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Tutorials - Legal Ways to Download Music for Free (Virtually)
Tunebites - Legal Napster and I-Tunes DRM Remover
There is a legal way to download all the music you want and then re-record it after which you can burn it to a CD, transfer it to an MP3 Player, anything you wish. This is known as the "analogue hole", to explain this you have to realise that if you have a subscription to Napster or i-Tunes you can download as many tracks as you wish, but the downloads come with DRM (Digital Rights Media) restrictions limiting what you can do with them. In order to burn a track to CD or transfer it to an MP3 player you have to pay extra for the rights, which can be expensive (depends on the subscription package you use).
However if you were to plug a tape recorder into your audio output and record the track on it the resulting track would be free of restrictions - this is the "analogue hole" and is on about the same level as traditional home taping of music or recording of video (which according to the huge mess of copywrite law actually is illegal but allowed under "Fair Use" since the lawsuit Sony won on the introduction of VCRs in the early 1908s)
The removal of DRM from copywrite protected media is illegal but apparantly making an analogue copy is not therefore this hole in the law is exploited, use it while you can.
Here is what you do to stay inside the law as it stands and get all the music you want for next to nothing.
Go to http://www.napster.com/ sign up for the download subscription service £9.99 / pcm no limits on how much you can download, get yourself some music downloaded. If you prefer i-tunes go there and sign up instead it does not matter which you use as the music is going to be de-restricted anyway.
Next download Tunebite and install it, you have to pay for it otherwise it only converts the first 30 seconds of a track, but it will save you a fortune and pay for itself in under 20 minutes. The Platinum Version also works with Video so is far better value than the cooking version. You will see on the site that this software is legal and openly for sale worldwide because it specifically does not "defeat" DRM it just by-passes it altogether, the original track is totally unchanged.
Read the help pages and installation notes with Tunebites to see how to set it up, it is pretty easy to figue out but beware when you use tunebites do not use the PC for anything else otherwise the quality of the resuting output will be poor or even useless.
Run Tunebites, tell it where the protected media is ie the folder you downloaded the Napster or I-Tunes tracks into via options then press the GO button to re-record the media minus the DRM. You can do anything you want with the resulting copies, they are totally unrestricted.
OK Granted this is pushing the "Fair Use - Analogue Hole" to the limits but it is legal, so until any court says otherwise it is OK. It even has presets to convert I Tunes or Napster tracks built in quite openly, besides which do you want to pay 75p per track for a MP3 which is nowhere near CD quality to start with or £9.99 / month for as much music as you can download?
Internet Radio
Another way to get legal music and video is internet radio, it works like an online jukebox searching for and downloading files from radio stations worldwide. You can also record anything you want to hard disk but it will be protected so to get it off your PC and on to your i-pod you need Tunebite - see above.
http://www.mp3radio.com/
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