The easiest way to connect with your music favorites is a subscription to one of audio streaming services. They are often called music search engines or music recommendation services. The most popular among them are Pandora Radio, Grooveshark and Last FM. They are providing their music service for free and this is the principal advantage. The user only pays for additional features like higher sound quality, the ability to download music and advertisements removal. The paid subscription price is very modest, it’s usually not higher than $15 a month. For this price you get the ability to connect as many digital players as you need. For example you can find Spotify application for Android, BlackBerry, Symbian (Nokia smartphones), for Mac and iPhone. These services don’t allow user to download music in regular MP3 or AAC format though. In order to store music files on your computer, you need to buy a subscription to a music store.
The second category of services are digital music stores like Apple iTunes, Rhapsody, Napster, Amazon MP3 and eMusic. They offer MP3 download that are not protected by DRM and are compatible with any digital player. The bad about this kind of services is a high price. The huge music fan will spend hundreds of dollars to build his music library. But there is still a way out – subscription music services. Their policy allows you to download lots of music cheap or even for free. However the music comes with DRM protection. The most common format of their music files is protected WMA (DRM WMA). For example Nokia Ovi music store provides unlimited free protected music downloads if you buy Nokia phone. As you know, there are strict playback limitations on protected music files and you need a special software to remove DRM. One of the most famous applications for protected music and video conversion is called SoundTaxi. This program can convert protected Nokia WMA files and operat
es as M4V converter for iTunes movies and TV shows. The program is capable of converting video to audio, for example MP4 to MP3 files. It supports every version on Windows but unfortunately there is no Mac version available yet.
There is one more interesting music service called Last.fm. It’s more a website than a music service though. They were the first to offer the ability to build charts from what user listens to. Let’s see how it works. The user registers a free account at Last.fm and downloads Last.fm client. After that user decides which player will be used for music playback and additionally installs and activates Last.fm plug-in. Then a program starts to gather statistics and transfers your data to Last.fm main website, where the charts are displayed. The process of listening to music and creating charts at Last.fm is called “scrobbling”. The paid feature of the service is Last.fm radio. It means that you don’t need to download music to your computer, just listen online with good Internet connection.