Kirya [.net]

Hey, I had promised not to talk about my musical tastes on this weblog, I couldn’t resist: I managed to legally download songs from 3 sites this week, in all cases in MP3 format, without DRM, ie. I can play the songs on my desktop!

The websites are:

• eMusic - I have enjoyed the free songs for the 15 days trial, but was really disappointed by the poor choice of artists, and don’t like very much the compulsory subscribtion, which doesn’t allow to browse the catalogue without being regitered
• VirginMega - you have to use the User Agent Switcher plugin to enter this website with Firefox/ICeweasel, and then, it is not possible to display only the songs available as MP3, which makes it very hard to download anything - I have downloaded Nada Surf latest album as it was the example given on a news website. Of course, you have to download the tracks one by one. The encoding quality is really good (256 kbps)
• FnacMusic - this site allows you to display all the albums and tracks available in MP3, but the download was quite hard: for unknown reason, I failed all the compatibility tests, which I have passed after a few page reloads! As for the other websites, songs have to be downloaded one by one, and the sound quality is not as good as for VirginMega, although the encoding is also 256 kbps.

I look forward to seeing the DRM fall into the deeper Microsoft’s archives…