Music Download Cards

[Razor X]

I was in Target today and took a quick look at the CDs to see if there was anything there that caught my interest (there wasn't).  I noticed that there were some albums offered the choice of purchasing the CD version or purchasing a plastic "download" card, which looked like a gift card or a credit card.  It supposedly gets activated at the cash register and then you take it home, go to a website and enter the number, and voila! you can download the album directly to your hard drive.

The one I looked at had a few extras -- like a bonus track and digital liner notes, but I just don't see the point of buying music this way.  To drive to a store and purchase a card so you can go home and download the album seems to defeat the purpose.  Why not just buy the CD and copy it to your PC?  Has anyone here ever purchased any of these cards?

[Tyler]

I've been seeing these at Target and other places as well.  If I can get more music for the same price, then that's one reason to buy it.  Though, I can really see your point.

One thing I did like about one of the cards that I saw was that I could download it in MP3 and it was free of DRM.  Considering that I listen to all my music in MP3 format, even in my car, it was attractive to me since I'd have to rip to MP3 when I got home anyways.

[herronm]

It might be worth it to get the digital liner notes.  I've been downloading MP3s from Amazon, but in most cases you don't get the liner notes.  I miss those.

Side note:  I've been trading CDs at lala.com for over a year.  You list the CDs you want and the ones you want to trade.  All done by mail and lala provides the mailers.  Low cost, about $1 per transaction.

[Razor X]

I just looked in my iTunes and noticed that anything I purchased through iTunes or ripped from CDs are saved  as AAC files at 128 kbps and take up an average of 3 MB each.  The files that I've purchased from Amazon are all MP3s at 256 kbps and seem to be about twice the size of the other files, on average.   I've been blown away by the sound quality of some of the Amazon files, though I think this is more due to the fact that they are digital remasters of very old recordings.  I don't notice any difference between them and the AAC files of more recent recordings.

Bottom line:  the MP3 files are taking up about twice as much disk space.  I guess this shouldn't be much of an issue with an 80GB hard drive.  Does anyone have an opinion on which option, if any,  is better?

[JDog]

Download http://www.utorrent.com  and head to http://www.mininova.com.

Search the mininova directory for all types of movies,tvshows,music,books. Use the UTorrent client to download the torrent, and bang, you have save yourself 10 bucks.