downloading music
 

Hello all

My daughters have a seemingly instatiable appetite for pop music
and I got weary recently of (them / me) buying maxi CDs
which nearly always have four or five versions of the same song
recorded on a different day, in a different colored shirt, or with the wind
blowing in another direction.

So, I've been trying iTunes (on a Win2k computer) for a couple of weeks
which seemed a good, legal answer to this predicament.
However, this tends to eat blank CDs without producing results.
All the configuration settings are correct
and when a CD burns fine one day and not the next,
I can be 99% sure it's not my fault.

I'm now looking round for alternative sources of the same sort which

1) divert a fair share to musicians, and

2) use a format which is a bit better than MP3
but which is also as far as possible transparent,
i.e. none of these protected proprietary formats,
that prevent me from copying or coverting.

Grateful in advance for any suggestions, from Ray