I'm new to this MP3 thing, and as far as I can tell this whole industry is built on illegal, stolen music. Is there a site where the songs I want are sold legitimately and legally?

Only in America.

John 5:24

Try out Apple's iTunes. Not too bad, at $0.99 per song. Hopefully this will lead to more pay-per-song online stores, which would in turn lead to competition...and lower, competitive prices. Still a good service, as you normally pay $14.00+ per a CD....and there might only be 4-6 good songs on the whole CD. This way you at least get to pick the songs you want to buy.

Jordan M. Wigley
Aximsite.com
Email: jordan AT aximsite.com

.

Are you an SEC sports fan?
Come join the friendly community at SECtalk.com

   

There are tons of legal MP3 sites out there that allow downloading, some free, some for sale. The most obvious would be MP3.com.

A few more that came up Googling for legal+mp3 are:

http://www.onlinetonight.net/mp3/
http://www.narcopop.com/musicians/
http://mp3.dubroom.org/

Search engines are a web user's best friend...

Yes but,

Can you play those legally bought MP3's in your media player of choice or must you use their proprietary player? I don't believe there is a standard yet. It's still three DRM giants (Microsoft, IBM, and Intertrust)going full speed in opposite directions to create a standard.

iTunes is great, but only available on OS X until the end of the year.

If the character of a man is unclear to you look at his friends.

Personally, I would wait and see how iPod takes hold. It's audio quality is awesome due to the conversion to MPEG-4?? and loses hardly any quality. A friend of mine hooked his up to a sound system and it was wonderful, who needs a 500 cd changer when you can have a little box. It is pricy, but when you consider the equivilant of Gigabites in Compactflash, it is a great deal. I don't think any other media player is using this format yet and hopefully it will be soon.

Dell Axim Advanced 400mhz
SanDisk 256MB-Formated by Flash Format
Viking 256MB CF

Be careful what you say, your Axe is listening!

I'm confused. I just had bad experiences with two file sharing sites, which not only provided illegal file sharing of MP3s, but also had pornographic content, which is not screened by any filter.

MP3.com appears to be one of the file sharing sites. They charge for the program to share the files, and declare they are not responsible for the illegal downloading, in the same way as easydownload.com does. And they are unresponsive if you ask for refunds or cancellations. Again the file sharing is illegal, and is to be prosecuted by the feds in the future (if the terrorists ever let up).

Thanks for the suggestion of Apple, but I don't have a MAC. It only works with Macs, and I want MP3s not MPEG 4.

It looks like no viable sites exist for PC users who want to legally buy MP3s.

John 5:24

Yea join the club.

If the character of a man is unclear to you look at his friends.

Seems like BuyMusic is trying to undercut Apple. Might give that a try too...

Later,
James

  

Hey, BUYMUSIC.com looks like the ticket. It doesn't have everything, but it looks legit. Thanks for the tip.

John 5:24

Its legit... They have funny commercials making fun of Apples iTunes ones...

Later,
James

  

If you have music you like. Just make your own MP3s. I have 250 CDs and no need to steal music to have all the MP3s I need. To me MP3 is not a fle sharing format. Its just a more convenient way to carry the music I have.

Okay, I know this is a little off the topic, but how do you make MP3s? I'd love to do that.

I only want MP3s so I can listen to them on my Axim.

John 5:24

What you want is here:

http://www.listen.com/





However, I think you'll have to rerip them to .mp3 off of the CDs you burn to put them on your axim. The best ripper is "cdex"

http://www.ubershare.com explains how to create the highest quality mp3s.

We all know that there are going to be songs you don't care for, on almost every CD on the market. Most CDs end up only having 2-6 songs you really want to hear. Nobody really likes paying ~$15.00 for a disk with only two good songs. Individual downloads at $1.00 or less per song, could be quite economical. So far it's not a bad business model. But there's still a big problem...

How do you know which songs are the ones you want to buy?

You can't always go by the radio, because the large market stations only release a new song every few weeks (sometimes months.) The record studios prefer this, to get the maximum album purchase saturation. Everybody who likes the first "hit single" has three weeks to buy this album. When sales slow again, there's a "new hit single" and another period of increased record sales. [Case in point, 3 Doors Down, The Better Life - the local stations were playing their 4th "new hit single" 6 months after their first hit song hit the air.]

The first company that figures out how to let you hear the whole disk two or three times before making your individual song purchases is the one that I think will win the market share in the end.

Just my $0.02