email this morning randomly for 3 free songs! Sorted.

Coke has joined itunes so I'm assuming buying Coke in the future will lead to free songs but we'll see!

scotnan

I've just started downloading music and burning cd's for the first time so I'm a complete novice. You guys all seems to know what you're talking about so I thought i would ask here (hope you dont mind OP)

I've been reading through everything here (and trying to understand best i can lol) but there's still a couple of things not clear to me.

eg on Woolworth site, when you go to buy a track, it says
'..Unlimited Plays | Never Expires | 1 PC Only | 3 Burns | 3 Transfers to Portable Player..'
Are these options? Do I have to choose one of those when I go to the check out?

I thought if you paid to download a track, it was yours to do what you want with it (burn it as many times as you want) is this correct?

Also someone on this thread mentioned (sorry can't see back that far from reply box) about not being able to get the tracks transferred from ipod to comp. So is it best to d/l the track onto your comp first then transfer it onto ipod?

This is prrobably all A B C to you lot but we've all got to start somewhere lol

Answers in La La form ( no joined up writing!) please!

Thanks guys.

MercilessKiller

Scotnan.. unfortunately we all thought at first once we buy it we can do what we like. This isn't the case.

Tracks we buy come with DRM - Digital Rights Management protection. It ensures we don't mis-use the file by copying basically. As users won't usually burn the song more than 3 times without breaking copyright laws (selling it to someone else) a lot are limited with this 3 burn thing.

Those options aren't a choice. You get them all. I.e
1) Unlimited plays on your computer
2) It NEVER expires from your computer (goes with the unlimited plays)
3) You can only play it on the PC you download it to (advances from 1 and 2)
4) Only 3 burns (ensures lawful use)
5) 3 Transfers to Portable players

now the last one i think is ridiculous as you should have infinite but hey..

The best way is indeed download the song, then transfer to ipod. If the ipod is being used on a new machine itunes won't upload the songs. There are pieces of software (ipod file manager) that will allow you to transfer the songs back from the ipod so you may want to give that a go.

As for it all being A B C, we all have to start somewhere and I just hope I helped ok

If you didnt understand anything just reply or PM and i'll get back to you.

wolfman

I'd personally advise you to avoid any DRM protected files, sadly this includes getting anything from iTunes.

It's basically the industries way of telling us how to listen to our music, rather than the user defining how they'd like to listen to it. It's a very restrictive technology and is just causing more problems with devices becoming interoperable.

I still buy CD's then convert them myself. You can pickup a CD for not much more than you'd pay for the equivalent on iTunes. In doing so you then have a higher quality (lossless) original, a natural backup, packaging, and the ability to convert the track to whatever you want.

Or you could buy online, have a lower quality file (lossy), no packaging, a number of restrictions, and most probably not be able to play it on all devices.

It means I can play my music in Windows, Linux, on my phone, iPod, Shuffle, X360, Chipped Xbox, burn it as many times as I want etc... without having a single problem.

Where something like iTunes is advantageous over buying a CD is when you want an individual track. I personally won't be using such services as I don't want to spend a lot of money only to run into problems a year or two down the line. For example, tracks from iTunes, as far as players are concerned, will only play on iPods, which is just tying you, your music device, and your music collection to Apple.

scotnan

Thank you for keeping the answers easy enough for (even) me to understand lol.