Recommend a music service, please

At iTunes. The significant one loves it.

I seem to recall that there is an Open Source equivalent. I will hunt down the URL.

Some of my friends have bought music online from Wal-Mart. They've burned them to CD using Windows Media Player 10. It was all pretty easy once you figure out how to navigate Wal-Mart's site.
Their site isn't friendly with FF, you have to use Internet Explorer.

You can buy a Wal-Mart gift card and put some cash on it. That way you don't have to give out your credit card number. You can even renew the gift card at a machine at the front of the store.

They stream music for free, just choose the genre and you get assorted selections. I use the smart recorder that's part of the Creative software that came with the Creative Audigy sound card in my computer. You get maybe ten cuts and then a 30 second advertisement, then back to selections. I save them as .WAV files, 16 bit, 44kc stereo, then I burn directly to a CD. They'll play on any CD player in that format. Most all radio stations have a stream of what they broadcast and are free.

What do we mean by "five copies"? Do you mean to CD five times? Why would I want to do that more than once?

"Organize"? I'm a rather simple soul; to me, "organizing my music" means sorting the CD's by artist...

Not sure if it is accessible in the US, but I would think it is anyway. FutureShop has a bonfire download service, the RAW file quality is fantastic, well beyond most free downloads or i-Tunes downloads.

I just checked Best Buy, and they also have a DRM free service, meaning you can do pretty much what you want with the file.
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?id=pcmcat130600050000&type=category

Now if you are talking free, as in P2P. YOU can download the UTorrent client http://www.utorrent.com/, it will allow you to search a half dozen torrent sites. Torrent is just a file name for the download file, the actual music files will be in mixed versions, mostly MP3 but some FLAC etc.

Just search for the file you want, find a copy with the most seeds (people with a full copy to share) and your good to go.

If you decide to run this way and have questions, PM me anytime. It may take a bit for a reply because I don't monitor that account. You can always prompt me here if you need to.

16 bit with 44kc sample rate is the best for most players and 24 bit won't play on most players. 24 bit is really good, I use it on cuts I wish to play on the computer but won't work on car or portable/boom box players.

Right now I just shove a store-bought CD in and let it go. If I think of putting a stack of 45's on the turntable, will I have a good analogy?

Back in the days of singles, when we chose a stack we were creating a playlist. When all the records had played, we would do it again.

Playlisting is a digital stack of 45s. By creating them, you get an hour of music by multiple artists that you want to hear. So I have a playlist that I pray with, a playlist that I like to clean the house to, a playlist for when things get freaky on TR. I don't have to choose the songs each time because they are already grouped the way I want to hear them.

Think of it this way....

A good Italian chef may have thousands of good recipes up his sleeve. But at any one time, he wants to concentrate on a dozen or so for his menu.

A playlist is like a menu - it can consist of any number of songs that you have on your player. You can have one song on a number of lists. Lists can be long or short.

James

When Tig said she was putting together a playlist for the walk, I listed a heap of different tunes with WALK in the name.

For example: You could have a total 300 songs (or as many as you want)and group/list/reorder them by artist name, or song title etc. as you have suggested, or you can create playlists (you just select a groupd of songs and save them as XYZ playlist. No fancy coding or burning needed, most players allow a free playlist generator system, or you can buy software for more complex management or categorization (is that a word?) of your music.

Any of the 300 songs can reappear in any playlist as many times as you want, it's just a list of songs grouped by category.

Such as "Walking songs", "Heavy Metal songs", "accoustic music" etc.

A song that fits all three catagories could be in all three playlists, but the original song only needs to be stored in your system once, the playlists are just a reference guide that groups music together,

Amazon.com has recently started an MP3 download program - the thing that truly makes it beautiful is you download an actual honest-to-goodness MP3 file, and what you do with that file isn't controlled or monitored by anyone. You can burn as many CDs as you want, you can move it around from computer to computer - anything. Being able to actually BUY music in MP3 format (and not just 'rent' it - which is what you do with iTunes) is a HUGE step. And you can get whole albums for under $5.

It sounds like a concept more oriented to an .MP3 player or listening to music on my computer. Useful information, but I'm probably going to concentrate on burning CDs. My initial goal is to replace my vinyl LPs, hopefully at a lower cost than replacing them with retail CDs (assuming I can find replacement CDs).

When I'm walking, gardening, exercising, etc. around I listen to NPR on a walkman. Play lists sound like mix tapes, something I was always too lazy to bother with. I just stick the tape / CD in and let it go.

Thanks!

A big subject simplified: "Most media are protected by copyright, but have a fair use clause which allows for unhampered use in certain situations. All existing DRM (Digital Rights Management)technologies fail to adequately make concessions for fair use, leading many civil advocates to argue that they restrict the legal use of content."

Basically DRM limites the copies you can make and requries that a licence file accompanies the song. Such as the case when Windows Media PLayer searches for the accompanying licence file in order to play the song.

DRM free means fair use, it means you can burn it to whatever you want as many times as you want, you can tape it, store it in your PC or even share it with others as it is not licence restricted. Mind you, SHARING music files is nto considered "fair use" whereas copying it for your own cdplayer, car stereo, computer etc. IS fair use. This fair usage is exactly how Canadians get away with file sharing, a law was passed here to allow fair use of media, making it next to impossible to sue Canadians for sharing files.

It is legal to have the file, legal to make copies for FAIR use, and legal to store them on your PC, it is also legal to run file sharing software on your PC. So if someone enters your shared folder with your stored, legal music, through a legal portal, it's prety hard to sue them.

IF you manage to work around all those issues and still want to sue a Canadian, then the supreme Court justice has already declared that an ISP offeringuser information is a breach of Constitutional Privacy Rights, so the ISp doesn't cough up the info, they are better off facing a small fine from the RIAA instead.

When you look at how the MPAA (Motion Pitcure Association of America) has now used open source software and then distributed it illegally with hidden code to track university kids downloadign films, you know they are just going too far, grasping at straws etc. Now the MPAA has breached a copyright themselves by not providing source code to their spy projects, so they have been told to cease and desist the rollout.

More info on that here: http://www.audioholics.com/news/industry-news/mpaa-dmca-takedown-notice

Looks like nobody has a clue how to keep gouging the consumers these days.