New From My Morning Jacket: It took me a while to get around to the latest album from And you know what to do with any offer that seems too good to be true. The bottom line is, don’t sign up for a music service you haven’t heard of without carefully reading its terms of service. Translated, this means that you would not legally own any music downloaded from EMD. There’s also a section where you agree not to upload any content that “infringes any third party’s intellectual property” to the peer-to-peer network. EasyMusicDownload’s terms, for example, spell out that it’s only selling you a recommendation of free software it doesn’t run the network that the software accesses and it makes no guarantees about content availability. Essentially, they’re selling you a copy of Kazaa or some other free peer-to-peer file sharing software.

A quick look at the terms of service on any of these dubious sites can tell you exactly what they’re doing. Unfortunately, the new service doesn’t support many portable players yet (only the Nomad Zen Xtra and several Palm PDA models work at the moment), so most users will have to burn CDs and re-rip tracks to take them on the road. The new store’s 192-kilobits-per-second AAC files are also the highest-quality paid downloads I’ve heard. Both services show you an artist’s entire discography even if they can’t sell you most of the albums in it–a helpful touch. The RealPlayer Music Store has a lot in common with Rhapsody. September 2003 issue of PC World, I gave high praise to RealNetworks’ Rhapsody subscription service. I’ve spent a few hours with the new store and media player, and the news is pretty good so far. Hewlett-Packard-branded IPods–was RealNetworks’ new RealPlayer 10 and its associated The biggest recent digital music news–apart from Apple’s deal to produce

It probably won’t kick Apple ITunes out of its spot as my default media player but it may very well become my favorite app for ripping CDs. All in all, Winamp 5 is a pretty nice release. Video playback, while not super smooth, is handled adequately. You can set up simple or complex rules to create customized views of your music library that perform the same function.Īs far as the basics, CD ripping is quick and ultra-configurable in the $15 pro version. Smart or rules-based playlists are handled through the music library as well.

Preference pages give you nearly unlimited control over the organization of your music library–everything down to whether you want a dash separating the track number and title in the file names of newly ripped MP3s. But it’s the other little ways you can get under the hood that make Winamp a truly useful media player.

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