Music – Page 3 – Ted's Blog

eMusic

I bought some Dockers this weekend and it included “100 free music downloads” which turns out just to be a trial month with eMusic, a subscription download service. Previously McDonald’s had given away a free song on Sony’s download service, but I investigated that and found out that they used some proprietary music format that only Sony players would recognize. So I never bothered. But 100 free songs sounded pretty good since on iTunes that would be worth $99!

So I looked into it to make sure it was worth it. Interesting. They let you download true MP3 formatted songs with no copyright restrictions and recorded at high variable bitrates for best quality. They don’t have as many songs as iTunes, only 250,000. So what’s the catch?

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iTunes Purchase

When I got the iPod I also had to get Apple’s iTunes (well, not really; I wound up sticking with Windows 98 and using Ephpod to get songs onto the iPod, but I did set up a Windows 2000 hard drive and load iTunes on it).

After a number of weeks I finally got all the security patches in place for Windows 2000 and felt like I could take iTunes for a spin on the internet and download some songs. 99 cents per song is really pretty reasonable. I’ve bought entire albums before because they had 3 good songs. The problem with downloading is you don’t actually have something to hold. I think that tangible ownership is an important part of having music, but maybe I’m just old fashioned. Cover art used to be giant and double albums (and plenty of single albums) would open up to even bigger artwork in the middle. CD covers just aren’t as impressive though some of the disc graphics are kind of neat.

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Michael Hewatt – Being in Dreaming

This is a review I wrote on Amazon:

I heard some of Michael Hewett’s music on NPR’s Hearts of Space one night. So I did some research and wound up buying the CD. Much of the disc is very pleasant new age type acoustic guitar picking with kind of a southwest flair.

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Music you need

I haven’t checked out the store yet (I mostly use PC’s, but don’t tell anyone) but I agree that there is a great market for one hit wonders and singles. There was a time when albums didn’t really mean much and it was just singles. And some artists and types of music are just better suited to singles. When I find a good album, I’ll buy it, but it has to mean something as whole or have a lot of good songs on it.

Here are some of my very favorite album fragments (in one folder, so they’re alphabetical):

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