Canadians can finally enter the age of legal music downloads:
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2004/dec/02canada.html
Only took 'em 1 1/2 years but hey, better late than never! Best news is, you pay $.99 Canadian per track...translated to roughly $.84 American. THAT is a hell of a deal, and the cheapest price per track of any iTunes Music Store in the world. If anyone here starts using it, please give your feedback.
BTW, all you'd need to do is download iTunes for your computer, then visit the store and download your songs. Using iTunes, burn the downloaded songs to a music CD, then you can trash or remove the protected dowloaded songs (AAC format). Then, put that burned CD back into your computer and rip the songs back into unprotected MP3 files for use however you wish (WMP, MP3 player, etc.). Yes, it's jumping through hoops a little, but that's the price you pay for legal downloads.
See that: us Yanks have some love for ya this week. First a visit from Bush, and now legal music downloads! ;)
Wow, all this nice treatment makes me want to break down and cry out of joy ;)..
I don't know i'll have to check it out. That does sound like a pretty good deal!.
I've got news for ya, Eric - it always WAS legal for us to download songs. Funny you should post this as I was just reading an article about how it's legal here until "The music industry manages to get a supreme court judge that doesn't listen to his ipod in his chambers" (the exact words of the article). Our Supreme Court ruled a few years ago that downloading music for personal use is perfectly legal, no different than listening to a radio staion (or recording a song off one). What is illegal is uploading songs. If you download a song you're OK, but you have to immediately move it out of your shared folder because if you share it you're breaking the law.
Even still, it's about time iTunes came to Canada - I know I'd rather spend a buck for a song than put up with spyware and download a hundred "corrupt" copies to get a good one...
batch files are your friend
"
@echo off
:start
move Incoming\*.* Music\Unsorted\
sleep.exe 60
goto start
"
Looks in a specified folder (in this case .\Incoming\) for files and moves them to another location ( .\Music\Unsorted\) every 60 seconds.
I tried itunes music download, it sux. I cannot stand 128 bit files because although they say there isnt you can hear a huge difference. I do use itunes for my media player though.
I always try to go for 192 or above. If you're running something like $20 speakers, 128kbit, or even lower, may sound as great as the larger files, but if you have anything of decent quality, there's a huge difference. My v.2-400's are far from the best speakers out there, but they sure are capable of putting shame to low bitrate mp3's
Itunes only offers 128? Didn't know that :wtf:
They are 128-bit AAC files. In theory they're supposed to sound better than 160-bit MP3's. After re-ripping them into something higher, I can honestly say they're not too bad and are roughly equivalent to a 160-bit file. I'd prefer something higher as well...however, the monumental task for anyone selling music over the Internet is a fast transfer rate. Add encryption on top of that, and you can see why Apple uses the AAC format. It's not bad really...could be worse!
I'm not complaining about the AAC format, I even use that for all my files on my PC. It's just that I am a bit of an audiophile so the huge difference in sound, really gets on my nerves. You can really here it in the lack of lows and highs, cymbals for example sound terrible in 128 bit format. But overall Itunes is far easier to use than Winamp or windows media player at least for the pc. The gracenote cd database they use is also very nice. I have an 20gb ipod and i love it, makes boring trips and long waits very nice.
OMG....speaking of the subject at hand, check out today's Joy of Tech (http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/index.html):
(http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyimages/624.png)
So is this offensive to Canadians, or just hilarious? I don't know whether to :giggle: or :dunno: !
most of it is :giggle: some is :dunno: I don't see anything funny about club music. :(
I found most things funny, except the club music having an obvious reference to clubbing baby seals (http://pages.sbcglobal.net/bryanbaskin/clubbing.html) .
That's helarious.
Lets please not make this into another huge flame war. They have been strangely very common on this board.
..and this time, I didn't do it. :p
Here I'm thinkin', you actually pay for music? Heh..
(I got most of my MP3 collection before even Napster existed)
Then again, oddly enough, I have the CDs for most of the stuff I downloaded, and only downloaded it because I couldn't find a program I liked at the time for ripping stuff off the CDs. (we're talking like 1998 here)
Sometimes I even own multiple copies of this stuff.. because I owned it on cassette, then bought it on CD. :D
The way I figure it, I can use a filesharing to download a couple of songs from a certain artist. If i really like them I will always buy there cd if not I just delete the songs. So I pretty much just preveiw them. I am also selfish enough to turn off sharing :evilgrin:. Now what is so wrong about that?
The only thing I'll outright pirate is one-hit-wonder stuff. I'm not buying a whole CD just to torment my fiance with "Funkytown". :p
The vast majority of stuff I've downloaded, I already owned.. often both on CD and cassette. I paid my dues.. and I don't give a if the RIAA doesn't like my lack of continued support. :p If they want my financial support, they can talk Pink Floyd into a reunion and tour. :p (oh I'd be all over that like white on rice and a glass of milk on a paper plate in a snowstorm) Hey, Cream's back together.. so why not? :p