Thing #19 -- Digital Music

Digital Radio? Yes! I've been using it for years. It's so handy to be able to play music at my work computer that's close & quiet and not disturb other people in the room. The problem with audio streaming is that it is not always consistent. It's a few seconds behind the actual station, which sounds odd if the radio and the computer 'edition' happen to be on at the same time. Worse, it just stops every once in awhile and I have to wait while it buffers up once again. If the computer I am working on doesn't have quality speakers, or, more likely, no speakers at all, the sound quality can be pretty poor.
Still, I can listen to my favorite station, or easily find a station with nice background music, with no need to purchase or take up space with other CD players or radios.
I was entranced by Pandora; I only needed to type in one name, and it played beautiful music for me for as long as I wanted! The Yahoo site is just a mess, sorry. There's too much stuff to have to sort through to find the one thing on the page that I'm looking for. Then when I finally found it, it didn't support Firefox. No thanks! Pandora was much nicer, ie simple, user-friendly.
A few years ago I did download a few songs from iTunes, when they had a free Pepsi promotion going on. I felt pretty geeky that I was able to do it successfully! I would really like to learn more about this, because there are a lot of songs on the radio that I would like to have, but I don't feel like I know enough about the whole digital music download world. There's so many possibilities! I want to be better informed! I need a whole class just on this topic :)
The only kind of file sharing I'm interested in is the legal kind. My brother wrote a book and made it available for downloading, so I was able to put it on a cd. There are other sites for authors where you can post a poem or short story with no copyright restrictions attached. This is the sort of file sharing that I am familiar with. I do agree that future laws need to take changing technology into account.