I spent some time last night and downloaded the new version of iTunes, which also has apple's new Music Store. This is the first digital music sharing system that actually has a decent business plan. Songs are a buck each, or you can get an entire CD for ten bucks. You're allowed to burn them onto CDs, transfer them to iPods, send them to up to three different computers, listen to it on your Tivo series 2, whatever. I didn't actually purchase anything, but I did go through and listen to the 30 second samples they have for every single song. I love it.

Most of the CDs I would buy would be from Tower or Borders or some other place that would let me listen to the entire CD and see if I liked it before I plunked down 15 bucks. This lets me do that, and everything's in the very cool AAC format instead of MP3. I thought it wouldn't make a big difference, but even on my crappy little iMac speakers it was better enought to make me sit up and say "holy crap!" I do wish they had put things in the Ogg Vorbis format, since that's just the coolest sounding name ever. Looks like .OGG might be going the way of the Betamax without support like this. I'm going to keep saying that today. Ogg Vorbis. Ogg Vorbian. hmm.