Good Downloadable Music - Finally

I think the fact that I'm a big Mac fan has come up in the blog before. Well, I am. I'm about to get rid of my last vestiges of PC ownership (as soon as my lovely 24" iMac is delivered in working order). The remaining issue for me with Apple in general is the iTunes music store.

I love the convenience of downloading music, but I refuse to buy music with DRM attached to it. So, up to now, I've had to buy CDs and rip them to a high quality format and load the songs into iTunes manually. It's workable, but inconvenient. Now before you get all over me, I know that it's not Apple's fault. I also know that they DO offer DRM-free songs, but that's just one label for now (EMI) and not only do you have to pay more, you have to go looking for the stuff. It's just not obvious.

All that changed for me today. Well, it changed a little while ago, but I just started using Amazon's MP3 download store. It's phenomenal. It's still not a complete catalog of music, but I started looking for a few artists that I've been meaning to buy, and found all of them. Apparently both EMI and Universal have joined in, providing a great library of available music. So, one album download quickly led to another. With the Amazon download assistant, it automatically added the high quality (256kbps) DRM-free songs into my iTunes library.

There have been other reviews of the store, even some iTunes comparisons, so I'll let you read those directly if you want more insight.