FreeLists / blindipod / [blindipod] Spiral Frog

["Lysander" <wildblinker007@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I just thought I'd post a quick overview of how this free Spiral Frog music 
service works for those who might be interested.

They say it's free ad-supported music--and boy, they aren't kidding. Every time 
you go to download a tune you have to listen to a 90-second audio commercial. 
Not every time you view the website. Every time you download a song. The files 
come in WMA--so no CD burning, and of course no iPod because iPods don't 
support WMA. It's possible that they'll work on other portable players, but I'm 
going to guess not. Still, it might well be possible on players that support 
WMA. What's more important is that they--like the iTunes music store--are 
ripped at 128Kbps constant bitrate. When will these idiots stop doing this? 
That erks me more than anything else about the service. It's 2000 and bloody 6, 
verriable bitrate profiles exist for almost everything, the least oyu can do is 
go up to 192 KbPS if you don't want to do lossless--which i could understand 
for free as the bandwidth on that would be pretty steep. Aaanyways, you have to 
go back to the website every month to view advertisements. If you don't, your 
license to listen to the songs expires.

In conclusion: props to the recording industry for trying something like 
this--it IS a major step forward in thinking for them. The execution, however, 
is inexcusably flawed. I understand that you can't expect much for free, but 
there are much better ways to control your content than hobbling it this badly. 
I'd come back to this if they made the commercials under 30 seconds or used 
banner ads rather than audio that gets in the way of the actual file, AND they 
increased the bitrate of the files. As it is, though, I don't see any reason to 
do this. I can still download anything I want for free at the same 
quality--sure it's illegal, but let's be realistic: I will not be caught, so I 
do not care. I'd see the advantage in using this service if hte ads were less 
obnoxious because it would be free, legal, and guarantyed quality--but the 
quality is inexcusably low for this service and so woudln't be any better than 
I would get on a filesharing service.