Digital Music, the bane of my existence.

For some one who spent more days in the saddle than in front of a keyboard, I consider myself to be somewhat tech savvy. I bought a mp3 player two years ago and had fun burning my CDs to mp3 files and listening to my player. I love to walk or workout with my mp3 player, it doesn't skip and holds more than 30 songs.

Now, on to the terror that is downloading music files. I still buy CDs, call me crazy, people that make music that I like should be able to sell their product for profit. It's called capitalism, it works. When the Napster craze hit the college campus' in the late 90s people were filling entire servers with music files without paying a cent. Like I always say, 'everyone likes a pig, but hog needs to be slaughtered'.

I am officiating the wedding ceremony of my friends this weekend and they asked me if I could get a song for the reception. I said I would and I did. I looked for the song and found it on Buy.com.

OK, now what? First you have to create an account, log in, pick the song, buy it with a credit card, try to download it, switch to IE Explorer, try to download again, successfully download it, try to open it, register it with the 'digital music police' open it as a WMA file, try to figure out how to convert it to a WAV file, download some free software that says it can convert WMA files to WAV files, open the software, click on the song and tell it convert it, then have it tell me the file is actually a WMAis file and it is an unsupported file type.

Luckily I was not anywhere near a firearm or a good piece of hardwood or I would be shopping for a new laptop right now.

So for the past two hours or so I have spent exactly 99 cents for a song that can only play on my laptop, downloaded software that probably has spyware in it and have wasted a good portion of my evening.

We had set a dealine of today to get all the music together.

I love deadlines, I like the whooshing sound they make as they go by.