A recent thread talked about downloading music for playing in the plane.
Being an old fossil, I had never done this before, and solicited suggestions
and help regarding this unknown (to me) area of the internet.

Several sites were suggested and explored, but the only "legal" (meaning
"pay per song") music site I found was www.iTunes.com , which has turned out
to be a marvelous experience -- thanks to whomever suggested it!

Here's how it works: The iTunes software is free, easy to install, and
fairly easy to use. It's basically a specialized, secure browser that lets
you access their on-line music library. It has many features, most of which
are intuitive and logical. (Some of the navigational buttons are a bit odd,
but -- once you figure them out -- are handy and fast.) Setting up my
account so that it would bill my Discover card was fast, simple, and not
overly burdensome, as these things go.

Music can be categorized in many ways, but I found "by genre" to be most
useful. For example, if you want "Blues," you select it, and then ALL of
the blues groups are displayed. Clicking on one -- say, Stevie Ray
Vaughn -- pops up a window of all albums published by him.

You can then either select the album of choice to see the songs on that
particular album, or you can select "ALL" and see all of his music from all
of his albums. It's easy, and quick. Best of all, click on "Texas Flood"
and you will hear 30 seconds of that song! This really helps when you're
looking up a song you can't quite remember.

Example: There is a particularly haunting song from the movie Titanic (NOT
the Celine Dion "theme" song) that I've always wanted. I had NO idea what
the name was, but with iTunes I was able to simply listen to 30 seconds of
each song off the soundtrack album, and voila! -- I had my song.

When you find a song you want, just click on "Buy this song" and it
downloads in MP3 format. Downloading is incredibly fast -- of course, I
have broadband. Dial-up might be pretty frustrating, but I guess that goes
without saying nowadays. After checking out the free (and apparently
illegal) service at "SoulSeek," the speed of download was especially
refreshing. (SoulSeek is a peer-to-peer arrangement, meaning that your
downloads depend not only on YOUR connection speed, but on the "donor's"
connection speed. It was agonizingly slow on the night I tried it...)

You can also search for music using any number of parameters. Type in the
word "FLY," for instance, and you'll get every song in their library with
the word "fly" in it, or in the group's name! (There are an amazing number
of them, by the way. Flight has inspired a LOT of music...)

Here's the best part of the whole thing: At the end, when you've got your
80 minutes (or so) of music downloaded, you burn the CD with a SINGLE CLICK.
There is none of the hassle of opening another program, or formatting a
disk -- iTunes has its own built-in CD burning software that creates a CD,
playable in ANY CD player. Again, painless, quick, and easy.

Bottom line: I now have an entirely new collection of "flying CDs" without
ever leaving my house, and without having to buy 35 (at least!) CDs. Our
plane will be ROCKING on our next flight!
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"