Not Happy Days
I downloaded my first digital music track. Yeah, I know it is about time.
I’ve had a portable audio player for several months that can play MP3 and WMA files. Up until now, the music on it was always ripped from my own CD collection. I was never into the illegal napster/kazaa downloads that alot of people were into.
But I was looking for a particular song that I didn’t have: Happy Days Are Here Again. Political ramifications and all. After reading this article, I went to MusicMatch.com on the review’s recommendation. They have high bit-rate (quality) songs and they don’t have any monthly subscription fee. I also already had their software on my computer. Hey, this’ll be a no brainer.
I used their search engine and it listed a two and half minute rendition by George Shearing at the top. Bingo! I like that jazz pianist alot. Can never have too much of his solo piano work. Hey, I’ll splurge $.99 for track 3 off of this album. I click buy and it prompts me to create an account. During the account creation process, I gives me a little link to the list of WMA players they support. The hardware list, dated last year, did not contain my particular model, which is pretty new, but about half the entries in the list were older models from the same manufacturer as mine. Shouldn’t be a problem.
After I sign up and enter my VISA number, the song magically appears in my playlist after only a few seconds. Thank you broadband! My computer says the track is over 4 minutes long. That’s odd. It starts playing and you know, it doesn’t sound like Happy Days Are Here Again either. You know it sound alot like When I Fall in Love. A beautifully played song, but not what I ordered.
I search my hard drive and found the 5.6Mb file named “George Shearing – Happy Days Are Here Again”. I right click to display the properties of the file. The title, artist, album all match up, but the track number says 4, not 3. I go back to the All Music Guide web page. Sure enough, track 4 is When I Fall in Love.
Grrr. Might as well enjoy it, but when I copy the file to my portable player wouldn’t you know: they player was was running low on battery charge and the disk was full. I plug the player in for awhile for it to charge then delete another album off of it to make room. With the new track on my player, I press play and a little message shows in its display: “[i] Copy Protected”. It then skips to the next song.
Apparently only half of Creative’s portable music players play copy protected files. Apparently mine is not one of them. Apparently I won’t be buying anymore music online.