Ok, so Josh and I are finally going to break down and get involved with one of these services to download songs.

We've been looking at options:
Rhapsody
Yahoo
emusic
(neither of us have an ipod so itunes is out of the question obviously, from what I know)

Josh is concerned about signing with a subscription service and he's heard stories about services like Napster where when you stop the subscription the downloaded file stops working.

Sooo...what do you guys use, what do you recommend? I was thinking that Rhapsody's offers looked pretty good. But Josh just isn't sure yet and wants your advice.

I've got the Rhapsody freebie service. 25 "listens" per month free. I like it.

I've also done the "free trial" thing over at eMusic. It went fine...just make sure you cancel the subscription before the billing period starts.

From what I can tell :

Rhapsody = more mainstream stuff

eMusic = more indie stuff

Generally speaking.

I enjoyed Rhapsody, but I only streamed albums or songs, never burned. It's good for previewing albums, though, and there's a pretty wide selection that updates sooner than I had expected.

I had emusic back in the unlimited download days, and I still have a fair number of albums I got when I was a member.

Are you guys only looking for pay services?

If not, try out Soulseek. No subscription fees, all kinds of music [pretty much everything you can possibly imagine] and it's the perfect way to try before you buy, or just download tunes you want for free. Screw paying for tunes from those services. Download the music for free, and if you like it, buy it directly from the artist or label.

There's also Bit Torrent, but it's a bit more complex, and I'm too buzzed to get into it.

Rhapsody is perfect for listening to albums. Huge selection.

You don't get to download files from Rhapsody or Yahoo without paying a per-song fee - you just get to listen from your computer. Napster, yeah, you only get the songs as long as you're a subscriber.

Yeah we're well aware of that. We have no problem with that. The paying part.

Dalen, I had soulseek for a while. Put everything on safety, and then a short time later our hard drive crashed and never came back and now we have a new one and frankly I will never ever use it again. It just seemed to take too long to dl a song and then our computer would go nutty afterwards.

ahhh ok. i hear ya. same thing happened to a friend of mine actually.

how about iTunes? dead easy to get tunes from there.

Rhapsody is the best. Ive seen Yahoo work on some computers really well and not even allow you to log in on other computers...the price is certainly the best. Emusic is a totally different animal. I pay for rhapsody (can run my computer through my stereo and can use rhapsody on my phone) and i have emusic for those extra things that you cant get elsewhere. I got the year plan at emusic for like $190 (20% off for ~1000 tracks)

Take a few minutes to acquaint yourselves with newsgroups, and you can find all sorts of shit: leaks, new releases, previous releases by artists with a notable new release, lots and lots of singles by year, etc.

You need to acquaint me. Im lookin for some stuff.

$190 for downloaded music??? good god, no thanks.

Ill take 'free' thank you very much

I don't understand why anyone would pay to download music.

If you're downloading music, do it for free.

If you're paying for music, you may as well pay for something concrete. A cd case and a booklet and a plastic disc.

right?

why people pay for downloads is beyond me. i mean download it for free, test it out, and then go buy the actual CD for that price if you like it.

good minds think alike.

Amen to that. Sign up for a news provider like EasyNews and you'll find more music than you could ever want.

The thing with downloading is that sometimes you want just one song, or two from a particular artist whose album you may otherwise not want to buy.

That's when these types of programs/services come in handy. Unfortunately we don't have the type of money to be spending on ten-20 cd's a month. But if for instance we do want a couple of obscure songs off of albums that don't particularly sound too great otherwise, then this works perfect.

We're looking at rhapsody right now, it looks pretty decent. Again, his big concern is that if one day we cancel our service the files somehow become inoperable(he was informed Napster does that) .

Idiopathic, you say you have it, have you heard of anything like this? This isn't a possibility is it?

EDIT: I answered my own question in the Help section. There is the difference between dl'ng the track through the subscription service vs purchasing the actual track.

Don’t know if slsk is to blame for your hard drive crashing but I also have a new computer. I download now at speeds around 60.0 Kbps and people upload from me at 40.0 Kbps. Speed is not a problem at slsk. I now test before buying because I own thousands and thousands of CDs and will continue to buy but will make informed decisions for now on.

Sorry, when Im buying a CD, 13-15 dollars is more than Id like to spend for some things. My emusic sub gets me ~ 100, for $1.50-$2.50 per. Considering all I do is sell my CD's anyway, this is cheaper for me.

I d/l plenty of music and buy plenty, this is just one avenue. To each his own.

Could someone please explain why either of these options is in the least bit tempting? You never own anything - you rent. You stop paying and those files are no longer usable. This is the music industry's dream - you continue to pay for the same thing FOREVER because you'll never be able to just stop unless you just give up on music altogether. The only service I'd consider is Emusic because you actually own those files, and they're not DRM-corrupted files that you'll be stuck with should you ever get a player that doesn't support them.

And Emusic's apparently great for jazz fans, as they carry titles that aren't available on CD and probably never will be, from what I read.

But I say if you're going to pay, go buy the CDs, rip what you want, and trade/sell them to make back some of your money. At least you're not just throwing it away like with Rhapsody and Yahoo.

I am probably in the minority since I didn't pay for any individual downloads on Rhapsody, but I subscribed to the service for a half year, maybe three quarters. To me, it's the same as subscribing to satellite radio, except I can pick and choose what I want to hear, or stream albums I'm interested in before I buy them.

I also can't believe that we haven't touted our own Colinswood up in this bitch.

It's just us obners, with built-in chat and downloading.

I need to get back on again. I've been slacking.

What do you have to download for this? I've been wanting to join up for awhile.

I don't see the original instructions thread, but if you just shoot Sketch a PM he should be able to set you up to start. It looks more difficult than it really is.