Napster scam: day one
So, I started running that Napster scam I told you about the other day. Those of you who clicked through and read the article may have the mistaken impression that it requires three computers to work. Not so, hippies. In just a few hours yesterday, I downloaded and converted 5 albums.
- Talk Talk- Laughing Stock
- Lyle Lovett- Step Inside This House
- Slowdive- Souvlaki
- Teenage Fanclub- Teenage Symphonies To God
- Elbow- Cast of Thousands
A spokeswoman for Napster said that such endeavors were nothing new and the company was not too concerned.
"The DRM (digital rights management) is intact. Basically, people are just recordingoff a sound card. This is nothing new and people could do this with any legitimate service if they want to use a sound card," she said.
"This kind of attack has been around for a long time and it's just because of our higher profile that it has sparked such interest," she said.
Click here to read why that's not true, and why the conversion is totally digital, never leaves the software realm, and results in no loss in audio quality.
- You gotta give yer credit card number and stuff. Napster is a subscription service, and this scam is taking advantage of their 14 day free trial offer. Just like getting a free magazine, if you don't cancel before the offer expires, they're gonna start charging you every month.
- The downloading is somewhat restricted. They do have a lot of artists, and a lot of albums available, but it looks like they've restricted downloading on some artists to certain albums. Fer instance, Jay-Z's "The Blueprint" is on the site, but if not offered for free downloading. On the other hand, I snagged that Velvet Crush album for free, while I would've had to pay per song to download it from iTunes.
- The Winamp setup is a bit complicated. This may be only cos I'm kind of a nerd (*gasp* No! Believe it. Despite the blog, glasses, and lack of a girlfriend...it's true.-ed.), but I thought I could find a way around some of the more time-consuming parts of the process and messed something up. But if you just follow the instructions at the original how-to link, it works very well. And I did find out that once you convert the file to WAV, you can import it to iTunes and convert it to AAC, which is very space-efficient, can be burned to cd, or transferred to your iPod. Glaven!
