I Urge you to Reconsider

[KingBahamut]

According to ZDNet Microsoft and MTV have joined forces to form Urge, a new online music service. From the article: 'The company said Urge would include a subscription component, as well as allowing individual song sales. A spokesman declined to discuss pricing, saying full details would be announced next month. The company gave no specifics on launch date beyond saying it would be sometime in 2006.'

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-5993125.html

Sigh...Urge....ITunes...Urge....ITunes.....

It just doesnt work.

Urge....

[teaker1s]

not much to worry about if you look at http://search.msn.com/ that's hardly a success compared to google ask anyone to name a search engine chances are they'll say google

[Stormy Eyes]

http://www.fundeling.com/boiyak.gif

[LinuxSwede]

According to ZDNet Microsoft and MTV have joined forces to form Urge, a new online music service. From the article: 'The company said Urge would include a subscription component, as well as allowing individual song sales. A spokesman declined to discuss pricing, saying full details would be announced next month. The company gave no specifics on launch date beyond saying it would be sometime in 2006.'

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-5993125.html

Sigh...Urge....ITunes...Urge....ITunes.....

It just doesnt work.

Urge....

I'm quite happy using FLAC downloads from Russia at 1/10th of the prices of those services, lossless, portable and perfectly legal.

[Mr. Electric Wizard]

The only thing I have against .flac is that they're sooo damn big compared to .mp3, or .ogg files...

[Brunellus]

The only thing I have against .flac is that they're sooo damn big compared to .mp3, or .ogg files...
you can always transcode from flac to ogg. the joys of oggenc!

[BWF89]

The only thing I have against .flac is that they're sooo damn big compared to .mp3, or .ogg files...
Flac and MP3/Ogg files aren't the same thing.

Flac is loseless format which means it's big but it has high quality.

MP3, Ogg, and WMA are lossy formats. Which means that they take a lossless format like cd audio or Flac and take most of the information or quality out so they can be easily downloaded.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossless_data_compression

[poptones]

Ummm.. I have several "ogg" files, ripped from cds myself, which use flac encoding.

WMA also has a "lossless" encoding.

MP3 is an encoding *and* file format. Wma and ogg are file formats which support multiple codecs.

[saphil]

I get so little pre-made audio material that This subscription cr*p has no effect on me at all. the 20 MP3s I have would be nice to play on Ubuntu though (for those odd moments when I am driven to listen to music on my fileserver).

[majikstreet]

I heard Mircosoft... that means "bye" for me. So, I could care less.

Stormy Eyes, heh!

LinuxSwede, where do you do the russia thing? I haven't done much research on the legal thing, but it'd be a better idea! (I have to try sharpmusique or something to download from itunes, I have a gift card left over from when I got my ipod!)

[poptones]

www.allofmp3.com
www.mp3search.ru

quality can be spotty on allofmp3 because their rips are basically p2p - they get a lot of music from their customers, and the quality of those rips is not always up to the "loslesss" level. I always buy a single track before plunking down for a cd after purchasing a collection of flacs that sounded like they came from a 192kbps "master."

Of course, I've also purchased CDs from russia that sound like this. In a country where piracy is something like 80% you can't always trust that a CD is really a CD.