It turns out Emusic.com's $10 per-month subscription plan, which netted you unlimited downloads of high-quality, legal MP3s, was all an elaborate prank to make me look dumb. The thing is, I can't go into Walmart without spending 20 minutes looking at the Star Wars dolls in the toy section; plus, my palms sweat a lot, so when I meet someone new and shake their hand my grip usually slips off and I end up falling backwards and cracking my head on the floor. So, mission accomplished, Emusic, but making me look dumb is as non-interactive a process as making the pope look holy. I mean after he has his vestments and miter on. After I hailed Emusic's unlimited downloading plan as the most brilliant way to pay for the MP3s you normally get for free, they changed the plan to 40 MP3 downloads a month, and then they lowered the price by $0.

Emusic's free trial still gets you 50 MP3s, however, so now you can get more MP3s than you would if you were one of their paying customers. If you're interested in streaming music, though, consider listen.com's Rhapsody service. For $10 a month you get unlimited on-demand music streaming. They have a huge catalog, but even if they don't have the artist you're looking for, chances are you can still listen to them using Rhapsody's "radio station" service which plays the artists you want to hear mixed in with a bunch of artists you might want to hear. You can't save the music to your harddisk and then burn it to CD, however. Well, maybe you can. They have a 7 day free trial too.

Also, Rhapsody encodes their audio in the Windows Media Audio 9 format at 128 Kbps, which they claim results in CD-quality audio. I decided to test this out by encoding a track I ripped from a CD in WMA at 128 Kbps, and comparing it to the same music encoded in WMA using their lossless compression method (which should be sonically identical to the audio contained on the CD). For the test I chose some music I thought an audiophile might listen to, "Variations on the Pachelbel Canon in D" performed by The Concord String Quartet, and then I selected some listening equipment I thought an audiophile might use: Shelly's 9 year-old $20 Sony headphones. I put both tracks in the playlist and shuffled randomly between them, never knowing which version I was hearing, and could not reliably discern the difference between the two. So it would seem WMA 128 Kbps encoding is good enough, and I once refused to watch Minority Report at my parent's house because they rented the fullscreen version.