Last week I paid tribute to Hallmark and jolly old St. Valentine. Or something like that. Melissa has said her iPod Mini is “too big.” Though she couldn’t tell me exactly what it’s too big for, I did replace it with a diminutive Nano “fatty” – doubling her storage capacity (8GB) in the process. We also went through an iTunes divorce – I’d been managing her iPod, but now she’s set up with her own iTunes software and account. So we’ve decided to only purchase single tracks from iTunes and, when we want entire albums, we’ll order physical CDs for ripping and sharing… until all iTunes are DRM-free. Or, perhaps it’s time to give Amazon’s DRM-free music download service a serious look.
Yeah, that Mini looks positively gigantic! I can see why she was unhappy with it. :-) (shhh… she just wanted the new thing)
I won’t stomach DRM-laden music anymore. When forced to buy tunes from iTunes (because I can’t find it elsewhere), I just use TuneBite to immediately convert it to an MP3. And although TuneBite makes this relatively painless, its still an extra step, and means you are getting even lower quality of course.
The Amazon store is still missing lots of artists and albums, but when you find what you are looking for it works VERY well, and the integration with iTunes is entirely adequate. The downloader works well, and doesn’t have to be loaded at startup. Highly recommended.
Obviously the store itself needs lots of work. There is often little information, the GUI is kinda half-baked (like the Unbox video downloads), and so on, but it’ll do until they redo it.
I’ve been happy with the Amazon store the few times I’ve used it.