Napster.
The long forgotten music downloading application. Well, a while back when the “new” Napster came out, I signed up for it, downloading some singles at 99 cents a piece. Well, today I decided to take the plunge. I signed up for Napster Premium for like 12 bux a month, and I am getting a free portable player to boot. I have jacked tons of music from the net for almost 10 years, so I figure it might be time to go legit. The premium service is cool, you can download as many tracks as you want, and listen to them online or offline. The downside is you can’t burn them, but you can transfer them to a portable device, which is cool. If you wan to burn a track, you need to purchase it standalone from your premium subscription.
Some other things that kind of irk me are that some bands don’t have any tracks (The Beatles are the biggest I see), so you can’t get all the music you want. When I first signed up, 311 didn’t have any tracks, now all their mainstream albums are on there! Still, there are almost a million tracks, but you won’t find the “bootleg” tracks for artists, so you are left to searching the net or using a p2p app to look for those.
CD Burning is built into the application, and there is radio/magazine/message boards, with radio and message boards only available to premium members.