Flying Music -- iTunes PIREP

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"

In a previous article, "Jay Honeck" said:
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!

Even better: You can get an iPod, and plug it into the music-in jack on
your panel. Rip all your legal CDs and transfer the stuff you bought from
iTunes Music Store ("ITMS" in the vernacular) and Bob's your uncle. I've
got 2660 songs on this one (and some of those are long classical pieces).
I think that translates into something over 1000 hours of music.


--
Paul Tomblin http://xcski.com/blogs/pt/
Windows gives you a nice view of clouds so you can't see any potentially
useful boot time messages.
-- Bill Hay

Even better: You can get an iPod, and plug it into the music-in jack on
your panel. Rip all your legal CDs and transfer the stuff you bought from
iTunes Music Store ("ITMS" in the vernacular) and Bob's your uncle. I've
got 2660 songs on this one (and some of those are long classical pieces).
I think that translates into something over 1000 hours of music.

Wow -- that's all on ONE disk?

Or doesn't an iPod use disks?
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"

Paul Tomblin wrote:
In a previous article, "Jay Honeck" said:

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!


Even better: You can get an iPod, and plug it into the music-in jack on
your panel. Rip all your legal CDs and transfer the stuff you bought from
iTunes Music Store ("ITMS" in the vernacular) and Bob's your uncle. I've
got 2660 songs on this one (and some of those are long classical pieces).
I think that translates into something over 1000 hours of music.


And even cheaper, you can get a portable CD player that is MP3
compatible. (some are under $30) One 800mb disk holds a *lot* of
MP3 encoded tracks.

Tom Pappano, PP-ASEL-IA-MP3-MP3CDR/W

"Jay Honeck" wrote in
news:OcaSb.176689$I06.1801285@attbi_s01:

Even better: You can get an iPod, and plug it into the music-in jack
on your panel. Rip all your legal CDs and transfer the stuff you
bought from iTunes Music Store ("ITMS" in the vernacular) and Bob's
your uncle. I've got 2660 songs on this one (and some of those are
long classical pieces). I think that translates into something over
1000 hours of music.

Wow -- that's all on ONE disk?

Or doesn't an iPod use disks?

Ipod has a hard disk in it...

--
ET


"A common mistake people make when trying to design something
completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete
fools."---- Douglas Adams

On 2004-01-29 07:37:31 -0800, "Jay Honeck" said:

When you find a song you want, just click on "Buy this song" and it
downloads in MP3 format.

It's not actually MP3 format. It's AAC (Advanced Audio Codec). That
difference might be lost on most people, but it's important. Playing from
your computer (using iTunes) or burning to a CD is no problem. But if
you're planning to transfer your tunes to a portable player, you'll want to
make sure that it supports AAC. A lot of manufacturers are going with the
"Microsoft Standard" of WMA, and excluding AAC.

One way around that is to burn the tunes to CD and then rip them to
whichever format you need. Audiophiles will howl (because you're adding
losses upon losses), but the rest of us probably won't be able to tell the
difference.

--
Larry Fransson
Seattle, WA

Larry Fransson ) wrote:

It's not actually MP3 format. It's AAC (Advanced Audio Codec). That
difference might be lost on most people, but it's important. Playing from
your computer (using iTunes) or burning to a CD is no problem. But if
you're planning to transfer your tunes to a portable player, you'll want to
make sure that it supports AAC. A lot of manufacturers are going with the
"Microsoft Standard" of WMA, and excluding AAC.

One way around that is to burn the tunes to CD and then rip them to
whichever format you need. Audiophiles will howl (because you're adding
losses upon losses), but the rest of us probably won't be able to tell the
difference.

Good to know. Thanks, Larry.

--
Peter












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"Martin Hotze" wrote in message
...
bottom line: buy a MAC!

Why? iTunes works just fine on Windows. So do any number of other
pay-for-download sites, not all of which work as seamlessly on a Mac.

There are lots of good reasons to buy a Mac, just as there are lots of good
reasons to buy Windows. But music download isn't one of them.

Pete

"Jay Honeck" writes:

After checking out the free (and apparently
illegal) service at "SoulSeek,"

Unlikely "Soulseek" is illegal. There may be files on the
peer-to-peer network that appear to be in violation of copyright law,
but that doesn't mean the service is illegal.

"Jay Honeck" wrote in message news:%M9Sb.176619$I06.1794771@attbi_s01...

When you find a song you want, just click on "Buy this song" and it
downloads in MP3 format.

Are you sure about the MP3 format? Back when I looked into this,
they were delivering files in some not-MP3 format. I prefer MP3
because my CD player plays MP3 format CDs.

John Galban=====N4BQ (PA28-180)