Are there any legal websites where you can download music for your iPod, apart from iTunes?

I hate it when we can only buy them from Apple and not their competitors like Napster. What happened to the free market nowadays?

Not too sure really I suppose there's always DRM problems and the like. The best thing to do if you want legal music is to just buy CD's and rip them yourself. Why?

1. It means you have a physical copy so if you have problems with your hard drive or player your music is not lost forever.

2. You are able to rip the music at the bitrate YOU desire rather than the standard 128kbps.

3. You have a CD copy for use at home which is obviously higher quality than any type of digital music file.

4. It doesn't really work out any cheaper to download; albums are about a tenner on iTunes and about the same if you shop around - supermarkets, Fopp and websites in particular.

That's true. I used to be a big fan of albums instead of singles, because they were cheaper to buy.

However, the main problem with albums is a lot of their songs sound the same, which I hate. I prefer singles now, so I can buy songs from different artists and nowadays, they seem to be cheaper online, than offline.

Yeah you are deffinately right there Fiona, it's really not worth buying physical copies of singles downloading is the way to go. I don't really know of any decent places other than iTunes to download from and to be honest using an iPod it's the easiest and most convienient way to do so. Plus its got a big selection. On the flip side you do miss out on B-sides, remixes and covers that come on physical copies.

Alot of people say 'I prefer to just pick the singles I like from an album and download those to save money and disc space.' Fair enough, but how do yo uknow which tracks you like if you haven't got the album to listen to them?!

iTunes normally allow you to listen about 20 seconds of each songs before you download them so you can easily identify which song you like/recgonise :p

Ah but is a 20 second preview really enough to make your mind up? It usually takes me a good 3 or 4 listens to an album before I can really decide what songs I do and don't like.

I'm like that when it comes to books - if it's already boring at the beginning, then I'm more likely boring at the end too!

Is it true that if you can download a WMA file from a legel website, save them on a CD, and then transfer them back onto your pc again, you can actually update them onto your iPod?

Louise have you never heard the phrase 'don't judge a book by its cover'!

Regarding your question Fiona you are absolutely correct. If the wma is converted to standard cd audio when the cd is burnt then when you load the cd back into the pc you can rip it to iTunes and hence iPod in the ususal way. However, the quality will likely be impaired as the music file type will have been chaged 3 times; from source to wma, from wma to standard cd audio, from cd audio to aac.

Back to original question Louise - I use the following web site: www.allofmp3.com for my downloads.
It's very cheap, you can choose the bitrate (larger files = more expensive), and perhaps best of all, you can preview whole albums or individual songs (at a very low bitrate) which is much better than the 20sec intro under iTunes.
Alternatively, you could always join your local town centre library and borrow the CDs instead. My local library charges £1/week and they have a huge choice!