MakeUseOf » buying music

Apple Opens iTunes Music & Movies Store In 12 More Countries & iBooks Store in 25 [News]

Dave LeClair — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 16:31:08 +0000

Apple are digging themselves even deeper into the business of selling electronic music by expanding their business into 12 more countries. iTunes is one of the largest sellers of music in the world, and thanks to this new expansion they are now a little bit larger. For the last couple of days, rumors have abounded about Apple expanding their music store into new territory, and now those rumors have proved to be true.

Users in Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Romania, Slovakia or Slovenia can now log into the iTunes store and legally buy all of their music. Users in these countries have always been able to buy applications for mobile devices such as the iPhone and iPad though the iTunes store, but music has remained off-limits until now.

This new expansion puts the Apple music store in 36 different countries, including all of the countries in the European Union.

Reports from users in these countries say that they are also able to download movies in their iTunes store. This service was also unavailable before the move. In addition, 25 new countries now support shopping in Apple’s iBooks store. These new countries include: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, and Switzerland.

Source: TheNextWeb via MacRumors

4 Add Ons That Can Make Songbird Worth Your While

Simon Slangen — Sun, 02 May 2010 17:31:38 +0000

Back when Songbird – a music player based on Mozilla’s code – initially launched, I was immediately intrigued by the idea. A completely customizable music player. The audio equivalent of Firefox.

Sadly, the critiques were largely true. Songbird was riddled with bugs and sure didn’t mind crashing once in a while.

Since then, Songbird has come a long way. Further than most iTunes fans care to admit. Not only is the little birdie far more stable – about as stable as an application gets – the Songbird addons have greatly matured as well.

Back in 2008, Laurence reviewed Eight Great Songbird Extensions Worth A Test Drive. There are some interesting mentions so check it out, but they’re largely still gimmicks. Yeah, just like a big part of iPhone applications.

The Songbird addons discussed below are serious. They can add a lot of extra value to your Songbird experience. With a bit of luck, it might just be enough to convert you to a new music player.

mashTape

Before the internet, being interested in something was a rather disappointing experience. Now, with the Google-Wikipedia combo, you can get extra information on pretty much everything.

MashTape takes this quest for knowledge – also dubbed, ‘being interested’ – to your music player and fills in the impersonal blanks between that bulk of artist names.

In a number of tabs, appearing at the bottom of your screen (see the very first screenshot), mashTape fetches additional data on the ‘now playing’ song. In Artist Info, you can read more about the group, with snippets pulled from Last.fm, MusicBrainz, Freebase, or Wikipedia.

Additionally, the News tab gives you an RSS-like experience, with the latest news items from a number of sources, including Google News, Hype Machine, and MTV Music News.

Finally you have the Photos and Videos tabs. These will show pictures and videos from the current artist, from YouTube, Flickr and SmugMug.

LyricMaster

LyricMaster isn’t a Songbird addon you’ll use every single day (or actually, you might), but it can prove invaluable at happy or heavily populated moments. Although a lot of music players allow you to add lyrics to a song, Songbird’s LyricMaster pulls them in automatically and displays them in the sidebar.

The sidebar will automatically adjust itself to your theme (as seen above), and can be collapsed when you don’t need it. For the diehards, or those regularly offline, LyricMaster also allows you to save the lyrics of a particular, or even all songs, to your hard disk.

Last.fm

Last.fm, in case you’ve been living under a digital rock, is a music website that can learn your tastes. From there on, you can either play music that’s recommended to you, or that’s similar to an artist, album, or tag of your choice. It’s not as accurate as just using your own music, but it makes for some great new music recommendations. And there’s seamless integration with Songbird.

The experience with Songbird’s Last.fm add-on is twofold. In terms of scrobbling, the plug-in keeps track of what you’re listening to, and stays in constant communication with Last.fm’s servers. Even tracks listened while offline will be submitted later on.

As you can see above, Last.fm’s radio stations seamlessly play in Songbird. Even the album art keeps up. But probably best of all, you can rate, hate, or tag songs that are playing. And not just the radio stations, but your library music as well.

7digital

A lot of people use iTunes because of the music store integration. Guess what. Songbird now features 7digital integration. 7digital is one of the most popular online music stores. Their prices are considerably lower, and on par with the iTunes music store. Perhaps best of all, you don’t need a credit card to access it.

The 7digital Songbird add-on allows you to log into the 7digital store from your music player. From there on, you can purchase or download previously purchased songs to your computer. Song downloads are immediately added to your music Library. If you’ve been using Songbird long enough, the 7digital add-on also features music recommendations, by scrobbling your music Last.fm-style.

What do you personally think of Songbird? Do you know any other noteworthy extensions? Let’s take a look in the comments section below!

Buying Music: iTunes Store vs Amazon MP3 Downloads

Stefan Neagu — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 14:01:38 +0000

In these tough times for the economy, file sharers and students alike, it’s time to find out exactly how much the convenience of buying music from iTunes costs.

To the untrained eye, buying Amazon MP3 music downloads might not immediately seem like a bargain ““ and let’s face it, it’s not as easy as clicking the buy button in iTunes. As with all things Apple, the whole experience of buying music on iTunes is seamless, simple and the catalog is huge, encompassing songs from the most obscure indie bands to mainstream pop.

Apple provides a slightly higher quality music format (DRM-free 256kb/s AAC), they also have variable song pricing, most individual songs costing you $1.29. Less popular songs are priced at $0.99 and $.79 (there are very few), but you can usually get a better deal by purchasing the whole album, with a typical 12 track record running you at $9.99.

There’s some good news though. Various promotions are always available if you visit the music store home, check the Facebook fan page and sign up for the Apple education newsletter. Just the other week, a 30 track sampler full of indie tracks was available for free, in addition to the free songs available every week on Tuesday.

You will also notice that certain bands/singers and genres will go on sale on special occasions, holidays or celebrations. You also have a good chance of getting the album at a lower price if you pre-order or buy it after the dust settles (after 3-4 months of the original release).

Depending on your perspective, as a PC or Mac user, an iPod or another device owner, the AAC format in which the music is available, might or might not suit your needs. The 256Kb/s AAC format is considered to be of higher quality to its MP3 counterpart, but any chance of noticing the difference will require a pretty expensive audio setup. (For more details on difference between audio formats see Audio File Formats Explained in Simple Terms)

Listening in noisy environments, on low quality ear buds (like the ones that come with your iPod) will mask any difference between the formats. You should also consider that not all devices can play the AAC format, especially older MP3 players. For most people, it doesn’t make sense to buy music from the iTunes Store without owning an iPod or iPhone ““ they probably have another application that syncs their device, and generally, buying Amazon MP3 downloads is cheaper.

Another nail in iTunes’s coffin is the fact that the Amazon downloader application will automatically import the Amazon MP3 songs you buy into iTunes if you choose to. Which means that you can have the songs on your iPod with just a little bit of hassle, as there’s no need to import manually. Plus since the Amazon MP3 songs come in DRM-free MP3 format, they can be immediately synced to your iPod, without requiring transcoding. If you’re using another MP3 player, like the Sandisk ones, your device most likely syncs with Windows Media Player, which is also compatible with the Amazon Downloader automatic import.

Amazon scores more points for having a lot larger collection of promotional priced albums and songs, and also offers a selection of free ones every day. At the end of the day, there’s no discernible reason that would make a price conscious person opt for buying music on iTunes.

Don’t forget to share your thoughts in the comments. You should also check out Download Free Music, Videos & Movies on iTunes, 7 Sites To Get Free Music Legally, 6 Ways To Sync Music To Your iPhone Without iTunes and 3 Ultra Cheap Alternatives To iTunes Store.

3 Ultra Cheap Alternatives To iTunes Store

Simon Slangen — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 17:00:10 +0000

Contrary to the predictions of most economists, online media downloads did take off. People tend to think that nerds these days have no morale, but they’re often wrong.

These days, instead of going to the shop, or ordering your stuff online, a lot of people download their music via services like the iTunes Music Store, Amazon MP3 or 7digital.

However, although downloading your music holds a ton of advantages, especially for us lazy ones, it can be a pain at times as well. People still feel some of those more absurd restrictions, and sometimes they just right out miss the ‘collection’ of physical copies. Also, if the producers can skip a big part of the production process, you should be able to pay less as well, right?

iTunes and Amazon distribute digital copies at physical retail pricing. But although people think they ‘dominate’ the market, in fact they’re just dominating publicity. There are a ton of available online music services waiting for you, each cheaper than the former.

Alternatives to iTunes Store

The cheapest of alternatives to iTunes store are natively Russian, because of a ‘legal trick‘ that allows them to cut away a large part of the price. The United States have tried to pressurize the Russian government in shutting these services down, but none of the charges held up, and most of the sites are now back online. More information about the legalities can be found here.

The only disadvantage about this service is that you can’t pay with PayPal, or bill per song/album. Instead, you’ll have to make money deposits of 10 to 25 dollars, minimum. Nevertheless, this is a very small price to pay.

Editor’s note: Some ISPs may block access to these sites, in which case, you may use a proxy server to access blocked websites.

So, are you ready? Here they come, the cheap music download services.

GoMusic.ru

GoMusic.ru, also accessible through its MP3Search.ru mirror site, has music available from over 55,000 artists, and 63,000 albums. These include most popular artists, and some of the more obscure ones as well.

Downloads are about 0.09$ per track and between 1 and 2$ per album. Most songs are encoded at 192kbps, and some even at a stunning 320kbps bitrate. Your purchases get stored on the site and can be redownloaded whenever you want.

Upon signing up, you’ll receive 10 free songs, after that you’ll have to make a money deposit.

The main reason I like this site is because they accept deposits of as low as 10$ (abt 7 euros), and you can pay with your phone as well as with most major credit cards. You simply call to a paid number, and get billed through your call. This works for most countries around the world.

MP3panda

MP3panda is by far the cheapest service around. Most albums leave the store for under a dollar, some even for a few cents. Individual songs can be purchased for 0.05$ standard price. The songs are encoded at a minimum of 192kbs, although a lot of them actually rise over the 200-mark.

The site currently provides over 35,000 artists with over 170,000 albums, which adds up to about 1.9 million songs. If you’re unsure about the service, you can have a taste by downloading their daily free albums.

A question arises. If music can be bought this cheap, why would anyone still download stuff illegally?

MP3Panda no longer accepts PayPal, but takes most major credit cards.

LegalSounds

LegalSounds, although with a dubious name, is another wonderfully cheap service. With about 120,000 artists, and a total of 2.1 million songs, this one is very much the winner for quantity.

The price per song is equal to that of GoMusic.ru with 0.09$, but the albums are slightly cheaper, hovering just under 1$. They always offers the US top 40 for free, and encodes its songs at a 192 to 320kbps bitrate.

LegalSounds also provides you with a free desktop client for Windows 2000, XP and Vista.

Like with MP3Panda, most major credit cards are accepted, with a minimum deposit of 25$.

Alternatives

Did you think those were the only choices?? No, they were just the absolute toppers. If you aren’t satisfied, check the list below for even more alternatives.

MP3 Sparks – This is the mirror of the once notorious AllOfMP3
MP3 Sale – Another really cheap service.
Just Music – An average service, but with quite a lot of songs.

Do you have any other suggestions? Are you familiar with any other cheap alternative to iTunes Music Store? What do you think about these services? Share your opinions in the comments section below.