One last link

[andrewducker]

EMI starts selling non-DRM downloads. Which is _great_ news if they weren't putting the price up by 30% at the same time. And only making them available in AAC format. And only at 256kbps. Which means it'll take up twice as much space on my MP3 player. I don't actually _want_ them that high quality when it means I only get half as many songs to carry around with me. It's a plot, I tells ya, a plot to make us all go out and buy bigger iPods!

Comments

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

The price is only going up for individual tracks; per-album price is the same. My view is it's still great news. More precisely, it's that I might now become an iTunes customer for the first time.

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

I don't know., Perhaps I'm overly cynical, but I see too many people buying things just because they're cheaper, and I wonder if the Cartel is using EMI as a stalking horse...

And so, a few months down the line, I see EMI saying "Well, the consumers carried on buying DRM files even when we gave them an alternative. So DM isn't an impedement to purchase after all..."

And then the locks come on even tighter.

I hope not, but it's just too like the way they've behaved in the past for me to trust them now

[drplokta]

You can always recode them to smaller MP3s for your portable player while keeping the original higher quality files.

[azalemeth.livejournal.com]

I like the higher quality. And, the lack of DRM means I might actually buy some. However, what I don't understand is why the cost actually needs to go up at all - I think it's just a nice bribe straight to EMI, one that bears no regard to the actual cost involved in production.

That all aside, I wouldn't complain about large AAC files :-). It's an open format - it's mpeg-layer 4 audio - and you can transcode it to anything at any quality you wish quite easily. VLC does it well.

You're probably right about the bigger iPods though!