Tunebite & Napster

As someone who likes to purchase legal copies of software and music, it's not hard to fall for a subscription service such as Napster. It may cost £10 a month but I defy anyone to be able to listen to whatever takes their fancy through nefarious means as easily as I can. It's so good that I've actually also bought some to create my own complilations for the car at £0.79 each.

The other great thing about it is that I don't need to back up my music. I can just delete it and download it again when I want it. Or can I...... GRRRRR.

It would transpire that music I've PURCHASED from them AND COULD LISTEN TO AS A PAYING SUBSCRIBER is only available for download 3 times. This means that i've lost about half my tracks. I'm obviously happy about that. It is all the fault of DRM, and clearly being the pirate (or is that pilot) that I am it's only right that it makes my life hard.

An email from Napster support confirms their suggested method... and I quote them... "an alternative is to burn the track to CD, then rip the track to MP3". THE WORLD HAS GONE MAD. All of that took me strolling through the Internet to discover that there is increasing pressure on the music industry (who have stupidly tight contracts over Napster et al) to provide purchased copies as MP3. Probably not enough to make any difference though. But... Find of the day was... Tunebite.

Actually I am a believer in DRM for subscription models, because otherwise it would enable any old muppet to sign up for a month - download everything and rip it to MP3, thus lowering the quality of my paid for service. So it saddens me that I might actually have to dig around for (and perhaps buy) a piece of software like this. It actually rips to MP3 without the middle step of the CD and since it bypasses the whole DRM problem it causes other headaches for the subscription model.

It's beyond ridiculous that I should need to go surfing for MP3 ripping software to use the tracks that I've purchased because I can't back them up.