Kevin's Watch

I'm currently trying out the Napster free trial period. Back in the day Napster was the greatest thing since sliced bread, followed closely by Audio Galaxy.

Napster's fee-for-service model looks promising - very fast downloads, and they have almost every song you can imagine. The problem comes when you try to burn a CD - not only do you have to pay a per month fee, but a download fee of $0.99 per song. Obviously, that could turn into quite a bit of money very quickly.

What's more, since I'm in a free trial period, the songs that I've downloaded to my hard drive will become unplayable if I don't pay the monthly fee (after the free trial period ends, in 2 weeks.) I have to continue to pay the monthly fee ($9.95 per month) in order to listen to those songs. If I cancel, I can't listen to them any longer.

Surely there must be something better out there? What do Watch members use? I don't mind paying a monthly fee - in fact, I believe that I should - but once I download the songs, I want to own them, be free to burn them, whatever I want to do. To me, that's the purpose of a monthly fee.

Thanks for the link, Syl. What do you know of this program? Almost all of the reviews were bad.

DLB,

What's the security mechanism used to put a lifetime on the MP3?

Hmmm - good question, I don't know. Under 'properties' it simply says the file is protected.

It's a torrent sharing program... like a cross between Azureus and Kazaa. It's clunky, but has a lot of files.