I just wanted to rave a little about Apple's/iTunes MP3 music store. If you try it, I think you'll agree its one of the coolest ways to buy music, MP3 or not. I buy alot of music but now I've become more selective. CD's aren't cheap and buying a handful of albums only to find 2-3 songs you like from each album is quite a drag. Its also very hard to figure out the rest of the album is as good as that one song you heard without buying it or borrowing a friend's CD. I'd often sit in the record store and listen to CD/albums for hours and picking what I liked. I would typically go into each track and advance to about the 1 minute mark. There I know most songs are going into full swing and I can get a good feel for the song without listening to the whole track. iTunes already does this for me with their music samples. The samples from each song are so well done. You get 30 seconds of each song from the middle of it. You get to hear the chorus, and stanzas, and for every song on the album. The other places I have seen with samples are like 15-30 seconds of the first 30 seconds of the song. By the time you start hearing a song build up, the sample cuts off already. Not to mention they typically use the satanic Realplayer which I despise.
With iTunes Music Store you go in, see some typical graphical pages with some hot albums, popular favorites and listings of genres and their most played/downloaded. When you select an artist you can see the whole available library of their music and also see other band/musician recommendations based on the musician you chose. Each CD cover is displayed along with all the album information. Every single track on each album has a lengthy sample. The samples are so awesome, I wouldn't doubt if the people listing the albums are going in and listening to each track finding that "sweet spot" to best showcase the song in a 30 second clip. It really gives you a great impression of each song to decide if you like it or not.
The great search functions that are well known in iTunes is also in the music store. You can easily search their whole MP3 library for an artist or a song or by genre, category, date released, length of tracks, etc. All those search parameters can be mixed up like an advanded search with all different parameters. You can even only know one word of a song title and search for it. Say I couldn't remember the name of this song but I remembered one word in the title like "steel" and I knew the song was about 4 minutes long and it was a punk rock song. I put in a search for all songs with "steel" in the title, length between 3 minutes and say 5 minutes, and the genre is punk rock. It brings up a list within a few seconds of everything meeting your search parameters. You may see 10 songs but it doesn't mater. Now you can click on each song on the list to hear it and figure out which is the one you were looking for.
Whats also amazing is the selection. I tried really hard to put in some fairly obscure/non pop albums and it came up with all of them that I looked for. I was really impressed at their music library. Alot of these albums I couldn't even find in large stores in manhattan where the CD libraries are in the 10's of thousands. And it only took 2 seconds to find, unlike shuffling through the piles of CD's that are supposed to be in some sort of order, or asking the clueless sales person to find something thats not on their "pop" rack.
Yet another awesome feature is that iTunes music store has some songs only released to Apple for the Music Store. They also have a ton of FULL LENGTH high quality/high resolution music videos. Even much better then going to MTV2.com and using the crappy realplayer which always crashes on me.
Soon I hope the Music Store does some sort of browser mode with quicktime, if not at least it will be on Windows soon. I think they said late this year? I have both mac's and PC's so it's no hurry for me, but I want the PC community to realize how good a Music player/manager can be and how awesome and effortless shopping for music can be with the Music Store. I could talk all day about how cool iTunes is, and maybe I am a bit jaded and biased, but it doesn't really matter because trying it speaks for itself. Its a killer app IMO and this Music Store feature is something that I think many of you will enjoy. It gives you better acccess to something I find so enriching and integral to our day to day lives; Music.
Apple's Music Store
With iTunes Music Store you go in, see some typical graphical pages with some hot albums, popular favorites and listings of genres and their most played/downloaded. When you select an artist you can see the whole available library of their music and also see other band/musician recommendations based on the musician you chose. Each CD cover is displayed along with all the album information. Every single track on each album has a lengthy sample. The samples are so awesome, I wouldn't doubt if the people listing the albums are going in and listening to each track finding that "sweet spot" to best showcase the song in a 30 second clip. It really gives you a great impression of each song to decide if you like it or not.
The great search functions that are well known in iTunes is also in the music store. You can easily search their whole MP3 library for an artist or a song or by genre, category, date released, length of tracks, etc. All those search parameters can be mixed up like an advanded search with all different parameters. You can even only know one word of a song title and search for it. Say I couldn't remember the name of this song but I remembered one word in the title like "steel" and I knew the song was about 4 minutes long and it was a punk rock song. I put in a search for all songs with "steel" in the title, length between 3 minutes and say 5 minutes, and the genre is punk rock. It brings up a list within a few seconds of everything meeting your search parameters. You may see 10 songs but it doesn't mater. Now you can click on each song on the list to hear it and figure out which is the one you were looking for.
Whats also amazing is the selection. I tried really hard to put in some fairly obscure/non pop albums and it came up with all of them that I looked for. I was really impressed at their music library. Alot of these albums I couldn't even find in large stores in manhattan where the CD libraries are in the 10's of thousands. And it only took 2 seconds to find, unlike shuffling through the piles of CD's that are supposed to be in some sort of order, or asking the clueless sales person to find something thats not on their "pop" rack.
Yet another awesome feature is that iTunes music store has some songs only released to Apple for the Music Store. They also have a ton of FULL LENGTH high quality/high resolution music videos. Even much better then going to MTV2.com and using the crappy realplayer which always crashes on me.
Soon I hope the Music Store does some sort of browser mode with quicktime, if not at least it will be on Windows soon. I think they said late this year? I have both mac's and PC's so it's no hurry for me, but I want the PC community to realize how good a Music player/manager can be and how awesome and effortless shopping for music can be with the Music Store. I could talk all day about how cool iTunes is, and maybe I am a bit jaded and biased, but it doesn't really matter because trying it speaks for itself. Its a killer app IMO and this Music Store feature is something that I think many of you will enjoy. It gives you better acccess to something I find so enriching and integral to our day to day lives; Music.
Apple's Music Store
I would rather have 4 really good songs on an album than 1 good one and 14 crappy ones.
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