Early February marked the one year anniversary of my sign-up with the online independant music retailer eMusic - and I couldn't be happier with my subscription so far!

Each month I have constantly discovered music by artists I would have had little chance in discovering otherwise - certainly since my radio listening has decreased dramatically over the last few years. It's fair to say that prior to February 2007, my musical awareness was decreasing fast.

My music downloads started off with a hunt for something familiar. I was aware that this was an independant music retailer and as such would not contain music from the major labels (little top 40 music), but I needed somewhere to start. Browsing through the collection I came across songs by Eddy Grant, The Raconteurs, Keane, The White Stripes, Badly Drawn Boy, Presidents of the United States of America, America and Steeleye Span - not bad for a site where I expected to find little I knew.

Before long however, I started to browse the site not only based on my favourite musical genres, but based on ratings and this is when I started to discover artists I'd not heard of previously. I also came across the eMusic message board and although I rarely post, I did find many recommendations there.

So I thought it would be good to look back over the past year and list some of the artists and albums that I have either discovered thanks to this service, or would not otherwise have bought:

• AC Newman - The Slow Wonder

• Apartment - The Dreamer Evasive

• Beirut - The Flying Club Cup

• Belle & Sebastian - The Life Pursuit

• Blitzen Trapper - Wild Mountain Nation

• Blonde Redhead - Misery Is A Butterfly

• Breathe Owl Breathe - Ghost Glacier EP

• British Sea Power - Do You Like Rock Music?

• Eliza Carthy - Rice

• Fauxliage - Fauxliage

• Feeder - Echo Park

• Flogging Molly - Drunken Lullabies

• Frightened Rabbit - Sing The Greys

• Jenny Lewis - Rabbit Fur Coat

• June Panic - A Child's Treasury Of June Panic

• Lemon Jelly - '64 - '95

• Loreena McKennit - The Visit

• Nada Surf - The Weight Is A Gift

• New Young Pony Club - Fantastic Playroom

• Modern Skirts - Catalogue Of Generous Men

• Mofro - Blackwater

• North Mississippi Allstars - Shake Hands With Shorty

• Office - A Night At The Ritz

• Pernice Brothers - Live A Little

• Rusted Root - Cruel Sun

• Sia - Some People Have Real Problems

• Spoon - Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga

• The Besnard Lakes - The Besnard Lakes Are A Dark Horse

• The Bluetones - Luxembourg

• The Bluetones - The Bluetones

• The Levellers - Truth & Lies

• The National - Boxer

• The New Amsterdams - At The Foot Of My Rival

• The New Pornographers - Twin Cinema

• The Rakes - Ten New Messages

• The White Stripes - Icky Thump

• Trembling Blue Stars - Alive To Every Smile

• Victory At Sea - All Your Things Are Gone

• Yo La Tengo - I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass

That's a list of nearly 40 albums covering Indie Rock, Indie Pop, Pop, Rock, English Folk, Ambient and Electronic music. It's not everything I've downloaded but that is most of the complete albums I have bought.

If I was to name favourites from that list, I would definately say Beirut, Blitzen Trapper, Nada Surf, Pernice Brothers, Spoon, The Bluetones and The National would qualify.

So now I just wonder - what music will I be exposed to over the next 12 months. It's very exciting!

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Tags: emusic

I might have been jumping the gun just a little bit yesterday, when I criticised the eMusic website for having problems with file extensions. Alarm bells probably should have been ringing when I said I was apparently the only person on the message boards to have experienced such issues.

For reasons unknown to me (because I felt like it, in other words), I decided to see if the problems of the emx files appearing instead of emp files occured using the KDE browser Konqueror. I'll be frank. The problems did not occur.

It seems something was amiss with the Opera web browser. Now whether this has occured because of the recent eMusic changes or not, I don't know but I did a full clean re-install of Opera and the problem persisted. I then put Firefox onto my system, and that worked, and continues to work fine.

As a result, I have scrapped Opera and gone back to Firefox which is good in another way - I can have the eMusic toolbar, giving me quick and easy access to the daily free download amongst other features.

So my faith in eMusic is reaffirmed; and because of that, I have used my remaining 8 downloads for the month getting two thirds of an album by the Trembling Blue Stars. The remaining songs on the album will have to wait until my account refreshes.

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There have been a couple of alterations at my favourite music downloading service over the last few days, one of which I don't really care about, but the other has been causing some minor headaches.

eMusic has launched an audiobook downloading service; separate from its music downloading service, but integrated into it's website. This is the part that I don't care about since I'm unlikely to start downloading audiobooks unless it includes copies of the Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy or something equally as good.

However, the launch of the audiobook service has led to a launch of a new download manager called eMusicRemote. Prior to the launch of Audiobooks, I had used this software in it's beta offering and thought it was alright. Okay, it's basically another copy of the Firefox browser tailored to eMusic with a download manager bolted on, but that didn't bother me too much. It worked and was quite interesting.

With the release of version 1 of the DLM however, problems have started to occur; the main being that I can no longer preview tracks within the DLM and have to use my normal browser (Opera in this case). When it comes to actually downloading the tracks however, I have found that thanks to a change of file format (now with the emx extension instead of the emp extension), I cannot use the old unofficial Linux download manager (eMusic/J) and have to use the new DLM. This means logging in twice and running two browsers when navigating eMusic.

The strange thing is, that file format problem does seem to be a bit intermittent. Sometimes the extension is emx, and at other times the extension is emp allowing me to use the eMusic/J again. It also appears, according to the message boards that I am the only person having this particular problem, although others are having problems of their own.

Now don't get me wrong, I still love emusic and have no intention of cancelling my account. In fact, I have been toying with the idea of uping my subscription to 75 downloads per month, since my current 40 doesn't seem to be enough. It's just a bit irritating.

I'm confident though, that these issues will be resolved in one way or another. And if it doesn't, well I can go back to downloading straight MP3 files from the website. I used to do this before I discovered eMusic/J. It just makes downloading albums more awkward since the browser will ask where to save each and every MP3, and I'll need to name the files correctly.

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