“All the cool kids…
…download their music these days.” So I was told last night by a friend of mine and it has more than an element of truth to it – iTunes was swamped by the increased demand after Christmas.
DRM doesn’t feature on a lot of people’s radar but maybe it should? I guess the geeks have to be better at promoting the alternatives. The two obvious alternatives are eMusic and Magnatune, I haven’t used either – I haven’t bought much music recently (download or otherwise) but Em’s just got a new PC and it’s wired up to the stereo so I guess now is the time.
I see on the blog of the CEO of Magnatune that the Rhythmbox music player now has the ability to buy Magnatunes tracks – cool, but the new version of Rhythmbox isn’t included in Fedora yet, I guess we might have to wait for Fedora 7? Hope not!
It’s been a good, if uneventful Christmas, still at my parents, done a little coding and last night met up with some old friends (Dave, Paul & Tanya), just before Christmas Adam came to visit. I’ve seen a lot of old faces but not everyone I’d like to have, I’m going to have to make sure I get in contact with everyone
P.S. I’ve heard that if you’re using eMusic on Linux then eMusic-GNOME is the slickest way to do it – will have to have a play
Audio LunchBox is another viable alternative
Also, amarok hooks into Magnatune quite nicely too, and it is a very nice audio player
Thanks for the info Anton, though I’ve been playing with magnatune as it has OGGs for each album :)
(And I’ve heard good things about Amarok but I tend to stick to GNOME/gtk+ apps)
My problem with OGGs is that my older iPod does not play them… There is an OSS project somewhere trying to do it, but with current algorithms it is not fast enough for real time decoding. If it ever works I will flash my iPod and start using OGG for all my music, but probably only for new stuff