Some sanity has finally crept into the online digital music mess. As you might have expected, this change did not come (at least directly) from the RIAA, or the "labels" as they are known. It came from hardware and software manufacturers, and as far as I am concerned, for the better.
My household has been pretty much fully digital for a long time now. I started collecting CDs back in the mid 80's and in fact I was one of the first people to have a CD player in his car. Once we went CD, we just about never purchased a vinyl record or cassette tape after that. I had plenty of 8 track tapes too, but they rapidly hit the dustbin. I still have the first CD we ever purchased (Donald Fagen, "The Nightfly") and it is in as good shape as when we bought it.
Once we were able to "rip" CD music into MP3 files in our PCs, we hardly ever even play the CDs themselves anymore - they have just become storage or backup. We also shared the master music PC library between our three active PCs and three portable music player devices.
When online music swapping (Napster and their ilk) became popular, we actually were one of the few families that didn't indulge. I took the high moral ground on this one, and didn't do it, except (to be honest) for a few minor excursions just to see what it was all about.
To play these MP3 (or WMA) files, you need either hardware or software players to do it. For software, I evaluated a few of the active candidates a few years ago, and settled on the MusicMatch Jukebox player. The basic version was free, and they didn't seem to be as bad about selling your name to third parties or spying on you. Technically, the player was pretty good, although it had (and continues to have) a few bugs and quirks.
Recently, Apple Computer started an online music purchase service, iTunes. But it isn't yet available to Windows users. Finally, an equivalent service has become available for the rest of us and, interesting enough, it's from Music Match, my favorite player. Here's the deal:
You can download the basic MusicMatch version 8.1 player for free, or purchase the Plus version for $19.99. The Plus version has a few bells and whistles, but the free basic version can do all you want, even fully download songs from the Internet. So, the first step is to download and install the player.
Once in the player, you can click on Music Download, and a part of the player window opens as a web page. You can navigate through a series of webpages to find your music. I usually click the Genre menu entry, and then select the type of music you want. Having selected the genre, I usually display the full list of artists available. The window shows you how many songs it contains from each artist and lets you sort by a lot of options.
Once you find what you want, you click on Download and go through a series of confirmations and finally it ends up downloaded directly into your MusicMatch library. The cost per song is $.99, or $9.99 for an entire album. There are no sign up fees or monthly fees - you just pay for what you purchase. The library looks fairly extensive, and is growing.
What is important is this: what is downloaded is normal WMA (Windows Media Audio) files. They are not encrypted, and can be played on any player that plays WMA files, including the Windows Media Player itself. So, how do they keep you from copying?
It turns out that the WMA format has the capability to mark the music files as being copyrighted. As such, you can only do certain things with them. This is what MusicMatch lets you do with their files:
a) you can copy the files to up to 3 PCs. Once each PC registers with MusicMatch, it can play any of the songs at any time;
b) you can download the files into a portable MP3 type player any number of times - be sure your player has WMA capability;
c) you can write a music CD an unlimited number of times - you can only write a specific playlist a restricted number of times, but by changing the playlist (i.e. the mix of songs) you can write unlimited CDs of the WMA files.
To me, that is a very good deal. The files use a standard format, the price is right, and the restrictions are acceptable to me. I think this is an excellent compromise and wish the effort and MusicMatch a lot of success. Expect to see a number of other vendors doing basically the same thing soon.
Stop the illegal file swapping and get on board now!
(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport / Oak Island area. You can visit his website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail him at bsc@bobseidel.com).