Thursday, April 20th, 2006 | Author:

I hate it when I like one song off an album and that’s it. I don’t want to buy the whole album just for that one song. I’ve considered paying for a digital download, but I’ve never done it before. What format do most sites put the file in? Can you burn it to a cd? If so, is there a limit? Someone please educate me. I need to get my hands on Simply Being Loved (Somnambulist) by BT since I can’t find a reputable store that sells the single.

Category: Music, Web
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4 Responses

  1. 1
    Kristi 

    I strongly recommend iTunes. It is so easy to sort your music and burn to CD as many times as you want. You could probably burn MP3s from the CD if you wanted to, but I haven’t had any reason to try it.

  2. 2
    Kristi 

    By the way, iTunes has 6 different versions of the song you want, for 99 cents each.

  3. 3
    paulw 

    I think there are places online that sell non-rights-managed music in MP3 format. I’ve read about them but have never seen one, and I don’t know they’d have what you want anyway.

    I also very strongly recommend iTunes. I don’t have to tell you how amazing I think it is. I also don’t want to tell you how much I’ve spent at the iTunes Music Store. ;-) Like Kristi, I went and looked up your song, and it’s indeed there, including multiple remixes.

    iTunes sells songs in high quality AAC format, which is based on Dolby and MPEG-4. They use Fairplay for rights management. It’s EASY to use iTunes to convert your purchased AAC song into a rights-management-free, high-quality, great-sounding MP3. So don’t worry about that.

    If you leave the song as-is after you purchase it, you can 1) play it an unlimited number of times on up to 5 different computers simultaneously, 2) play it on an unlimited number of iPods, 3) burn it to CD an unlimited number of times, and 4) burn it as part of an unchanging playlist 7 times (meaning, you can burn a single playlist with a purchased song on it up to 7 times – this just ensures you’re not mass-producing entire copies of retail CDs for resale, which would be wrong). So you see how wide-open it really is.

    The digital rights in iTunes Music Store purchases is FAR more liberal than other services, which invariably use Microsoft’s lower-quality and much more restrictive WMV format. I have never run into any limitations, any situations where I wanted to play or burn my iTunes music and couldn’t.

    If you just use iTunes to convert your song to MP3 after you download it, then none of these rules apply.

  4. 4
    Kevin 

    Everybody else already said what I was going to say. Listen to them, for they know of what they speak.