TechSpot - PC Technology News and Analysis

Hey folks
I bought myself a Sandisk MP3 player recently. It came with a free 1 month subscription th Rhapsody.

I Recently fired up my player to listen to some music. It wouldn't play the songs that I had downloaded from (C)Rhapsody and gave me a message saying that I needed to reauthorize my license for the songs. I had to hook up to the Rhapsody program and screw around until it worked.

This sucks. Are there other services that just plain give you a music file without the added license BS? (One that's legal!) I hate the stupid strings that they attach.

Thanks

Apple announced last week or so that they would sell songs from EMI Record Label DRM free, and this week Microsoft said they'd do the same (iTunes and Zune music store respectively).
Source

So you could limit yourself to those. Or you could download DRM'd files legally and burn to CD then rip to mp3 to remove the DRM. Or you could order from some Russian site and hope your credit card info is safe.

PS - Nice job with the bold tags.

I recommend eMusic myself. Good quality songs (VBR encoding) & no DRM. It's mostly independent labels that work with eMusic but that's just fine with me.

Yea yea I know.
Thanks for the tips. The Rhapsody people told me the same thing about burning the songs onto a disc. I don't know what the deal is but I haven't been able to get the burn function to work yet. Ugh!

Personally I dont use any Online music service... They push too much DRM which only makes it harder to actually listen to any music without spending 50 hours filling out forums saying you wont Copy right any of this stuff, BitTorrent is better anyways

The online music stores I use sell new or secondhand CDs. I can then rip them to FLAC or whatever I want, so far I haven't encountered any working copy protection systems in them.