This site charges by the mb and offers a choice of quality settings and compression right up to lossless, without any DRM. An album at 192kbs costs around $1.20 and 320kbs less than $2.

They have a larger catalogue than iTunes or any other online music store I’ve come across and have the current UK and US top 100 albums as well as countless film soundtracks, and an enormous back catalogue covering virtually all tastes.

I have used them for time with no problems whatsoever.

This is, without doubt, the premier site for a myriad of reasons. For starters, the site is Russian, and therefore not subject to the same DRM laws. This allows them to charge roughly $1 per album, or about a dime per track. I have spent appx. $80 for about 50 CDs’ worth of high bitrate files.

That’s my next point – you can choose between 128, 192, and near-audiophile 320 kbps. I love this.

For those worrying about their credit cards in the hands of a Russian processor, the payments are processed by Chronopay, which is a very responsible company (sort of the the PayPal of the EU). I have been using them for one year with no probs).

Seriously, folks – even at the highest bitrate (320), you’re still only paying about a quarter per track. And the selection is VAST. Everyone I’ve turned on to it is a fiend for it, now.

Just thought I’d pass this along!

Firstly any CD’s I really like which I own can be ripped. If I’m ripping to MP3 (which I often do for compatibility reasons), I use bit rates of 256 or 320 KBps, where file compression impacts very little on the sound (I am a musician who records and engineers projects on the side, I may not have “golden ears” but consider my hearing to be above average. If it’s just for my computer, I rip to 256 KBPS Ogg Vorbis files, which allow the improved sound and the files are 15-20% smaller than mp3, plus as there are no licensing fees for Ogg Vorbis, the format is risk free. I use CD-Tag for this, for a small fee it can rip mp3, wma, aac, ogg vorbis, mp3 vbr, FLAC lossless etc in a multitude of bit rates. CD-EX is good for free to encode mp3.

I do download some music from puretracks.com – Most of their catalogue is encoded at 192 KBps .wma DRM, they do allow you to redownload lost files for a certain period. I have 2 albums downloaded from Puretracks encoded at 320 KBps – the problem is though, that they DON’T TELL YOU what the bitrate is, so I also have one or two files at 128 KBPS which is noticably lacking in high end and bass. As the service grows it seems they are cost-cutting, as they once boasted that ALL files were encoded at 192 KBps or higher.

The library option is a good (if not legal) method. Of course, I have heard of people who go with a ’shopping list” to their library, listen to it, rip the album or tracks they like to mp3 and then file share. Copyright protection in the last 2 years or so is making this option increasingly redundant.

As for “get a Mac” – I use Macs and PC’s and see positives in both systems. It seems like a last resort trade-off to spend a fortune on a new Apple computer when a few precautions, BACK-UP Data, using Firefox instead of IE, running 2 or 3 bona-fide anti-spywares/anti virus such as Webroot Spysweeper, Spybot, Pest Patrol etc. and keeping them updated, keeping firewall tight and NEVER installing anything without fully reading the EULA, even if it is 20 pages long. And if Apple can translate their IPOD success into selling more PC’s, you can be sure that virus and spyware writers will start producing nasties that hit the Macs. Mac OSX and Linux offer less threat from spyware/viruses mostly down to the fact that they are in much lesser abundance than Windows, rather than having a totally superior design (yes, Windows sucks, XP sucks less than before but still sucks) – Like the Betamax vs VHS war, Betamax was superior quality but VHS was marketed better, hence became the standard platform.

I do not necessarily believe that a company should allow you to freely redownload items that have been purchased. Traditional stores will not give you a new CD if you scratch yours. However. with the cost of storage and bandwidth what it is, I do believe that they sites should offer a premium service (an additional 10c/song?) to allow further downloads.

I was looking for two songs that I did not want to purchase an entire album for. While I did get them, I have been unable to transfer the music to my second computer. It’s a good thing I had a coupon so did not have to pay full price!

http://spaces.msn.com/members/mike/Blog/cns!1pG4qKNdtRA5Nl-UhvZI_1rQ!999.entry

I have been giving Napster To Go a whirl this morning, and it seems to be pretty decent. The control built into WMP seems to hang every once in a while for no reason – but the fact that I can sample full albums and take them with me on my smartphone might just get me to keep paying.

However, other than burning songs to CD there’s one other very easy way your buddy Michael could have prevented his dilemma of losing his daughters iTunes collection. Use Mac in the first place! No viruses to worry about! And a much better user experience overall.

http://www.thelittleappfactory.com/software/ipodripwin.php