I have been really excited about doing some end-to-end testing on the much-ballyhooed Music Store contained within Apple’s latest incarnation of iTunes. After trawling the online store for about two hours, I went ahead and purchased a few songs from the online service. I was in a loud and semi-goth mood this evening, so here’s what I picked out:

The Sisters of Mercy
“Vision Thing”, “Ribbons”, from Vision Thing

Floodland was awesome. The followup, which took three years, disappointed most people who expected Andrew to be the gothic version of Meat Loaf. However, the first two tracks on Vision Thing almost make up for the rest of the album. Almost. A whopping $1.98 spent here.

Orgy
“Blue Monday”, from Candyass

When this came out, I viewed it as a particularly heavy-handed remake of one of the most recognizable dance tracks of all time. Driving at high speed through the hinterlands of Arkansas in a crappy Pontiac Sunfire¹ on a recent business trip while listening to this song on the local radio station at maximum volume was quite fun, though. One smackeroo less a penny.

Fleming & John
“I’m Not Afraid”, “A Place Called Love”, from Delusions of Grandeur

I adore F&J’s wonderful The Way We Are. I see it as a restless, chaotic slab of honey-coated plate steel with a creamy nougat-filled center. After previewing Delusions using the iTunes store, I decided that I really like the insanely loud end of their first album. Another buck ninety-eight into the bucket.

Result: I’m five songs richer and $4.96 lighter.

A word about the sound quality: it is quite good. The bitrate is a modest 128 Kbps (which holds to the 1 meg-a-minute rule). Much better than MP3 at a comparable constant bitrate.

The best thing is the store’s interface. It is lightweight, fast, and familiar. It is far superior than using a web-browser and RealPlayer to preview tracks. The clips load with astonishing speed, fast enough to be considered as instantaneous.

Finally, I discovered that the music library is not without its flaws. There were a few typos in some of the song files’ Title/Artist tags, and I even ran across a badly encoded track (one that sounded like it had a nasty dropout in the middle of the preview). But all in all, the iTunes Music Store looks great so far. If they can grow their music database, keep their aggressive pricing, and ultimately win the remaining hearts and minds of the rest of the major label players, then things are going to be quite rosy going forward.