Re: [Hampshire] Purchasing music online

Samuel Penn wrote:
> On Sunday 01 February 2009 13:29:15 Mike Dwerryhouse wrote:
>
> Ah ha. Never found that before. A big 'browse' link on the front page
> would have been more obvious. They do seem to have quite a bit of
> classical music, plus also quite a good selection of audiobooks, which
> is very nice.
>
> However... they seem to charge for both separately. From what I can
> see, I'd have to pay twice - once for music and again for audiobooks,
> a feature that seems broken. I'm not even sure I can just get an
> audiobook subscription, I'll have to try and find out more.
>
> Do you have to use their download manager?
>
> And by download I'm guessing that they actually count tracks rather
> than 'music'. That's going to be awkward given the count doesn't roll
> over, so I'd be buying fractions of an Opera one month, then wait
> a month to buy the rest.
>
> The audiobooks do look tempting however.
>
>
I use their download manager - I think it's built on the Mozilla toolkit
(forget what that's called). It works fine. The download file from the
website is a sort of encrypted key for the purchase. There is a java app
I used to use that fetches the mp3 file from the key. The download
manager does it in one go. I think there's a perl script somewhere
which also performs the conversion.

ISTR that if you re-download a track you already have, the database
remembers you already have it, and doesn't deduct it from the monthly
total. I'm not sure if that works from one month to the next, but it worked
for a track I just tried to download and failed.

They count tracks - it's meant for pop/rock albums. The same price for
25 minute tracks (I have some of those) as for 30 second ones. I haven't
tried opera. It probably depends how the record company sets out the
tracks.

MikeD