Thursday, August 19, 2004
A Real battle for online music
By now, you've heard of Real Networks taking the battle to Itunes by offering songs at $0.49 (compared to $0.99 at Itunes) and entire albums for between $4.99 and $5.50 each at its Real Music Store. The store supports a whole range of music players including the Ipod, the iRiver, most players from the Creative Nomad stable and even the Palm Zire, the Treo 600 etc. In principle, i.e.
I spent several hours trying to make my Zen work with the Real Harmony player (which you need, to play stuff downloaded from the store), with no luck. The problem here is that Real lets you download in a proprietary format called RAX (some version of AAC), which requires a firmware upgrade to play on the Zen. After trying for a long while, I figured that I should have taken Real's warning about Harmony being in beta stage seriously. Clearly, there is a bug in the current build that prevented the songs from being transferred despite several firmware upgrades.
There's still a solution, right? Yes, you need to burn the tracks you bought onto a CD and then rip back in MP3. Just make sure you transfer one song at a time (it claims insufficient rights if you try to transfer all the tracks at one go) and then burn the entire CD in audio format. I had no problem ripping the CD back into MP3 format afterwards. As a result, I am listening to Thievery Corporation's excellent new album, The Outernational Sound (bought at $4.99), as I write this post.
The point of this post is to alert y'all to the fact that buying 4 CD's for $20 is a superb deal and the Real store does have a huge selection, including an entire section of Indian music. The only trouble is the burn and rip back thing if there's a compatibility issue with your MP3 player. On the other hand, if you dont have an MP3 player and just want to buy some cheap music, this is a fantastic opportunity. I dont expect this offer to last for too long since Real has got to be losing money selling music at these prices. This is just Real's attempt to lure customers from the Itunes store. At these prices, it just might work.
I spent several hours trying to make my Zen work with the Real Harmony player (which you need, to play stuff downloaded from the store), with no luck. The problem here is that Real lets you download in a proprietary format called RAX (some version of AAC), which requires a firmware upgrade to play on the Zen. After trying for a long while, I figured that I should have taken Real's warning about Harmony being in beta stage seriously. Clearly, there is a bug in the current build that prevented the songs from being transferred despite several firmware upgrades.
There's still a solution, right? Yes, you need to burn the tracks you bought onto a CD and then rip back in MP3. Just make sure you transfer one song at a time (it claims insufficient rights if you try to transfer all the tracks at one go) and then burn the entire CD in audio format. I had no problem ripping the CD back into MP3 format afterwards. As a result, I am listening to Thievery Corporation's excellent new album, The Outernational Sound (bought at $4.99), as I write this post.
The point of this post is to alert y'all to the fact that buying 4 CD's for $20 is a superb deal and the Real store does have a huge selection, including an entire section of Indian music. The only trouble is the burn and rip back thing if there's a compatibility issue with your MP3 player. On the other hand, if you dont have an MP3 player and just want to buy some cheap music, this is a fantastic opportunity. I dont expect this offer to last for too long since Real has got to be losing money selling music at these prices. This is just Real's attempt to lure customers from the Itunes store. At these prices, it just might work.
