Napster Reborn

So after listening to EnergyX for a while I collected a list of cool songs I wanted.

First I tried the time-tested method of pirated MP3s. Well, since the demise of the original Napster, I’ve found that it’s hard as hell to find find pirated MP3s. I tried that Kazza thing but I ended up with two defective MP3s-one was not the right song and the other was just 15 minutes of silence. I won’t even go into all the adware/spyware/who-knows-what-ware that thing installs. (I installed it on my software testing computer, which I can easily rebuild by cloning over the hard drive.)

In the old days I might turn to the alt.binaries.sounds.mp3 newsgroup or whatever it was called, but of course Comcast doesn’t carry it. At least it didn’t last time I looked, which admittedly was probably over a year ago. And even if it did, you can’t really choose what to download; you’re stuck with whatever people decide to upload. I would have to subscribe to an unfiltered newsgroup service, which would probably run me $10-$20/month. That’s pretty ridiculous just to get a handful of songs.

So I figured it was time to check out the state of legitimate Internet music. So I downloaded Napster and grabbed a handful of 99 cent songs.

It was pretty easy to find the songs I wanted, which was a big plus. But the amount of protection built into the song media is just crazy. You can’t play the songs except in Napster, which kind of blows. You can, however, burn the songs to CDs which is pretty cool.

I was keenly interested in the quality of the audio. I’d characterize the sound quality as somewhere around “FM Radio” quality on my own personal scale. I think they are roughly 128kbps quality MP3 quality, which is okay for playing on my computer speakers, but is noticably inferior to CDs in my truck. The compression basically wipes out all the hard transients in the audio, so everything sounds kind of muddled and mushed up.

But I guess you can’t expect too much for 99 cents.

Addendum: I found this article which talks a little bit about the sound quality of online music.

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