<p>hahahahaha i lmao at the supporting buying cd thing. sounds like lars ulrich from that gay band…metallica</p>
<p>
Sure, as soon as CDs stop being so ridiculously overpriced and start to come only with songs that I want to listen to (rather than making me pay for all the songs instead of just the few I like).</p>
<p>This is not to say I don’t buy CDs; I do, and I enjoy them. But I would never rely on CDs as my sole or primary source of music.</p>
<p>^ itunes or its equivalent? </p>
<p>About downloading, How about getting a paid Megaupload account and downloading at your liesure? This is just a possibility.</p>
<p>
That would still be just as illegal and not help the artists. If you’re gonna buy the music, do it right.</p>
<p>I was about to say Walmart had cheap downloads but then I went to the site and noticed they upped the price of all the Michael Jackson songs. Cashing in.</p>
<p>wow…
just do it
nobody cares</p>
<p>
Doesn’t have the greatest selection of songs; I’ve been shocked to find a lot of songs missing from their libraries that I’d expect to be there.</p>
<p>Plus iTunes is proprietary software that uses very irritating DRM, and it’s a hassle to obtain and use programs that get rid of it (and a hassle to convert files from their format to MP3s). And the iTunes software is bloated and poorly constructed. After becoming popular, it went in the same direction RealPlayer did years ago. I wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole.</p>
<p>If a paid service were to arise that had a great song library and simply let me download and do what I choose with my music (ie, I download an MP3 no strings attached), then I’d be more than happy to use it.</p>
<p>
[QUOTE=GoldShadow]
Plus iTunes is proprietary software that uses very irritating DRM, and it’s a hassle to obtain and use programs that get rid of it (and a hassle to convert files from their format to MP3s). And the iTunes software is bloated and poorly constructed. After becoming popular, it went in the same direction RealPlayer did years ago. I wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole.
[/quote]
Word. I despise all Apple products and would never use any of them. Besides, it wouldn’t run on my Linux system, so it wouldn’t matter either way. And in terms of the music player functionality, iShıt doesn’t even come close to Amarok.</p>
<p>
[Amazon.com</a> MP3 Downloads: Free music, bestselling songs at low prices, most albums $8.99 or lower. Compatible with MP3 players, including the iPod®.](<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/MP3-Music-Download/b?ie=UTF8&node=163856011]Amazon.com”>http://www.amazon.com/MP3-Music-Download/b?ie=UTF8&node=163856011)</p>
<p>iTunes has horrible memory leaks, but other than that, I don’t get why it is so hated. The DRM isn’t very restrictive and is easy to analog rip, if you want to.</p>
<p>this thread just got overly-pretentious.</p>
<p>Yeah, totally off topic. </p>
<p>All tracks on iTunes are now DRM-free anyways, so the dude above really has no argument in that regard. (I’m sure they’re not completely clean files, but they’re regular mp3s, playable on however many computers you want, in whatever program you want. Even when they had DRM, it wasn’t at all a hassle to “remove” the DRM.)</p>
<p>Of course, some people just need to complain about everything. Even if there was a service as GoldShadow desires, I’m sure he’d find something wrong with it.</p>
<p>
No, only tracks from the big four record labels (Sony BMG, Universal Music Group, EMI, Warner Music Group) are going to be DRM-free. Unfortunately, a lot of the music I listen to does not come from artists signed to these labels. And yes, converting files (from AAC to MP3) and removing DRM is a hassle for me. I don’t always have time to spend converting large numbers of files; I would much rather download files in the format of my choice (MP3) without the need to process them.</p>
<p>
It’s a good thing I’m not one of those people! I’m going to check out lockn’s link (thanks by the way, I didn’t know Amazon had such a service), since I’m already an Amazon customer. I actually found some, though not all, of the harder to find songs I’ve been looking for. I may give it a shot.</p>
<p>If your school has a public network where anyone can get on, get on that network, clear your cookies, don’t log into anything that would compromise yourself. And download away, you actually cannot get caught since they have no way of finding you.</p>
<p>I work for our schools computing services and they tell us this stuff haha. Even if you do get caught downloading its sort of the schools responsibility and they will probably give you a warning. And they seriously do not care, they won’t go out of their way to find you and take legal action.</p>
<p>What if someone sends me a song by email or AIM, YM, Skype, whatever? Is it still illegal? Can schools still find out?</p>
<p>Come on. Unless someone sends you a 100 songs daily through AIM or whatever, they’re not going to care. Moreeeee than likely that they’ll go after the person who originally downloaded the song (if at all)</p>
<p>
[QUOTE=ana_ro]
What if someone sends me a song by email or AIM, YM, Skype, whatever? Is it still illegal? Can schools still find out?
[/quote]
The schools don’t care at all about how much copyrighted content you’re downloading. They just don’t want to get any legally threatening letters from copyright holders saying that someone on their network is infringing copyrights.</p>
<p>If you want to share files (copyrighted or not) with friends, you should check out [url=<a href=“http://www.getdropbox.com/]Dropbox[/url”>http://www.getdropbox.com/]Dropbox[/url</a>]. You can get a free account with 2 GB of space that can be used to store and share any files you want. Since it’s all done privately with your friends, it is literally impossible to get caught.</p>
<p>Another option is [url=<a href=“http://unite.opera.com/]Opera”>http://unite.opera.com/]Opera</a> Unite<a href=“it’s%20still%20in%20the%20testing%20stages%20right%20now,%20but%20it’s%20pretty%20stable”>/url</a>. Opera is a (very nice) web browser that now also has a file server (as well as a web server, photo sharing service, media player, & chat room) that will run on your computer and let you share files with anyone you want.</p>
<p>generally speaking, if a school is blocking p2p traffic, they’re going to have a policy against server hosting, vpn, or any other service that enables people unauthorized access to their network.</p>
<p>with that said, anything that involved uploading content to an in-between server is completely safe. unless you’re uploading several gigabytes in content regularly of course–at which point they’ll just warn you for using too much bandwidth, which is a lower offense than p2p and likely wont result in any formal sanctions (ie access rejected)</p>
<p>
[QUOTE=aforautumn]
they’re going to have a policy against server hosting, vpn, or any other service that enables people unauthorized access to their network
[/quote]
Except this is essentially unenforceable, so you should be good to go.</p>
<p>
[QUOTE=aforautumn]
unless you’re uploading several gigabytes in content regularly
[/quote]
I totally forgot about this one. You should definitely check your college’s policy on network traffic quotas (both upload and download) and make sure you don’t exceed it.</p>
<p>A good way of avoiding that problem is to share files within your college’s LAN, since that won’t count towards your quota. You can do this with software such as [url=<a href=“http://dtella.org/]Dtella[/url”>http://dtella.org/]Dtella[/url</a>].</p>
<p>So I tried the Youtube to Mp3 thing and it works really well, but can they catch me for it at school?</p>
<p>There’s no one at your college watching exactly what you’re doing online. They can tell what type of traffic is going where. It’ll just look like you’re browsing the internet. </p>
<p>The thing I was worrying about was traffic quotas. Apparentally I have to register a computer to use the internet at my school (or something like that - I don’t really understand how that works. Is it nonsense?), so they can see how much traffic I’m using. Would something like 500GBs/month (a lot being up) be a problem or do I have to be in the range of several TBs?</p>