Until recently, I bought all my CDs in physical form (strange that I have to specify!), mainly because I like to rip (using Max) at a higher bitrate than is available on iTunes.  I also like being able to flip through the album notes and artwork, and the option to play it on my CD player.  Yes I still have one.

There are plenty of arguments supporting digital downloads, some quite surprising, like the environmental impact of purchasing and (eventually) disposing of compact discs.  Lately I have been thinking more about the clutter aspect.  I have many CDs that I’ve listened to once or twice on disc, and have ripped to my hard drive.  Of course there are some that I’d prefer to have on disc, but what about albums that would be fine in MP3 format?

I recently tried out Amazon’s MP3 Downloads and was surprised to find their prices were cheaper than Amazon’s, and all of the downloads are DRM-free.  So I downloaded a couple of albums at $9.99 a piece and am quite pleased with my decision to save a few dollars on albums that I don’t need a hard copy of.

What about this price difference?  According to some sources, the major record labels are offering companies other than Apple, such as Amazon, a price break because they’re not so happy with the iTunes domination.  Check out the Coding Horror article about this.

All that to say, check out Amazon’s MP3 Downloads.

I recently posted about Grooveshark which dubs itself as an “online music community”.  I think Grooveshark is great when you know what you’re looking for, but other sites like last.fm and Pandora are fantastic if you want to hear something new.  Based on the Music Genome Project, the idea behind Pandora is simple:  you type in the name of an artist that you like, and Pandora finds similar music.  For each song you hear you can choose to strongly approve of the song (in which case you’ll hear more material like it), disapprove of the song (you’ll be streamed a new song right away), or let the song play through, where Pandora assumes you liked it.

One issue with Pandora is that you can’t easily control it like you can a standalone program like iTunes, meaning you hvae to have a browser open at all times, and you don’t get hotkeys.  You also can’t stream your Pandora music to an Airport Express like you can with iTunes.  PandoraJam for the Mac solves these issues, and also gives you the ability to record what you’re hearing (tagged and added to iTunes automatically) and also scrobble to your last.fm account.

There’s a program similar to PandoraJam for Windows called Pandora Jar which was reviewed at Lifehacker.