MP3 players, downloading music, etc. (1 Viewer)

[FoFa]

OK, just got my new teenager (13) a MP3 player for her birthday.
In case it matters I got her the Sansa M240 1GB.
Any who what is up with these music services. They have downloads for like $.79 - $.99 each, or you can subscribe for unlimited downloads for anywhere from $5.00-$15.00 a month. I noticed at least with Napster you have to download their software also (I looked at Yahoo and Rhapsody, but not sure about those as far as software goes). So what is the difference between unlimited downloads and single price (except single price can cost much more). I guess you can't BURN the unlimited downloads to CD (why), can you listen to them on your computer as well as your player? SO can explain this all or provide a few links that explains it all?

 

[KenHigg]

Here's the short on some of it; The basic,most universal format is .mp3. This is what most all of the portable players play. This is also what most of the online services will give you when you download. Windows and Apple computers come with a mp3 player so yes you can listen to them on your computer. When you buy a cd, the music is in a different format. You can convert this format with programs like iTunes and whatever napster has. Then you can convert them back to a cd format but it will take a seperate application to do that, but you will probably lose sound quality...

 

[FoFa]

Well the Rhapsody web site says the download format for the unlimited subscription is WMA DSA (or something like that, can't remember the last 3 D??) so it is not MP3, and I would suppose Napster and Yahoo are similar.

 

[KenHigg]

Hum... I'm guessing that you would need to research what player works with which service format. Then you could always convert after the fact if you had to...

http://www.bugnet.com/analysis/0106/ftmpretro.html

 

[ghudson]

I refuse to play the pay as you go game with music downloads.

I use CDex to rip my CDs into MP3s or WMAs. CDex allows you to select the quality [bitrate] and a whole lot more. I convert my music files to a 64 bit WMA file and I do not hear [notice] any loss of sound when the original source is a CD. I can store about 10 CDs worth of music on my 256 megabyte MP3 player when I convert the CDs into 64 bit WMA files.

I have yet to get my hands on a "protected" MP3 file for I would love to test if CDex can convert the file into an unprotected audio file.

 

[FoFa]

From what I have been reading, MP3's (at least the current std) are not protected in any way. The most popular today that have Digital Rights management (DRM) are AAC and WMA. Microsoft of course is pushing WMA, and it is feared that in the future the O/S won't allow any WMA files to be moved or played unless there is some king of licensing on the file. MS is integrating the WMA std into it's windows O/S. At least that is what I have been reading. It also appears WMA can give you the same quality of music at a lower but rate than MP3 can. But the downside is in the future you maynot be able to listen any WMA files you create today unless thay have DRM encryption. A lot of that seems to be speculation, but that is pretty much what I have been reading.

 

[ghudson]

I hope that Microsoft will not be able to lock down a WMA file but I know that they will try. I agree that the low bitrate of a converted [ripped] WMA file sounds great with the experiences I have had using the ripping functions of the CDex program I mentioned above. The low bitrate of the WMA file also means that the file size is smaller and I can fit more songs on my puny 256 megabyte MP3 player. The CDex program is old enough to not have any encryption stuff built in so hopefully it will help to bypass any that it might find. I have only encountered a couple of CDs that I could not duplicate and I then used CDex to rip the songs and then burned them to an audio CD and it worked flawlessly. I prefer to leave my CD collection intact [preserved] by copying or ripping the CDs and making my own compilation CDs to be played in my car.

How do the music downloading sites protect a file [MP3 or WMA] that a person legally pays to download so that they can not email it to a friend who has not paid for the file and they do not belong to the same music file downloading site?

 

[FoFa]

By using the AAC (Apple) or WMA DRM std. Since most reading I have done is on WMA, will try to speak of what I read. Basically it is an encrypted file, and a license (encryption KEY I think might be the proper term) gets passed to those devices allowed to have the file. The DRM std is built into the firmware on the devices, or the the software on the computer. Since WMA is a propritary Microsoft product, you have to license it from Microsoft. WMA rippers (newer ones) are suppose to handle the licensing issue also (you rip from your CD a license is put on the file, or something like that). Also what kind of license it is (only put to a playback device, allowed to burn to CD etc.) I just havn't figured out what happens if your hard drive crashes or you get a new computer, where are those license physically?

 

[ghudson]

I guess I need to pay for a downloaded music file and see what I can do with it to test the "system".

 

[FoFa]

If what I have been reading is correct, if you buy a track for "burning to CD" than you can burn it to CD, turn around and rip it and do whatever you want with it (within legal limits). But if you D/L from an unlimited service (like Mapster to go as an example) then you can only transfer it to a licensed device, not burn it to CD nor convert it to another format that can be misused.
Of course I may tiotally misunderstand also

 

[Mile-O]

I got pissed off with iTunes when I joined up, downloaded one song, and had to use their horrible player to listen to it; my other applications, Windows Media Player and Sonique didn't recognise the file type. I think their file was called MP4, or something, and that incident made up my mind never to use iTunes and never to get an iPod.

 

[boblarson]

Then another way some might do it is to subscribe to a music service and play the song while using a wav editor to capture the song, convert it from WAV into a compressed format and download to the player.

Now, as for me, I use WMA at 128Kbps to store on my computer and convert to 48Kbps to store and use on my Dell Digital Jukebox (20Gb). I've got over 600 CD's worth stored, it sounds just fine on it, and I have almost half of the space left to add more.

For converting files I like using dbPowerAmp. I can right click on a file in the Windows Explorer and quickly select to convert. There are extra Codecs available to convert to almost any different type.

One cool thing about the Dell Digital Jukebox is that if you use the Dell Explorer, you can actually copy files FROM the jukebox to your computer.