I finally bit the bullet and got the trial subscription to EMusic. 14 days or 50 downloads. It took approximately 24 hours in real time to download 50 MP3's. What I mean is that 24 hours ago I started. That's maybe 4 hours in on line time at this point.
Needless to say, I like it.
What they have got that p2p's don't is (1)BANDWIDTH and (2) GUARANTEED QUALITY.
OK, it's 128kbs but still sounds quite good. It's been said that no matter how many times an MP3 is "traded", it is "bit-perfect" every time. I don't believe it. These 128Kbs MP3's sound much, much better than some 160Kbs ones that, uh ... a friend of mine got off of a p2p site.
Straight from the source seems to make a difference. In my case anyway. No blips, squeals, pops, crackles, etc.
And did I mention the Bandwidth? Some songs were downloaded faster than I could pick another from the same album.
And Kudos to "Media Jukebox Download Manager". It has performed flawlessly, so far. Thank You.
I'm going to try an album or two because I have just given the go-ahead on the three month subscription. I would have gone for the year long at 2/3 of the cost per month but I suspect I'll need that money for a new hard drive before then. My 80 Gig and 14 Gig drives have all-of-the-sudden started looking woefully inadequate.
We must encourage those that "have the right idea" in music downloading. That would be good quality and fair use of the material in addition to the stated goal of artist compensation. If Universal's "experiment" works, and I feel that it will open some eyes, then we can expect to see more content (they've added some since yesterday). Even some more recent and better selling artists will start showing up.
There will still be a lot of folks that want the packaging and will buy the CD. For the others, there is very little overhead in electronic transfers of music past the initial startup costs. Certainly much less than manufacturing and distributing a physical CD.
That's my opinion. Everybody has one.
CVIII
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Topic: EMusic and Me (Read 802 times)