Feelings on Napster?

I grew up, at least partly in northern georgia, my grandparents had a house in Macon county, near the line with North Carolina, in the mountains. I spent my childhood in the mountains there, working in Highlands north carolina, if you know where that is. Re: Napster--glad your having fun with it. Apparently your living life in a faster lane than I (I'm still dealing with a 56k modem). I've not burned any CD's as I don't own a burner. How did it turn out?

Oh, I only have a 56k also, you just have to do it 24 hours a day that way. Not good, and what I hate is when you get halfway thru a download, and the host suddenly decides to log off...what a pain. I need to go to a place with T-1 connection sometime, and use a zip drive..........I've not burned any yet, no super hurry on that. The hurry is in getting all I want (a lot) before they're ordered to cease operations...I only have 75 songs so far................I've been thru the NC mountains several times. On the way to Asheville on highway 64, you go thru a lot of little old towns, that probably look similar to the way they did, pre-WWII era. I love the Vanderbilt mansion, I wish my future dream house could be similar...heh heh heh.

I see napster like a trial program. You get the general idea of the program but your distracted by banners, register windows, and limited funcionality. I use napster to download something im interested in, burn it, and listen to it for a while to see if I like it. If I like it I buy it because mp3s sound horible on and good system. They are by definition compressed music. I haven't bought a cd since the begining of napster before lisining to it first. Whenever a mp3 is played on a good system it's like listining to a register now window.

Not all of them sound the same, some are pretty close to CD. The transfer rate doesn't tell the whole story, either. Some at 128 sound superior to a 256, it's just a matter of how well the original was captured. For instance, if a CD was copied at several times normal speed (before MP3 conversion), then the sonic ills are obvious. My reason for using Napster, is to get the music I am unwilling to buy, but would still like to listen to. This amounts to a lot of music, and saves me many thousands of dollars off the retail price of those CD's. I've already spent many thousands of dollars on both CD, and especially recent vinyl reissues, so I feel I'm owed a "break" of sorts. They've made plenty of money off of me since I first started buying music 16 years ago, afterall...

Also, it's nice to be able to get that stuff that can't be bought in stores (or anywhere), if you catch my drift. Sure, the sonic quality of those is compromised, but so what? I'm a music lover, where my favorite music is concerned (the "audiophile" music is what you show your system off with, mostly)...and it's not my fault that they'll never release a live concert album...