iTunes DRM-free for 99 cents

[DavidDaMonkey]

My office has apple.com set to the home page, and when I loaded it up this morning, I saw this:

iTunes Plus now offers over two million DRM-free tracks at just 99 cents
Offering customers the largest catalog of DRM-free music in the world, Apple today expanded iTunes Plus to more than two million tracks while at the same time lowering the price of those tracks to just 99 cents. In addition to artists from EMI’s digital catalog, iTunes Plus now includes artists from Sub Pop, Nettwerk, Beggars Group, IODA, The Orchard and many others. All iTunes Plus tracks feature DRM-free music with high-quality 256 kbps AAC encoding, offering audio quality virtually indistinguishable from the original recordings.

I knew they had a few DRM-free tracks for 1.29 awhile back, but now they are the same price as all the other tracks. I'm an audio engineer and am plenty happy with the 256 kbps/AAC encoding. This seems like a very positive step. Am I missing something?

[Dirkgreatness]

Just download limewire... its free!!

[untitled]

While I'm glad they're doing this, it's not that big of a deal, is it? I've gotten used to just burning WAV CDs of all the music I download from iTunes, and then converting the files from WAV to MP3s (at whatever quality setting I choose) so I can use those instead of the M4P files. Is there a loss of quality from the conversion process?

[DavidDaMonkey]

Originally Posted by Dirkgreatness

Just download limewire... its free!!

Unfortunately I went to a music business school where the illegality of this was seared into my brain.

[MavsX]

who sets their homepage to apple.com? Unless maybe you work in a design shop or something..and you use a mac?

[DavidDaMonkey]

Originally Posted by MavsX

who sets their homepage to apple.com? Unless maybe you work in a design shop or something..and you use a mac?

Its not my computer, its one that lots of people use, so we just leave the homepage to the default. Which, since its Safari, is apple.com.

I work in a recording studio, and we use all Macs for our stuff. That being said, I use a Mac laptop at home as well.

[MavsX]

i knew it! i actually kinda like macs.

I would never have said that a year or two ago.

[DavidDaMonkey]

Originally Posted by MavsX

i knew it! i actually kinda like macs.

I would never have said that a year or two ago.

Yeah, about 3 years ago I adamantly referred to Macs as "Fisher Price: My First Computer" (I think I stole that from somewhere, cant remember where).

[MavsX]

Originally Posted by DavidDaMonkey

Yeah, about 3 years ago I adamantly referred to Macs as "Fisher Price: My First Computer" (I think I stole that from somewhere, cant remember where).

ha