Thorpeland Photography

My Music, My Way

I was recently reading an article on the various "Legal" music download sources and how they are all battling now over which should be the standard music format. Companies such as Apple, Music Match, Roxio and Napster have each opened online music stores and each have tied each of them closely to a music playing device. For example, Apples "iTunes" has a slick download interface and a great choice of music to purchase. But, all the music is in their proprietary format with the extension ".aa". I guess it stands for Apple Audio, or something similar. In this article I was reading, Apple was so proud to announce that the only way to take the music you buy from them on the road was to purchase an Apple iPod. Because that is all their music would play on. Besides the PC itself of course. Ha! If I buy the music, I'll play it on whatever I want. So despite the millions ($$$) Apple spent on perfecting their iTunes times iPod equals big sales equation, it took me 5 minutes to circumvent it and play the music how I wanted. Basically here's all I did. Within iTunes, I created my play list of songs I had purchased and clicked on "Burn to CD". iTunes automatically converts the songs to the ".cda" format. This format, along with ".wav", is used by all home and car CD players. Once my CD was burned, I simply fired up a program called "FreeRIP". As the name declares, its free and it also rip's the ".cda and .wav" files from the CD and converts them into the music industries dreaded ".mp3". Once the file is on my hard drive as an MP3, I can burn it to CD's, make copies to other PC's... whatever I want. And since I have an MP3/CD player in my car, I just load up my music to go on a CD. Take that Apple. As slick as they are, I now have no need for your $400 iPod.