I've been working over the last few days to get party music together for a dance that the youth are having on Sunday. While I was trying to find a copy of "The Bird" by Morris Day and The Time, I decided to investigate some of the new legal file sharing options. I downloaded iTunes and Napster.
iTunes was easy to use, but when I downloaded a file, they saved it in a proprietary format so I can't copy it to a standard MP3 player and take it where ever I want. I needed to edit the song for content because they cuss at the very beginning. Since it wasn't an MP3 file, I could burn it to CD so I'll pull it off the CD and convert it back to a standard WAV so I can edit it and them into an MP3 using CDex. (CDex is a little more complicated, but it lets me do what I want to do).
I never actually downloaded anything with Napster, so I'm not sure of the format or ease of purchase, but Napster also did not have the obscure song that I was looking for. Not sure what that means for Napster, but I liked the look. I'll have to see how well it performs at some point.
Each of the services charged $0.99 per song. I'm curious to see about using it with some other songs I want.
I'm also in the process of trying to get a linux PVR to work. So far no luck, but I did manage to install RedHat, so there is a possibility of success in the far distant future.
