Music download help

[fossyy]

As a new mac user i would welcome some help with where to PURCHASE music online.
Everywhere i've tried in australia to my knowledge does not support macs and today i purchased what i thought was a membership to a music store (www.findanymusic.com) appears to be a site to down load music swaping software(which i havn't managed to do yet).
I have a 1.33ghz 12" power book and a 20gig ipod.
Recently i purchased a VINES cd with some form of copyright protection which would not even play in the powerbook so i returned it,i think this is taking copyright to far.


Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[kaylee]

Unfortunately there are no Mac-compatible music download services in Australia right now (Hurry up and get here iTMS please!!!).

Destra Music (which encompasses sanity, hmv, jb hi fi, leading edge music and a few others) says they may add AAC compatibility in the future along with their current WMA. Telstra's bigpond music currently only supports WMA (don't know if this will change, would be disappointing if they don't, especially seeing Telstra supports Mac's using them as an ISP). Sony Australia - not sure on what format but they say you require either windows media player or windows version of real player.

That unfortunately really leaves you with only two alternatives to get your music - stick to buying CDs (which is no good when the music you are after is only available on a copy protected disk which is not technically a CD because it breaks the standards), or resort to using a Windows PC to download from one of these services, using iTunes for windows to convert to AAC (probably lose quality in the process), and then transfer over to your Mac.

Sorry i couldn't really help you.

 

[johnnyjibbs]

...or resort to using a Windows PC to download from one of these services, using iTunes for windows to convert to AAC (probably lose quality in the process), and then transfer over to your Mac.

I'm afraid iTunes specifically says that it converts non-protected WMA files only. All music stores use protected WMA which has the DRM layer on it. This means you can't do that. Although I can't imagine the conversion is particularly good either - the other alternative is to burn to CD and then re-rip in iTunes but the quality will probably then be terrible (unless you import in AIFF or Apple Lossless and put up with massive files sizes for crappy WMA quality).

I'm afraid, you'll just have to wait until iTMS Australia, or for one of the other services to start using AAC.

 

[kaylee]

I completely forgot about iTunes not being able to convert DRM'd WMA files. Thanks for correcting that johnyjibbs.

 

[decksnap]

As far as I can tell it IS legal, but the debate on this is up in the air and I have yet to find a completely credible, non-biased opinion on the legality of this site- but
www.allofmp3.com is a Russian site where you can buy music encoded in any format at whatever bitrate you choose, and each song cost like a penny. It is freaking amazing, and my opinion is that at this point it is legal to download from. Give it a shot, but read up on it first.

Please- I don't need a speech from anyone telling me it is immoral even if it is legal, because if you're the type who would give said speech, we just don't agree.