A Yankee in Texas

So yesterday Amazon launched the beta version of their DRM (Digital Rights Management) free MP3 store. So this morning I decided to try it out. I decided to download the song from the iPod Nano commercial: 1234 by Feist. I’ve had the song stuck in my head for days.

The process is very smooth. You install a downloader application. When you buy the music the web site prompts you to open a file which tells the downloader to go get your music. All in all I was pretty impressed with the process and it’s DRM free so there is no hassle with how many devices you have it on or how many times to can burn it to a CD.

The song and album prices are competitive with iTune and in some cases a little cheaper. I still think it’s a bit crazy to pay $.89 or $.99 for a song that isn’t on physical media, but DRM free is a step closer to the record companies understanding what we the consumers actually want.

As far as selection goes I did a quick search and I found pretty much every artist I was looking for except one. I searched some main stream and some independent bands. My buddy Steve’s band Small Arms Dealer is on there. If you like punk music go buy this album now. It kicks much ass and they are great guys.

The Mp3’s are encoded at 256kbs, which from what I understand is pretty high quality for an MP3. In case you didn’t know MP3 is a form of compression for audio files and what that basically means they are trying to make a copy of the an audio file that is smaller (ie has less data) than the original, but sounds very similar. To do this they have to remove bits of information. How many bits get removed is determined by the encoding. I am sure there is much more to it, but it’s not my area of expertise. I personally can’t tell the difference between different encoding settings, but I know of many audiophiles that can.

Anyway like they say “Money talks…” So vote with your dollars. If you think that this is a step in the right direction go buy music and show the record labels that this is what we, the consumers, want.

– Jeremy

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 at 11:54 am and is filed under Comments on Technology, Letters from NY. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.