Speaking of music, the other night I finally did some biz with buymusic — I downloaded 3 songs. Where did I hear the songs? Radio @ AOL which is currently my favorite internet music streaming service. AOL’s sound quality is excellent comparatively if you have broadband.

So how did the buymusic experience go? First of all, as I saw someone else mention (sorry I don’t remember who it was to permalink them) that the quality is only 128k. This is disappointing for a paid download. They need to get that up to at least 192/44 or better yet, make it 320/44. The three songs I chose were from Def Leppard and were 99 cents each.

Since I wasn’t registered the site prompted me for an email address and then took me to the real form where it snagged my credit card and shipping info. Once you get through that you can go checkout and then download your music one at a time (another bummer). Note: you are going to need Windows Media Player 9 for this so if you don’t have it then you better download it before expecting to be able to play the song. I found that even after I downloaded and upgraded WM 9 on my machine there were still some “digital rights” that needed to be synchronized, which I assumed to be the security process that identifies my computer to those three songs so that they can only be downloaded on this one machine.

Overall, the selection of buymusic is good, the quality is substandard and the process of retrieving your purchased songs (one at a time) is not refined. Improvement is needed. Grade: D

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