Sharing the full Itunes experience

[revisionA]

So I finally did it, I went legit. Instead of the 40 plus gigs of mp3s I downloaded from napster and various other services in the last decade... my powerbook has only my true CD collection rips and now... four albums from the Itunes store.

I just thought I would share with you all my experience. I have always been a musician, and only having legit music makes me feel a lot better about that. I was only concerned with iTunes purchasing getting out of control... not the quality or quantity.

I bought two albums from Front 242, one plus an Ep from Death Cab for Cutie, and Coldplays Parachutes (lost the cd...).

What if the downloads arent finished or get interrupted?

Check for purchased songs... on the itunes menu (I think advanced, I am on a pc at work right now), will connect to the itunes store and continue/finish downloads of purchased music. Works flawlessly, I had to leave a friends house and the downloads resumed fine on my home network later in the evening.

Do I have to authorize purchases?

Unless you set up one click purchasing, you have to give your .mac or itunes password with each purchase or after a single purchase, subsequent times you must click a pop up window to ensure its not a mistake click in the store. This is fine, not too messy, some failsafes to ensure I dont pay for a britney spears album because I rest my hand on the trackpad while on the phone... etc.

Quality?

128kps AAC is supposed to be about the same as 160kps mp3, I rip my CDs to 192kps mp3s normally and cant tell the difference on my Altec Lansing ipod speaker thingy.

VS the local record store?

Hands down, the local record store is better for imports and used CDs of my old favs, but for new releases or buying a song at a time, iTunes roxx.

$

 

[playaproved]

I've done the same... My powerbook has all of my "legit" music and movies, while my PC has all of the music I've downloaded. I rip all of my music at 192kbps MP3 as well. I can tell a slight difference in the iTunes music, but only when listening to it through headphones, and occasionally in my car. At most the difference is very miniscule.

 

[Danksi]

The problem I found with Napster, torrent etc, was that although it was a great way to listen to 'new' music and expand your collection - it also seemed to be a reason to collect music for collecting sake.

I've recently been going through our 9K song collection, clearing out a lot of downloaded stuff (which is fairly legal in Canada at the moment - Grey area), since we don't listen to it and it's just taking up HD space.

 

[JDOG_]

I have like 30 gigs on a portable hard drive from my first big iTunes music collection but tired of having to use my external HD to listen to music on my iBook. I'm just gonna keep it hanging out until I get my MacIntel with a bigger drive.

I walk the line on music legitimacy, mostly because my brother is a professional musician. That's my only moral holdback on it. Charging $20 a CD for most of the stuff that's out there...that's just criminal.

 

[whocares]

So I finally did it, I went legit. Instead of the 40 plus gigs of mp3s I downloaded from napster and various other services in the last decade... my powerbook has only my true CD collection rips and now... four albums from the Itunes store.

Now that we've worked on your morals, lets work on your spelling. Type after me: i-T-u-n-e-s, iTunes.


Big ups on the legit thingy