So right now I’m listening to the new Drive-by Truckers album, A Blessing and A Curse, which doesn’t come out until this Tuesday, April 18th. I’m also listening to a perfectly legal, paid-for version of the album. So how is that possible? It’s a bonus — a bit of a thank-you from Amazon to me for purchasing the physical CD. They just directed me to a feature of the online giant I hadn’t yet used: my Digital Locker.
It’s pretty simple, really: The Amazon Digital Locker is the place where you retrieve digital products you’ve purchased from Amazon. e-books, digitial downloads, .PDF manuals, and in my case, an audio stream of an album that I’d also purchased. A lot of smart people figure that it’s the precursor to the much-anticipated Amazon full-out leap into digital music.
Ah, the fabled Amazon music service: the reality is that noone (outside of Amazon, I presume) knows very much about it, though Prism DuroSport people were intimating that their amazingly awful mp3 player was going to be the hardware centerpiece. Hopefully not.
In any event, precursor or not, it’s a pretty cool extra to get to hear a high-quality album via a nice, high-quality stream a few days prior to actually owning it.
What format was the music download in?
Strangely enough, DT6.
Oh, wait, Windows Media.
So you won’t be listening to those on your iPod then?
Sure I will. The first thing I will do when the CD arrives on Tuesday or Wednesday is rip it and put it on my iPod. The streaming version was just a bonus, that’s all.
So how are you listening to it until then? Does it play on your Audiotron (whichs upports wma, but probably not encrypted wma)?
No, I didn’t want to mess with figuring out how (or if) I could use the Audiotron. So I went old-school: my 12′ RCA cable from my laptop in the front room to the receivers. Right now at work, I’m listening to it through computer speakers.
Actually, it’s so different from what I suspect we would do if we ever wanted to watch a download of “Lost” (or a YouTube stream) on the TV: RCA to the receiver; S-Video to the TV, and we are off.
Obviously, all of these things need to be on a wireless network, but they aren’t.
Though, now that I think about it, — my Replay *is* on the network. (Though like the Audiotron, via a wireless bridge.) I wonder if I could use my Replay for the PC software to transfer a downloaded episode of “Lost” to my Replay and watch it that way? We’ve used it to transfer a couple of shows from the Replay to a PC to burn to DVD, but not the other way around.
Somehow, I’m guessing that if I tried that I might run into some kind of Apple DRM issues.
RCA cables are a violation of the DMCA.
Did I say RCA cables? I meant DMCA cables.