How much is digital music worth?

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iTunes and eMusic have won my business: Both allow portablity and it is extremely easy to burn to CD.

eMusic has VBR mp3s and you can download 45 songs for $9.99. I ripped to CD and they sound pretty good in the car but not so great on my surround system, the high ends show some distortion and the overall sound is not quite as crisp as CD quality. eMusic has a lot of osbcure stuff that I like and is a great place to explore indies and some great "old" music. I got a Ray Charles greatest hits collection that is outstanding.

iTunes uses mp4, the new standard, and they sound very good when burned to CD -- both on my auto CD player and the surround system I use for critical listening but side by side comparison still show the CD beats all the downloads for pure sound quality. Most albums on iTunes cost $9.99 and many contain 15-18 songs so your net cost is less than 99 cents if you buy albums. However, some albums really are worthless except for a tune or two, so paying 99 cents for what I like is not horrible. Ryan Adams new album was well worth the $9.99 IMHO.

I am not interested WMA files although I have heard a few that sound OK. But they only work in Windows envrionments and I do not limit myself to the MS world.

My wet dream is to find a retailer who provides true CDE quality files, i.e. ogg vorbis or shn or flac -- that is what I want since I usually listen on high definition systems and mp3, wma etc still are not good enough. That is what all retailers need to understand. There are 2 markets; the pop market which accepts the lower quality mp3 and wma for non-critical listeners, and the "high-def" marjket who want the best possible sound -- no one is serving the "high-def" market.

With both services I have had zero problems with portability.; Posted by: Sunny Jalolly Posted on: 12/10/03 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use