Ms Heinz’s music tastes are wide ranging, encompassing jazz, R&B, soul, rap, hip hop, blues and house, everything from Billie Holiday to Pink. But when the robbery took place eight years ago, she decided not to start buying the same CDs all over again.
The solution to her problem was broadband, which has enabled Ms Heinz to recover her music library. Now, she can download up to 50 albums a week from the internet, in a massive effort to replace her lost collection.
Until seven months ago, Ms Heinz used a dial-up internet, then she transferred to broadband. She had been looking at moving to broadband as she had become interested in music-downloading websites and her dial-up connection was too slow to make the practice viable.
On a dial-up connection, one song could take around 40 minutes to download. “I had to sit with it and watch it,” she says. “Sometimes the line would drop and I’d have to dial up again and try and find the file I was downloading, which would have disappeared. So I’d have to search for that song again and keep my fingers crossed and hope it would get all the way through.”
Ms Heinz’s dial-up provider had a cap in place for maximum online hours available for use each day and she was informed that she had exceeded the limit. She made the move to broadband.
“When broadband came along I thought, great, I can start downloading all this music.” On a broadband connection, a song downloads in five minutes while an album takes around half an hour. “I don’t have problems with broadband. I make a queue of the albums or songs I want and leave it to all to download.”
The higher cost of broadband is compensated for in many ways, including the convenience factor. “I pay £28 each month for broadband which sounds quite expensive. But an album is about £14 a time from a shop. I can even get vinyl recordings online, complete with the scratchy sound.”
Downloading music from the internet has been a controversial area of new net law since the advent of Napster agitated the major music publishers into action: unsurprisingly, record and film companies take a dim view of people accessing their products without paying for them.
To download music legally, you can buy songs from sites, such as DotMusic, Pressplay or MusicNet, where for a fee, the tracks are sent to you in MP3 files from a central computer.
Some radio stations and record companies also offer free “streaming” services, where you can listen to the music on your PC, but you are unable to download it in order to store, re-play or share the music without paying for it.
The music companies remain concerned by “peer-to-peer” sites, and have yet to find a way to prevent or limit this illegal copying. With pere-to-peer sites, as soon as a user logs on, the contents of their hard drive or server can be accessed by anyone else on the network at that time. This leads to file share, where a user can search the network for a particular title or album and download any of the results that come up.
Using search and queuing procedures on her PC, with broadband Ms Heinz has been able to leave her computer downloading throughout the day or night, while she is out at work or asleep, and has managed to store up to ten albums in 24 hours.
“I’m just trying to build up my collection that was stolen,” she says. “I’m getting there now as I’ve almost got 3,000 albums stored.”
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