I know some people who’ve settled on one source for digital music purchases. (I also have a friend who buys CDs and rips them himself, but that’s another topic.) This made me wonder what the buying habits of our readers are. I’m curious as to how many people pretty much limit themselves to one source vs. how many of you “shop around” before you buy.

Regarding the iTunes Store, obviously a big advantage is iTunes integration. You’re in your music library, and with just a click, you’re in the store. Do a quick search, click a button or two, and the music is yours. Further, the music is automatically placed in your iTunes library, with album art. It’s all so seamless and easy that I certainly understand the attraction. All other thing being equal, it could be a powerful tie-breaker.

However, getting music into iTunes via other methods is almost trivially easy. Amazon does it best. Its download app makes it as seamless as the iTunes Store. You make you purchase from Amazon, and the files are downloaded and automatically appear in your iTunes library. It’s very slick and works every time.

Even without a slick downloader, all it takes to put music into iTunes is a simple drag and drop. Download the files from wherever onto your Mac or PC, and then just drag them onto the iTunes library. Not only does iTunes add them to the library, it even grabs the album artwork for you.

While I agree the iTunes Store’s integration is a nice advantage, I’m not willing to pay a lot of extra money for if I don’t have to. What follows is my usual process for making a music purchase.

First Stop: eMusic

If the music I want is on eMusic, I get it there. However, since eMusic is almost completely indie labels and artists, it’s not uncommon for what I want to be unavailable.

The main disadvantage of eMusic is that it’s a flat $10 a month, for which I get 40 downloads. (It’s now 30, but I signed up over two years ago when it was 40.) If you don’t use the downloads you lose them. I listen to a lot of stuff, and usually have no issue getting 40 a month, but many people probably would.

Another disadvantage of eMusic is that the files don’t have the appeal they did when I joined. File quality is 192K VBR LAME encoding, and they’re DRM-free. Over two years ago that was way ahead of the game, but now it’s the worst of the bunch. Amazon is MP3 256K; iTunes is an even better AAC 256K, and both are also DRM-free.

In short, eMusic is not the amazing value proposition it once was. Still, if you can average three albums a month for your $10, it remains a good buy.

Next Stops: Amazon and iTunes

The next stop for me isn’t Amazon or iTunes — it’s both. I have to see what each is offering to make a decision.

Price is obviously a factor; if there’s a large price delta for the same album, I’ll get the least expensive. For example, I just snapped up Green Day’s new album 21st Century Breakdown on Amazon for $4.99. It even included an “exclusive” live track. iTunes, for its part, had two extra tracks and a PDF booklet, which is great, but it was $14.99. And without the two bonus tracks, they wanted $11.99. Sorry, iTunes, Amazon wins this round, hands down. Amazon tends to have more sales, but iTunes frequently has bargains as well. If either one can save me a couple bucks or more, that’s generally where I’ll buy.

Content is another factor. Amazon seems to do less of this than iTunes, but when an album comes with PDF liner notes, extra songs, etc., that could sway me. I’m old school, and actually read liner notes. As for extra content, sometimes I find an extra song is one of the better ones on an album. It’s all about the music, and if an artist I like is tossing in one or more extra song, then I’m interested, though not for the kind of price difference I just mentioned above.

What if it’s a “tie” (i.e., cost is essentially the same and neither site has special content)? In that case I tend to go with iTunes. I believe Apple is the primary reason we have the Amazon MP3 store as we know it, and I reward it for that. Sure, Apple started the iTunes Store mainly because it wanted to ensure music was available for the iPod (i.e., not just available with Windows Media DRM), but the way it changed the industry is no worse off for that. Fear of iTunes’ “power” is what prompted the labels to stake Amazon with DRM-free music in the first place. Apple shook things up, so I give the company its due.

Besides, if price is not an issue, I’d rather have AAC files anyway. We could debate their sonic benefits all day (I’m not going there), but if nothing else, it’s irrefutable that AAC files are smaller than their MP3 counterparts. Since I like higher quality encoding rates, I’ll take all the size relief I can get.

Only One Store?

In the digital age, I’m not sure why anyone would hit just one store to get their music. I didn’t even shop that way in the “old days,” when going to three places meant driving around. But nowadays, when you can visit multiple stores and check what’s available in maybe 30 seconds, why limit yourself to just one?

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Sadly, no e-tailer turned out to be safe. Both Amazon and Wal-Mart introduced their own variable pricing schemes shortly after Apple’s went live. This was literally hours after a friend recommended switching to Amazon, since it now presented a better deal. Amazon is now offering some of its best-selling tracks at $1.29, and some at the low end for 79 cents, while the overwhelming bulk of their catalog still goes for 99 cents. True to their lowest price guarantee, Wal-Mart’s standard price point is 94 cents, with some top sellers now going for $1.24, and a few bargains at 64 cents.

The changes across the board signal an industry-wide trend, and show that Apple was not alone in negotiating a new pricing arrangement with the record labels. It’s especially noteworthy that the same tracks don’t necessarily cost the same in each store, with Apple having more songs in the top-tiered price range than either of the other two.

Both Wal-Mart and Amazon had already been selling music DRM-free, suggesting that the recording industry’s goal with dangling the DRM-free carrot in front of Apple was to pave the way for price hikes across the board. Now that that barrier is gone, expect to see digital music prices creep to the point where they more closely resemble what you’d pay at brick-and-mortar stores.

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Even though Apple does not ship alternatives to built-in programs, many savvy users grab alternative browsers , text editors and even movie players. One area where Apple seems to have a stranglehold, though, is in the general media players category. Let’s face it, almost every Mac user uses iTunes as the primary way to store, organize and playback media. iTunes is also the de-facto way to get content–music, video or applications–onto your iPod or iPhone. iTunes, to put it bluntly, is its own monopoly with no competition–until now.

Thanks to the hard work of the Pioneers of the Inevitable, Songbird is finally in its 1.0 Release Candidate stage and nearly ready for prime time. So how does it stack up against Apple’s built-in 800-pound gorilla? Can it replace iTunes for many users? Read on for TAB’s initial view of Songbird 1.0.0 RC1.

Songbird: First Look

One major difference between iTunes and Songbird is that you will need to have an Intel Mac to work with it. There are no PPC builds for this release candidate and I suspect that may be the case for the first official release as well. The 31MB download ends up taking 126MB on disk just within the Applications folder, which is just slightly less than the 136MB occupied by iTunes. Not surprisingly, Songbird makes use of the XUL framework and a host of open source libraries to do its work, all of which must be factors in the difference in resource consumption just after startup when compared to iTunes.

You will be asked to import your music after firing up the application for the first time and Songbird will either scan your system for content or it can import your existing iTunes library. While it may re-create your library and playlists item-for-item, Songbird cannot play protected AAC content due to the QuickTime add-on not working with RC1 just yet, so do not expect to play many of your iTunes store purchases unless they are either in iTunes Plus format or you have already taken measures to de-DRM your library.

You will also be asked if you want to load any extensions at this time. Songbird ships with five add-ons:

• iPod Device Support
• SHOUTcast Radio
• Concerts (including ticketing info via Songkick)
• Last.fm
• mashTape

And you can find many more in the Songbird listings.

Once the initial setup is complete, you will be greeted with a window that will seem very familiar and intuitive.

But, Does It Play Music/Videos?

As the previous window-capture shows, Songbird most definitely plays music. With the proper add-ons installed, it will even give you some details about what you are listening to.

Because it is open source, Songbird supports Ogg Vorbis content without having to fiddle with any settings and also supports MP3 and FLAC on all platforms; WMA and WMA DRM on Windows; and (once the add-on is updated) AAC and Fairplay on Windows and Mac.

Video support was “interesting” as I tried playing a movie trailer from the iTunes store (not in a DRM-format) and it played, but with a slightly different experience than one would get in iTunes.

(The video was “squished” with no way to correct it, but it played “correctly”).

Songbird does let you modify the media metadata and will display song lyrics if you have meticulously entered them yourself or utilized one of the handy add-ons to fetch them from the dark corners of the internets.

How Does It Measure Up?

Because of the virtually identical interface to that of iTunes, the experience was very…iTunes-like. Everything worked as you would expect and audio playback was indistinguishable from that of iTunes as well. Smart Playlists worked as expected along with subscriptions (i.e. podcasts). Video playback was a bit tenuous and Songbird did crash on me twice, but that is to be expected given that it is still a release candidate. The developers were even thoughtful enough to include a mini-player.

I was very pleasantly surprised with the level of support for iPods. I was not brave enough to subject my own, personal iPhone to the test, so I commandeered my daughter’s iPod and managed to perform all operations that one would expect to perform without any errors or warnings. That same iPod worked fine again in iTunes as well.

It was also unexpectedly useful to be able to utilize the tabbed-browsing capabilities within Songbird, especially when I used it to explore the “similar songs” content via Last.fm.

Tabbed-browsing was also useful when I jumped over to Aimee Street to find some tracks (it further displayed a list of files I could download immediately).

However, my experiences with the preferences system left much to be desired.

With a bit more polish and working add-ons, I could definitely use Songbird as my primary audio media player if it weren’t for the need to sync everything but music and video with my iPhone. It would also be useful to have a “remote” application for Songbird that worked on the iPhone and iPod touch.

Beyond The Player

The real power of Songbird comes from add-ons. These extensions are what make iPod support, album art download, Last.fm functionality and skinning (now called “feathering”) possible. The best way to work with add-ons is to use the “Songbird Add-ons” bookmark from the leftmost pane. By viewing the Songbird Add-ons gallery from within the application you will only be able to install those extensions that are compatible with the version of Songbird you are running, which will take quite a bit of the guesswork and frustration out of finding ones you want to use.

After putting Songbird through it’s paces, here are some add-ons I can recommend you install to get the best experience out of the application.

• MediaFlow for a cover-flow like view
• Last.fm Album Art to make MediaFlow useful
• Music Recommendations for pseduo-Genius-like recommendations
• LiveTweeter to annoy your social networking friends
• LyricMaster to read what you are hearing
• Mac Remote Control Support which enables the use of Apple’s remote control
• iTunes for an even more familiar GUI

Getting Your Hands Dirty

Because Songbird is an open project, you may contribute as little or as much as you’d like to the community of users. You can work on skins (OK, “feathers”), general add-ons or fiddle with building display panes and Songbird-specific web pages.

One very interesting idea would be to fully integrate social networking sites within Songbird itself so one could, say, monitor Twitter Search for “listening to” tweets and have them queue up in a stream from Last.fm or perhaps find a way to integrate Amazon MP3 into Songbird so that tracks can import directly into it instead of first having to go into iTunes then wait for the library sync. Personally, I’d really like to see support for Growl via some nifty add-on.

For those users that like to know where an application has made footprints on their system, Songbird will store music in ~/Music (you probably should create a subdirectory called “Songbird” that instruct the application to use it if you like your top-level Music folder tidy) and correctly utilizes ~/Library/Application Support/Songbird2 (note the “2″ on the end) for application extras. Application preferences are not fully stored in ~/Library/Preferences/org.songbirdnest.songbird.plist, but it does use it for some of them.

Scripters will be a bit disappointed as Songbird does not have a rich dictionary in any way, shape or form. Only basic application controls are available and no way to do any type of media content-based automation whatsoever. All customizations and integration attempts must be done via Songbird add-ons.

Songbird has come a very long way since the days of version 0.3 and it is definitely something the iTunes development team within Apple should keep an eye on. While iTunes bloats (though Genius is truly genius), Songbird innovates. When 1.0 finally comes out, I suspect I will have little hesitation recommending it to even the most casual of Mac user.

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I am all for competition, but I don’t think these two alternatives provide much to combat Apple’s dominance. Let’s take a short look at each.

Netflix

Personally, I use Blockbuster Online, so I don’t know much about the current “Watch Now” plan that Netflix has. Netflix last year started allowing people to stream movies in their queue to their computer. Now, they have announced a box that will allow you to stream movies to your TV. It costs $100. According to Crave’s review of the box, it has only 5% of the top movies available to be streamed and the quality is only 480i (worse than a DVD and much worse than HD).

Granted, this is the first version of the streaming device, and Netflix has three more models coming down the line. This is never going to sell well if there are so few options.

Netflix does have more models and a cheaper price than Apple TV. These are important competitive advantages. Netflix seems to be trying to make this box replace DVD players, which is a great idea. If they make a combo DVD player and streaming device, Netflix would be much better positioned to attack Apple. Just another box that doesn’t offer as much functionality as AppleTV is not that appealing.

One great benefit of this box is that it won’t cost Netflix customers any more money to stream their movies (other than the $100 device cost). They already get their “Watch Now” movies as part of the plan that they are on.

Hopefully, AppleTV will support a reasonable subscription plan for rentals. If that happens, and iTunes can keep the catalog larger than Netflix and Blockbuster, I don’t think that Netflix has a prayer.

Napster

Napster is also fighting against the iTunes monster by offering the same thing that iTunes offers. You can buy DRM-free, 256 kbps MP3s from Napster’s online store. This departure from their usual subscription plans offers music “from all four major labels and thousands of indie artists” (from Crave)

I don’t understand why they are offering the exact same pricing as iTunes. This does not help consumers. At least Amazon was on the right track by reducing the price of songs to $0.89 (ten cents isn’t much, but it is a start). I know that Apple has sold four billion songs on iTunes at that 99-cent price point, but I think that companies could sell even more, and further fight piracy if the price point were lower.

I was in college when allofmp3.com was all the rage. I also love Russian music so that site was amazing. At first, I thought somebody “got it” and realized that if you charged just pennies for each song and it was DRM-free, it would be much easier to buy the music than it is to find illegal copies.

Napster is not offering much more than iTunes, so there is not much of a reason to start using their service, to me. What do you think? Is it enough? Napster claims 6 Million songs. Is that enough? I know that the argument has been ad nauseam about a price point that will fight piracy, so I won’t belabor the point here. I will just ask that somebody offer it! They will sell more music and probably make more money in the long run.

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Fortunately, there’s eMusic, the next largest online music retailer behind the iTunes Store. All songs at eMusic are available in pure MP3 format, encoded with the LAME variable bitrate (VBR) encoder, completely unrestricted by DRM. If your musical tastes are like mine, you’ll find eMusic to be indie music heaven. Many artists available there are unsigned or self-promoted through IODA, the Independent Online Distribution Alliance, but eMusic’s catalog of popular names is formidable as well, including the only DRM-free online version of Paul McCartney’s Memory Almost Full.

Until recently, though, the eMusic Download Manager has been available only as a PowerPC application, and ran a bit sluggishly under Rosetta on Intel-based Macs. But that has all changed. Meet the brand spankin’ new eMusic Remote 1.0 — available for Windows, Mac (PPC, Intel, and Universal), and Linux.

The new eMusic Remote is built atop the Gecko engine from Mozilla and integrates a browser window with the download manager, allowing eMusic customers to browse, preview, and download all from the same application without having to open a new window or tab in Safari, Firefox, Camino, or other browser.

So for all you readers who are already eMusic subscribers, go download the Technology Preview of the eMusic Remote; I’d like to hear your thoughts on it! Do you like the integrated experience, or would you rather have a slim application that just does the download? Is it just me, or does it actually run faster?

If you’re not an eMusic member, you can get 25 free downloads when you sign up at the website, or if email me at tab (at) paXoo -dot- com, I’ll send you a link to double that for 50 free downloads when you sign up.

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