Ipod or ??? Where to go for downloads?

[amt]

Help!! My wife has expressed an interest in a Nano lately (her birthday is coming up, hint, hint). Im generally not hip to the MP3 thing other than Ive done some ripping etc with Lame/EAC/Foobar just for yucks.

She wants to download lots of singles, form the 70s and 80s for use while running and for in the car. Shes not technically astute BTW.

What is a good route? Ive been thinking the 1gb Nano since Apple products seem to be the most user friendly in general. And what is a good download website? Id prefer a one time payment for unlimited downloading but is that a good way to do it?

Thanks,

amt

[pinkmouse]

Keep it legal, guys and gals!

[BWRX]

The ipod's are quite nice and are intuitive to operate. My girlfriend loves the ipod nano I got her, and she's hard to please!

The iTunes store may have songs she's looking for. I personally encode mp3s from CDs I own or borrow so I know the quality is decent. If you guys have a lot of 70s and 80s CDs just rip them yourself. Alternatively you could try finding a friend who has CDs from those eras and ask if you can borrow them for a day!

[amt]

Hey Brian,

Well, one of the goals is to acquire those songs that dont justify buying the whole CD (meaning nobody I know has it). One hit wonder type stuff. And also, I dont want to have to do much. If my wife and point and click and have a new song, life will be good. I love her but shes not good at PC manipulation and so I spend a huge amount of time as it is debugging her machine and explaining software use.

So do different stores have different music based on iTunes vs whatever? That could be problematic.

amt

[BWRX]

Well the iPod can obviously play mp3s and Apple's proprietary format. It can also play raw uncompressed audio files (WAV or AIFF), WAV files, and Audible files.

Point, click, buy is the whole premise of the iTunes music store. Same goes for most other online music stores. The faster they can get your money the better.

Maybe the iPod will give her the motivation to become more computer savvy.

[xplod1236]

From what I've heard, the one time payment, unlimited downloads sites are there to take your money and link you to a peer-to-peer program which you can get for free. That's not the legal way to get songs, but it's an option.

[Geek]

Lemmie set things straight - downloading is LEGAL in Canada or from a Canadian server. Uploading is not.

That is all

[denver]

Originally posted by amt
Help!! My wife has expressed an interest in a Nano lately (her birthday is coming up, hint, hint). Im generally not hip to the MP3 thing other than Ive done some ripping etc with Lame/EAC/Foobar just for yucks.

She wants to download lots of singles, form the 70s and 80s for use while running and for in the car. Shes not technically astute BTW.

What is a good route? Ive been thinking the 1gb Nano since Apple products seem to be the most user friendly in general. And what is a good download website? Id prefer a one time payment for unlimited downloading but is that a good way to do it?

Thanks,

amt

hi there,

why not install a program like limewire then search your favorite song then download it.. its a nice software... i hope i help..

[xplod1236]

Originally posted by denver
hi there,

why not install a program like limewire then search your favorite song then download it.. its a nice software... i hope i help..

I did not want to bring that up, but since you did, I'll comment. Yes, it's nice software which lets you download for free, but that is not the legal way to get songs. And I think that sharing songs is the illegal part, not downloading.

[kevinkr]

The Apple iTunes music store with a 1GB/2GB Nano is the perfect solution for the very non technical at heart, particularly if you set up iTunes up so that every time you connect the Nano it automatically gets updated so states the Apple ad copy.. (I use iTunes and have a 5GB first gen iPod - still works after nearly 4 yrs, but I need to replace the battery.) I do like the Nano and iTunes but see below:

Caveats:
Nano(s) scratch easily!

The one danger of automatic synchronization is that if there is material on the iPod that is not in iTunes this material will be deleted from the iPod..

I know the above because a very sad niece called me a few weeks ago to say that she had crashed iTunes and it was set to automatically synchronize the Ipod with iTunes, and yes it deleted everything on the iPod.. I was able to recover most of the music, but still have a lot more to do..

IMHO iTunes has a lousy approach to synchronization it just makes the iPod the same as the library in iTunes with absolutely no intelligence whatsoever. Worse is there is no provision in the software for backing up the music files you have purchased, although they harp on the importance of back up you must do it manually - and unless you are very careful to get everything saved in the library as well as the playlists which are saved elsewhere you will have a not so fun time restoring the library after a HD failure.

I have spent many hours restoring other peoples iTunes library and when this happened to me I sort of gave up..

Despite the hype iTunes is not for the brain dead or computer illiterate - if you invest a substantial amount of money in downloaded songs you need to back them up, and make sure that the auto synchronize feature is turned off or that its failings are well understood if using it. You will need to be involved.