Travel Technology - buy.com now offering pay per song music at 256k

256k wma's will take up twice as much space on your portable player. Can anyone tell the difference?

http://www.buy.com/corp/256available.asp

AFAIK this applies to some titles but not all, yet.

I gnerally burn a CD of my downloaded music even if I also plan to listen on a portable device. I've been less than completely satisfied with the sound quality of a few 128k downloads I've purchased through buy.com (or other sources, for that matter). For the most part they've been 60s/70s albums so my first reaction has been "Gee, the quality of sound recording equipment sure has improved in 30 years" but I think that in a big part it's the WMA compression since purchased CDs that were recorded in that period don't sound as muddy as the downloads.

I'm not sure but I got the impression looking through my account info that I can re-download an album at 256K that I had previously bought at 128k.

I'd always download the highest quality available. Windows Media Player (V9 and higher, anyway) allows you to re-sample the files to a lower bit rate; I'm not sure whether this is possible with DRM'd files.
To:
Change the quality level of a file while you copy it to a portable device. (You might want to do this to save space on your device.)

In Windows Media Player, click Copy to CD or Device, and then select the portable device you want to copy to. Click the Portable device properties button . On the Portable Device tab, click Select quality level, and then move the slider to decrease the size of the file or increase the quality level.

buy.com is still selling music?



:D

buy.com is still selling music?

Yes! and at $.79/song a much better value than Napster or iTMS.