Looking for a good music downloading program compadable with a mac, something like how napster is set uop, were u pay a fee per month for unlimited downloads, or something free.

Hmm... I'm not sure. There is this reallllly great program out there right now though. It's called iTunes and you can use it to access the iTunes music store. Which is an online store for the purchasing of music. It's made by a company called Apple Computers (AAPL on the stock exchange) and they allow you to preview songs and then purchase them for the very reasonable price of $0.99 per song. Often they have greater deals if you purchase the whole album. :p

Seriously though I'm pretty sure iTunes is the only online music store that works on the Mac. Lemme know if I'm incorrect in that assertion.

Thanks,

Jeff

I was actually looking for free music to be honest, one of the share programs were u share the music and it therefore is not illegal as long as you share. That is what I am looking for

Well free & legal rarely go hand in hand in my experience. If I understand the current Napster set up you pay them a fee and then you're allowed unlimited downloads per month, but to play on an MP3 player or burn discs you pay an additional fee. So it's not really free. As compared to iTunes flat 99 cent purchase where you can burn the songs to disc or add to your iPod or what have you.

Programs like the old Napster and Kazaa allow people to share files in a peer to peer setup. That would be just fine if they were swapping family photos, but when you give someone music without paying the people who own the rights to the song..then you're like the kids from that Apple Superbowl commercial not too long ago.

Bottom Line: The only way to legally download music is to purchase it in some way(or at some time) and the only music store for Mac is iTMS.

Sorry,

Jeff

is that napster thing youi was talking about mac friendly?

Hello,

A different program is: Limewire. But I fully agree with GordonFi that the legal reasonings should prevent you from even wanting to dive into this type of arrangement.

A lot of the Napster / Limewire / Kazaaa software like to bring in viruslike programs to do things like steal serial numbers, perhaps passwords, and maybe a keystroke logger.

Best advice is to just leave this part of the internet alone, and do not mess with it. If you want to share photos, put them on a webserver somewhere and let people click on them.

Walk away. Be safe.

Christian

On a slightly related note, I bought my fiance an IPOD for xmas and am looking for an alternative peice of software to manage the music on it as I find Itunes to be too limiting....that is unless someone can explain to me a painless way to copy music from an IPOD to a library on any given p.c. Without this function I can't get the music from a freinds IPOD to my p.c. or move merge music from my p.c. to my finace's laptop without having to copy the Itunes folder structure and hack the XML file which stores the file pointers

I found your posting because I am trying to the same thing. Have you found anything yet?

Hello,

I wish I could be helpful here, but do not own an iPod. One of these days... unless we get one as a wedding gift...

Christian

Ok, although I'm a MCSE and consider Mac's to be on "the dark side"....I've kinda come around full circle with I-tunes. I agree the interface is very good and intuitive but was very pissy to find that you can't copy music from an Ipod to anywhere else. I also heard that the latest firmware version for Ipod updater causes limits to what music can be played as music bought on other online stores might not play on I-tunes.

After a bit of a hunt I found a few pieces of software that allow you to copy the music database from an Ipod to your p.c. Of them all I preferred Sharepod as it doesn't require any install (only works if the Ipod is connected) and seems to work seamlessly. It doesn't copy the folder structure that the original ripping made but copies all the ID3 tags and when you re-index the songs in I-tunes will sort them into their respective albums/genres artists etc. I've attached the software for you to try.