Miles Mendoza's Website of the Day ... and more!

Napster Vs OD2: The UK’s legal music download services compared.

Website of the Day: Friday May 21st

The arrival of Napster 2.0 as a legal online music service is exciting news for music fans as it hugely increases the choices available to you when you want to buy new music. Peter Gabriel’s OD2 service has responded to Napster’s launch with a promotion that effectively means half price music downloads until June, and with Apple’s iTunes service due to launch in the UK later this year, further promotions and price-drops are likely. That’s all good news for the consumer.

Napster's main competition in Europe comes from sites like Tiscali, HMV, MSN and MyCoke Music and all of those other sites are powered by OD2 service.

Napster definitely wins on number of tracks available – There are already 500,000 tracks in their library and that will rise to 700,000 within the next month. OD2 currently has about 350,000 tracks online, but says that figure will rise over the next year.

If you can find the tracks or albums you want on the OD2 sites you’ll get them cheaper there, especially between now and the beginning of June – as their current promotion buys £40 worth of music for £20 which works out at just 50p per download. Napster charges 9.95 to download an album and between 88p and £1.09 a track according to how many tracks you buy at one time. Keen observers will be aware that due to the current weakness in the dollar, download prices in the US are considerably cheaper - on average 99 cents per track and $10 per album. We can only hope that UK prices become more competitive when iTunes enters the European market.

The other big difference between the rival services is that Napster also offer a subscription service. For £9.99 a month, you get access to the whole of Napster’s library enabling you to download whole tracks to up to three different PCs at once for no extra cost, so if you have your PC hooked up to your stereo you can listen to all that music at CD quality and you’ll never have to get a CD out of the case again. You only pay extra if you want to burn any of those tracks to CD or copy them to an mp3 player.

If you want to try Napster’s subscription service without parting with your cash, they’re currently offering a free 7 day trial of the service.

Both Napster and OD2 will let you listen to 30” of any track in their library. OD2 will let you listen in full once without downloading for about 1p a track

Napster runs as desktop software which includes a player, cd burning and ripping, music library software, message boards and an online magazine. It also lets you create playlists and email them to friends – if they are Napster subscribers they hear the full tracks... non subscribers will hear 30” excerpts.

By contrast to Napster’s software download, the OD2 service runs entirly as an online shop accessed through your web browser.

Both Napster and OD2 are PC only. Neither service will run on a Mac, so Apple users will need to wait for the arrival in the UK of the iTunes Music Store. As a consequence tracks downloaded from either service cannot be directly copied onto an iPod, but they are compatible with a large range of alternative portable music players, several of which outperform the iPod in terms of battery life, range of features and cost.

LINKS

>> Napster UK

The following sites are all powered by OD2
Tiscali Music Club | My Coke Music | MSN Music | HMV | Virgin Downloads

Other UK Music Download sites
Wippit | People Sound

>> iTunes in the US
>> BBC News on the launch of Napster
>> Guardian Online on the launch of Napster
>> Web User magazine reviews iPod competitors

Is Apple ever an acceptable name for a child?

Website of the Day: Thursday May 20th

>> Inch: The Institute for Naming Children Humanely

While the British tabloids continue to debate the wisdom of Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow's choice of name for their daughter, there are no prizes for guessing the view taken by the Institute for Naming Children Humanely. The site highlights different categories of inappropriate child names ranging from The Scrabble Draw (slam together meaningless syllables until the parents believe the result sounds like a name) to The Abstract Quality ("give a child a name encouraging a certain value, like Faith, Hope, Charity etc, then hope they don't grow up to display the exact opposite characteristic!")

History in your Loft?

Website of the Day: Thursday May 5th

>>The HP National Photo Album

This is a terrific social history project to preserve a photographic record of our generation and ensure that our old photos doesn't get lost. The company who have worked with galleries and museums in digitising their collections are now encouraging us to dig out old photos which may have some lasting social or cultural interest - Whether they depict old steam railways, royal visits, sporting events, workplaces or family occasions you can upload your old photos to the site or send them off by 'snail mail' for the site to scan in and return to you. The site already offers a fascinating mix of images from the early 20th century right up to the present day.

Hints and Things

Website of the Day: Monday May 17th

>> Hints and Things

A site crammed full of genuinely useful tips and advice, put together by self-proclaimed 'plump, old, grey wrinkly' June Jackson with the aim of 'sharing all those little pearls of wisdom that used to be passed from generation to generation'. You'll find tips on topics as diverse as basic piano repair, finding missing contact lenses, vehicle maintenance and selling yourself in a job interview. June is clearly a genius who knows everything, and I wish she lived round the corner from me, so I could pop round for a spot of advice and a nice cup of (perfectly brewed) tea!

Download replacement instruction booklets

Website of the Day: Thursday May 13th

>> Instruction Manuals (UK)

For some people the idea of reading an instruction booklet could be seen as either a sign of weakness or an admission of defeat, but for those of us who aren't instruction-phobic this site may prove rather useful. It provides links to downloadable versions of the instruction booklets for a huge range of appliances and products - Just select the category of product and the manufacturer and away you go!