Issue Date: February 3, 2001
Sample songs to tune up your music knowledge
TUNING INTO THE Grammys Wednesday but not sure how to tell Alicia Keys from Nelly Furtado? When it comes to sampling music, the Web is great. And I'm not referring to pirating your favorite songs.
CDnow.com, Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble's Web site (bn.com) all offer samples of many songs on most new albums. To find them, use the "Search" function that each site has near the top of its home page. It's best to search by album or artist, because searching by song title may yield other songs by the same name. Once you get your search results, click on the album name, then scroll down a bit on the album's home page to find the list of available songs. Clips are roughly 30 seconds long on all three sites, and they generally pick similar selections, offering up the chorus plus a little more. It isn't quite CD-quality sound (even if you've purchased external speakers), but it's good enough to figure out whether you want to spend $15 for the album.
The key difference between the sites is technology, not selection -- and CDNow, with its roots in music, is the clear leader. Many albums allow customers to listen to the clips as MPEG files, which are readable by any recent Web browser, without downloading additional software. Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com require you to have RealNetworks' "player" software installed on your computer to listen to samples. Although the basic version of the software is free, downloading it can take a while. And the download process doesn't always work right at first. Both offer "help" pages, but these only serve to suggest what a pain it can be to make it work.
-- By Ron Lieber
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