Amazon MP3

I just downloaded my first album from the new Amazon MP3 service, and I have to say that I'm impressed. Here's what I've discovered:

1. Most individual MP3 files cost $0.89 (compared to Apple's iTunes $0.99).
2. They have no digital rights management (DRM), so you are free to play the music without limitations.
3. The songs are encoded at 256kbps (compared to Apple iTunes' 128kbps). As an added benefit, I noticed that the files on the album I downloaded were created with LAME 3.97, a superior, free MP3 encoder.

One minor annoyance is the requirement (for entire albums, anyway) to install Amazon's MP3 Downloader software. It's easy to install, fairly straightforward to configure, and integrates seemlessly into iTunes (on my Mac). The downloader saves and organizes the music downloads in its own directory, plus instructs iTunes to add the song to your library as each file is transferred. This creates duplicate downloads, but that could be a benefit for iTunes users since it fragments some albums by placing individual music files in separate directories.

Based upon this single experience, I can say with a fair amount of certainty that I'll use the Amazon MP3 service before Apple's iTunes.