Today Amazon began offering high-quality, DRM-free MP3 downloads from two of the major music studios. I decided to give it a try. I fired up my Powerbook and installed Amazon’s free downloader. Installing a separate downloader sounds like a pain, but it is a very slick tool. You can buy an entire MP3 album with Amazon’s One-Click using your favorite browser, and then the downloader automatically pulls all the files down, copies them to your iTunes folder and imports the tracks into your iTunes library (including the album art). Fancy.
With much of the EMI and Universal catalogs available, the selection of music is excellent. I bought Sinatra’s classic In the Wee Small Hours (1954) for $8.99 (also available at $0.89 per track). Frank never sounded better — this is the 1998 remastered version, and the MP3s are encoded at 256 VBR.
Is this an iTunes killer? Too soon to say, but this is an awfully impressive debut — the price is better than iTunes and the quality is superb. I still prefer CDs, but if I am in the mood for a quick impulse buy, I now have two viable alternatives.
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