Surprisingly perhaps I haven’t rushed to join the e-music revolution. Until I got my phone with its music player a year or two back I didn’t own a device other than a computer that could play e-music. I always used a computer at home or at work to play music and videos. This is partly because I don’t in general put headphones on and listen to music anywhere I go, and because when my old Walkman cassette player broke it got replaced by a radio and I never got around to buying an MP3 player.
That’s now changing because of my work which will require me to move around different worksites, and also because of the convenience of being able to download music instead of buying a CD or DVD. Up until now I bought most Christian music from the shop and ripped the CD or DVD, but last week for the first time I bought a Hillsong album as a download from their website, which is much cheaper than buying a CD and convenient, too. I remember a few years ago buying a Kent Henry CD from the States. It took months to arrive and with the shipping it more than doubled the cost. Imagine now you can buy any praise and worship music from any artist directly over the Internet without paying the costs of physical media and distribution (CDs or DVDs) and shipping charges.
There are several ways of getting music like this. iTunes of course is king, but Amazon is giving them a run for their money. However, at present Amazon’s MP3 store is unavailable outside the US. This really means either the artists’ site or iTunes. Since I don’t yet own an iPod I will have to get one sometime. I don’t know much about how the iTunes DRM works with M4A files so I hope there is a way I can, in the meantime, get downloaded music onto my phone so that I can keep playing back on that until I get around to buying an iPod.
Well, I got iTunes installed and have managed to create an Apple ID so I could buy a track (Jeremy Camp – Overcome). This came down as an m4a file and Media player also recognised it. Therefore I was able to sync it to my phone. With iTunes I also managed to edit the info fields on the Hillsong God Is Able tracks I bought and downloaded at the weekend, so that they appeared properly in the album listing. I’m not sure why there was a problem with the MP3 ID fields if that is what the problem was, but the phone kept refusing to put 8 of the tracks into any album. At least now I have managed to get it to recognise that 10 of the tracks are in the same album but it still insists on creating another album for the 11th track. So far as the Jeremy Camp album goes, the fact the track is recognised and can be moved about suggests there is not any DRM on it. I suppose DRM is not mandatory on iTunes. With the hassle of the info fields and downloading the individual Hillsong tracks next time I will just buy it on iTunes.