And speaking of the available tracks at Connect. . . well, got "Come Talk to Me" and "Don't Give Up" from Peter Gabriel's Secret World Live, which is just as much on his Real World label as several albums that weren't there, and neither was much of his other back catalog.
On the other hand, Rasputina's Thanks for the Ether, which isn't on eMusic, is on Connect. Got two tracks from that, too. Try to guess which ones.
On the other other hand, there's several Jimi Hendrix albums that I'm fairly certain hadn't been released when he passed away. I went for the non-posthumous "Little Wing" and "Hey Joe," figuring that he might have not put some of the other stuff out for a reason.
Anyone else worried that when Prince goes on to his great reward, we're going to be buried in cds of every half-ass session he ever recorded?
Mind you, some of the older half-ass sessions are probably better than the recent. . . that's the kind of thinking that leads to exactly what I'm bitching about, isn't it?
I really don't have any complaints with the service. The tracks downloaded sequentially rather than concurrently, but, um, who cares? Playing 'em back now from the MiniDisc I transferred them too, and have no problems with the sound quality. And considering it's "only" USB 1, they transferred pretty quickly. Yes, there's all sorts of horrible DRM restrictions blah de blah, but, see, there's this output jack on the MiniDisc player, yes? And an input one on the computer? Or, hell, I could burn the songs to an audio cd and rip them easily enough.
I'm confident that if I had a high-quality audio system, I'd actually be able to detect the degradation in quality resulting from this. Plus, if I had that much disposable income, I wouldn't have anything better to whine about.
Sorry, the reviews on Slashdot and a few other tech sites made the service sound utterly abominable, This is probably because you're meant to actually pay for the music, and as we all know, infomation wants to be (supplied to me for) free. Except they usually leave out the bit in parenthesis.
One maybe-valid criticism: longer (over the seven minute mark) tracks are $1.99 rather than 99 cents. So one of the Gabriel songs was almost two whole dollars. For just one song. My god, the humanity of it all.
Oh, and I shot a $10 donation to BitTorrent author Bram Cohen. Just because.
Leave a comment