Napster serves mp3s again.

[jackofallgeeks]

Of marginal interest: the bastardized son of the original Napster, the new
Napster is now offering
all it's songs as mp3 downloads at 256bps for 99 cents. Just one more
place to go, I guess, to see if I can find a song as a more-useful mp3
before crawling to iTunes and the drm'd m4a.

As a note, I've finally read up on what the FLAC music format is and would
really like to see that come into favor. It's a compression format in the
way mp3 is, but mp3 encoding loses a lot of information: you can't recreate
a CD-quality track from an mp3. The opposite is true for FLAC: no
information is lost and full quiality can be retrieved from the FLAC file.
Until then, though, mp3s work for me.

Comments

I defy you (and hope to be wrong)

[jackofallgeeks.livejournal.com]

"That's What I Get" by Nine Inch Nails
"Short Skirts" by Felix Da Housecat
"Rich Girl" by Sugarcult (Not live)
"End of May" by Keren Ann (Not French)

Re: I defy you (and hope to be wrong)

[jackofallgeeks.livejournal.com]

This (http://lyricwiki.org/Sugarcult:Rich_Girl) pretty much sums up everything I know about the song. I can't find it on Amazon or any discography. After reorganizing my music library I have a live recording (I don't like live recordings), but I remember having a studio version (I think).

Re: I defy you (and hope to be wrong)

[jackofallgeeks.livejournal.com]

Those are, indeed, the songs I've been seeking.

Your awesome is awesome.

[otakulk.livejournal.com]

Flac really took off in the pirate section (specifically on oink before it was shut down), especially with the tech-geeks. I like flaac, but it doesn't play on myipod, and I find myself burning CDs so infrequently that I can't justify converting to flaac for my general music purposes.

If you are a big flac fan though, the linux that you can install on the ipod can play them, I just don't like the interface as much as the regular apple one.

Also, I think very soon you'll see music providers offering different formats of the content they provide. The space is cheap, its the bandwidth they want to cut down on (flac >> m4a). I do recall one short lived music website that charged you based on the bitrate that you wanted. I thought that was awesome. Also, the new NIN album Slip (I think you had a post about it) is available for free in flac format. They really took it to an extreme though, offering the 1.2 GB source audio (higher sampling rate than WAV) if people wanted it.

All in all, I think the more formats, the more people will find the content accessible. I personally stick to mp3s as well, even though I could do m4v, but if I buy a song I want it to play on every device I own (ipod, PC, etc) regardless of the operating system or software (its freaking 2008 people!). I guess for now formats provide that extra layer of DRM, but I wonder how BSON will fair now that they have mp3s (They were doing really poorly with microsoft drm'd wma, mostly due to the lack of device support. I heard amazon was doing well with pure mp3 sales).