Bitrates?

Cuz if this is 128kbit crap as I suspect.... there are plenty of limitations!

How bout going beyond the corporate press release and actually doing a little.... journalism?

Come back when it runs in the UK

Do you have to have Real Player installed to buy these tunes? 'Cause that's a deal-breaker.

I used there service last night. 256kbit music files. No need for their software as you can buy directly from their website. After signing up with them they are giving a free download of any album that cost 9.99 Also albums or singles can be downloaded as a zip file or you can download their installer which will automatically add your albums or singles to iTunes. I got Velvet Revolver's album, "Contraband" for free.

What's the betting that when it arrives in the UK that 99 cents has morphed into 79 pence but the same server is used to deliver them worldwide

What's the betting also that a 'premium' service is launched where you can get 256kbps versions (which are upsampled-on-the-fly 128k tracks so no quality increase) and are 99 pence per track

What's the betting also that from 5.5 million tracks there's none of the ones that I want e.g. KS's UE

However all academic since no Real products allowed on my comp.

Of course, it this ever does come to the UK, they will simply change the $ for a £ - too expensive.

if realplayer is a requirement then count us out. we also only want decent bitrates!

FLAC files from BitTorrent.

Relax, guy! This is El Reg! The Daily Star of IT news!

If you're expecting more technical data than the cup size of the Eee Girl, then i'm afraid you're in the wrong place.

Paris, as even she can Ctrl + C, Ctrl + V a press release.

Thank you.

Unless the service is available in the UK, I'm not really interested. So far iTunes+ and 7Digital are the online music sites I use; sadly only partial catalogues are available. Some day music publishers will realise they cannot sell us the same crap in new packaged media and they should just be happy they can sell anything at all...

"Music Without Limits" indeed? So I'm guessing that both Real and The Registrar consider "US Only" as the kind of limit that's not even worth mentioning.

So they're still not acknowledging that there are other countries in the world, apart from the US?

Even the UK has better luck than poor old SA....

I'd be quite happy to buy tracks online, even at US prices, if only one of these big DRM-free sellers would let me!

When there was just itunes, it was easy -- if itunes didn't have it, then it wasn't available.

Now, you have to search half a dozen sites just to find out that something isn't available.

Isn't it time Google stepped in and created a homogenous downloads search, so that we can do just ONE search and see which sites have it?

Bite your tongue AC! I'm sure in no time at all shop.com and buy.com and getyercraphere.com and a gibizillion other shopper sites will be doing just what you want. You won't even be able to actually FIND the song you want but you'll be able to find a googleful of dead links to places that linked to a place you could buy it a year ago.

Fire pretty. Web 2.0 bad.

@Geoff Mackenzie:

I'll second that (old allofmp3.com came real close in the monetized field).

@Ash:

I couldn't have said it better. Thanks for clearing my head.

The alienhead 'cause the truth is in here... Now what was that cupsize?