Don't you just hate it? When you go to the iTunes Store for a track to discover that it's an 'album-only' purchase? This happens to me quite a lot. The other day I wanted to buy the Soulwax remix of Ready For The Floor by Hot Chip. But iTunes wanted me to buy the whole E.P. for £1.99. After a quick look on my favourite subscription music shop, eMusic ended in disappointment as they only have their first album (probably from when Hot Chip were on an indie label). But then I remembered receiving an email from EMI. I dug it out of Mail and found out that EMI sell all of their music through the 7digital store, as top-quality 320Kbps MP3s for 99p a track (much better than iTunes 256k AAC 79p files). Jurassic Park!
It seems that more and more music download sites are switching from restricted WMAs to universally acceptable MP3s every day. I despise the fact that Apple still sells AAC files that don't play on anything other than an iPod. I recently bought my six year-old daughter a cheap Creative Zen Stone and spent hours in Audio Hijack re-recording her iTunes purchases and then re-encoding them as MP3s just so she could listen to them. In fact it annoyed me so much that I changed my iTunes preferences to encode my CDs as MP3 insted of Apple's AAC Format. Apple still have the best music store. You really have to spend hours trawling through eMusic and 7digital to find what you're after. But as an increasing ammount of record companies wake up to the fact that restricting music is a wate of time, I just wish that Apple would take note and give up on the whole freeplay AAC file format altogether as customers choose unrestricted quality over ease of use.
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