Omar's Blog

I bought an album today on Amazon MP3. I must say it’s a wonderful way to buy music and one that I’ll be recommending to all my friends in the foreseeable future. All the songs in Amazon MP3 have no DRM and are encoded at a bit rate of 256Kbps, at this bit rate I really can’t tell the difference between the MP3 and the CD version of the song.

So why have I liked this new store so much? Well, now I can buy the song and not have to worry about it working on my next music player. I’m sure the song will play back again on my iRiver, my cellphone and my iPod. I can burn it to as many CD’s I want (one for the car and one for each of my other older CD players). When I upgrade computers, it will be easy to copy my music onto a external hard drive before upgrading, and copy it back to my new computer and have it work in iTunes without tricky authorizations. If, god forbid, I ever buy a Zune, I’ll be able to use my Amazon MP3 bought songs on the device without having to transcode or re-download anything.

Will this move kill iTunes? No, of course not, but from now on I will first check to see if a song is available in Amazon MP3 before looking to iTunes. I think this new store will put pressure on Apple to lower their prices on their offering of DRM-free music… I really wish iTunes would abandon the AAC codec in favor of the more ubiquitous MP3 format (right, wishful thinking)… But as of today I don’t care anymore what Apple does with its store in terms of music, I’ve found Amazon, and I like it!

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