iHCPL - Next Gen Sound #25 - To Burn or Not To Burn

So in exercise #25, we need to burn a CD. TO be honest, I'm having technical difficulties with Windows Media Player right now, but have burned CDs in the past. Usually, it's very easy to burn a CD - you just insert a CD, and select what you want to put on it and voila, you have a CD.

I just don't use CDs anymore if I have a choice. In the car, for audio books, I prefer an MP3 player because you don't get skipping (usually), which sometimes happens with CDs. If I'm listening to music at work, I much prefer an MP3 player - or an online play list to CDs or radio.

As to music online, I think open access (with some limitations) is preferred. For example, Songza, which I mentioned in my last post lets you find music and listen to it online. In my case, I own some of the music I'm listening to and I might find other things I like. If I like it enough, I'm going to buy a copy for myself. It's a case of try before you buy. Several studies have shown that sharing is not really detrimental to purchasing - in fact in some case it helps it.

iHCPL - Next Gen Sound #24 - The Sweet Sound of Music

I thought I better catch up with the Next Generation on Sound, so here is my post for exercise # 24. I looked at a number of pay music sites in the past. Before my iPod was stolen, I had used iTunes frequently (hopefully I'll get a new MP3 player soon - tax refund anyone?). To be honest, I wasn't overly fond of iTunes. I found it rather difficult to use, although the iPod was a dream to use. Funny how one was easy and the other hard.

Since I've downloaded music (and audio books) from the HCPL Digital Media collection, I thought I'd give music.download.com. Since I really like Celtic Woman, I searched to see if they had any free downloads. Unfortunately, they only had a couple free streaming MP3s. As a side note, I actually like this feature of the C|Net site a lot and can see fiddling around with creating online play lists more than downloading.

While they didn't have Celtic Woman for download, there was a related item that came up - Celtic Shores that had a bunch of free downloads, so I downloaded Amazing Grace. Glad this is just a test, because it was an incredibly annoying version, LOL. I skipped the transfer to an MP3 player, because frankly I've done that a lot with audio books, so I know how it works.

I'm glad I discovered this site. Another site I came across recently that's pretty cool is Songza, a music search site. When you enter keyword(s) it will find any songs or artists related and then you can play directly online. While there's no downloading, you can create playlists.