How to fill your iPod/media player on the cheap legally
Here you’ll find a couple of different ways to fill your iPod or other media player on the cheap with all your favorite tunes no matter what your taste in music.
First I’ll talk about the Internet’s latest music download service, Spiral Frog. Spiral Frog is free to the users of its service, and it pays its dues to the recording industry via ad revenue.
Spiral Frog features of ton of artists both mainstream, such as Kanye West and Maroon 5, and more underground, such as Infected Mushroom and xDeathstarx.
Unfortunately, Spiral Frog’s software only works with Windows computers and the media comes in a Windows Media Audio/Video format tethered to DRM. This means it won’t work on your iPod. But it’s free, so you can’t really complain about DRM in this case even if you have to watch an ad or two in the process.
The next suggestion for filling your portable media player is fairly obvious, although I don’t know why it’s not spoken about more. We can thank Cnet’s Crave for this, which is the simple practice of buying a used CD, ripping the music to your computer, and selling it back to the place you bought it from.
The ethics of such a practice is debatable, but it is no doubt within the confines of the law. Regardless, doing this will give you access to albums at about $3-$4 a piece while albums on iTunes go for about $10-$12.
I prefer the second option as it allows you to own your music sans DRM in the audio format and quality of your choice.
eMusic.com deserves an honorable mention. It’s a great option if it has the music you like, but it it has a relatively limited selection. eMusic offers you a certain amount of downloads per month with a monthly or yearly fee, and the music comes in MP3 format sans DRM. Naturally, the more you pay per month/year, the better the value per download.
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September 17th, 2007
“It’s a great option if it has the music you like, but it it has a relatively limited selection.”
…huh? By “relatively limited”, I’m assuming you don’t mean sizewise, as the site has 12 main categories, with many subdivisions. You can’t mean amount of songs available, as there’s a near limitless supply. You also can’t mean quality, as there’s everything on there from Asobi Seksu to Public Enemy via Johnny Cash and The Turtles.
So…..by “relatively limited”, I can only assume you mean “no (insert name of mainstream top 40 act here)”, but isn’t that what something like iTunes is for?
In terms of being “limited”, I actually find services such as iTunes *more* restrictive. The other day I obtained a hard to get album from EMusic that was impossible to get anywhere else and would have set me back $124 on Amazon.
Limited? Emusic is a lot of things, but limited certainly isn’t one of them.
September 17th, 2007
By “relatively limited”, you’re right in assuming that I meant the site lacks a lot of mainstream artists but I also meant that, even though the site features TONS of less known or underground artists, eMusic isn’t a one stop shop if you’re looking for underground artists as well.
eMusic has a lot in every category, but I’ve been unable to find a lot of the artists (both underground and popular) that I listen to on the site. That’s why I said, “It’s a great option if it has the music you like, but it it has a relatively limited selection.”
September 17th, 2007
” … the simple practice of buying a used CD, ripping the music to your computer, and selling it back to the place you bought it from.”
I don’t know the legality of the buy, rip, resell … but if you are going to be in the gray zone … your (taxpayer funded) local library system has tens of thousands of CDs; you just need to reserve, rip and return.
March 12th, 2008
The Shiki Video Browser is a free application that allows you to search for, watch, download and convert Internet video for your iPod, iPhone, iTouch, or Zune. With Shiki, you can build a personal video library with all of your favorite Internet videos including music videos from sites such as YouTube, Google Video, Daily Motion, and Metacafe. Get it for free at:
http://www.getshiki.com