Here are a few questions that I've recently found myself asking: in today's overprotected, overmanaged, overcompressed, over-portable world of music, where are the last holdouts of cheaply-available CDs? Where can I legally download music from a substantially large library in a format that can be played universally without rights management? Is there a such thing as a MP3 player that doesn't add DRM to all of the music I place on it?
Users of Windows-powered handhelds have long been able to upload unprotected media to their devices and play them back using Pocket Windows Media Player. I own a
Tungsten E, which came loaded with a portable version of RealPlayer that mandated the use of RealPlayer as host software to upload music to the device. Recently I discovered
Pocket Tunes, a feature-packed media player that rivals the music-centric functionality of Windows Media Player 11, all with just two megs of free memory and 320x320 pixels worth of display real estate. Unlike devices such as the iPod or Zune, which are locked to AAC and WMA (respectively), Pocket Tunes can handle formats from uncompressed WAVs and MP3s to more vendor-specific formats such as WMA and AAC, and back to open standards such as Ogg Vorbis. It integrates with Windows Media Player, though it will actively scan the Tungsten's SD card if you'd rather drag-and-drop or use a different app. While the Tungsten E's battery life may only be a third of an iPod or Zune while decoding MP3s on the fly, it's nonetheless a useful tool that's well worth the $20 price tag.
Amazon Marketplace, it turns out, is a haven for used CD sales. As I'm going to end up copying the CDs to my laptop anyway, I'm not all that concerned if the case is scratched or the cover art is missing. I paid about $119 for 31 CDs and DVDs; that's an average of $3.84 per disc, which is well under the price of buying albums or movies off a download store. Better yet, CDs store media in a lossless format, so I don't have to put up with the compression artefacts resulting from stores' tendencies to use bitrates as ridiculously low as 96kbps. I personally rip at 256kbs from CDs, and can deal with as low as 128kbps on Pocket Tunes, seeing as I'm currently using a cheap pair of headphones with my handheld.
Speaking of Amazon, they also have a DRM-free music store that's conveniently encoded to 256kbps MP3 files. In most cases, buying used CDs and having them shipped turned out to be cheaper than buying an album off the music store. The store's definitely cheaper when it comes to singles, and on a completely unrelated topic, it seems that when I buy a single track off an album, there's a five-in-six chance that it's a Track 1. Some less popular songs went for $0.89 instead of the regular $0.99. The tracks are extremely close to CD quality from what I can discern by ear, as I don't have an actual CD or higher-bitrate digital copy to compare the purchased tracks to.
A growing number of independent artists are releasing their music as MP3s (and in some rare cases, true CD-quality FLAC files) under Creative Commons licenses.
Jonathan Coulton is probably the most notable example, with free media ranging from self-written songs such as
Code Monkey to a remake of Queen's
We Will Rock You.