Napster

[admin_exported]

I was thinking about signing up for napster (£10 per month unlimited downloads ) and was wondering if it is worth it. Some one told me that if you sign up and 3 months down the line you left then you lose your downloads!!! Any truth in this?

Also, I have an Ipod Classic ( 80gb ). Can I transfer my Napster playlist in to ITunes and play the music from there?

Napster says it has 6,000,000 songs. Is this contemporary albums recently released? or is it 2,000,000 songs of the great atlantic whales, 1,000,000 goth delights, 2,000,000 andes rock bands?

I would appreciate any comments and advice.

Thanks, Ian

 

[fatboyslimfast]

Hi Ian,

I've been subbing to napster now for about 2 years. It goes a bit like this.

You can use your account to stream tracks to any windows-based PC.

You can download tracks to 3 PCs, but you can change 1 PC per month (say if you rebuilt one, or bought a new laptop etc).

If you use the download (and not buy them) then they will expire a certain time after the account is closed. If you pay to download them, then you can burn them to CD using the napster burn engine.

Napster>iPod, erm no. it just won't work - the DRM on the tracks is different, and the file format is WMA. iPods don't support WMA AFAIK.

There certainly are a good selection of tracks. The rule of thumb is that if the band/artist in question is forward thinking and releases it on other download services, the chances are that it's on napster.

If you want, think of a few albums that represent your collection and I'll have a check on napster...

I use napster to sort the wheat from the chaff - I listen to the album, then if I like it, I buy it on CD...(I'm not keen on 192kbps downloads for the same price as a CD!)

 

[Anonymous]

Hi Fatboyslimfast, thank you for the quick response. I really appreciate that. Your advice is good. I'll need to talk to 'her indoors' and consider my options. Ian

 

[Anonymous]

As I know , Napster music has the DRM protection which avoid customer play or convert the downloaded music with other incompatible devices and if you don't keep paying you can't keep the music when the subscription expired .

So if you want to play the protected music with other incompatible players (like iPod and Zune) and keep the music forever, you should remove the DRM with a specialized converter.

And here I found a good program to help me remove DRM and convert the DRM music.
You can free download it to have a try.
http://www.wmatomp3-converter.com/digital-music-converter.html#123

It can remove the DRM from protected music (mp3, wma,m4p, wav, etc) and extract audios from DRM video (wmv, m4v, asf, etc).

And here is a list of Napster compatible devices:
Phone: SYNC by Samsung, Samsung black jack, MOTOROKR Z6m
MP3: Sony A818 Walkman, Creative Zen version: M, Toshiba qiqabeat T - Series

 

[fatboyslimfast]

Good call regards the list of compatible devices, but please be aware that even if you have paid for the downloads, removing the drm is against Napster's policies, and could technically be illegal. Just thought it needed pointing out!