RAS Buy Song FAQ
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1. Can you take me through the song purchasing process?
Buying songs on RAS is very easy. There are three main steps to purchasing a song on RAS: 1. Add Song(s) to Shopping Cart 2. Checkout / Purchase Songs 3. Download Songs you Have Purchased Here's the whole process written out in more detail for those who'd like to know: There are currently three pages on the site on which you can add a song to your shopping cart. The first is the site's front page, the second is the main Songs Section page, and the third is any Song Details page. On these pages you will find blue or gray buttons that say "Buy Now" or "Buy This Song." Clicking on any one of these buttons will place the song into your Paypal shopping cart and take you to the shopping cart overview page. Once there, you can either click the "Continue Shopping" button, which takes you back to the RAS site where you can continue to add as many songs as you wish to your cart, or you can click the "Checkout" button to checkout and pay for the songs you wish to buy. If you chose to continue shopping, once you're ready to checkout, there is a "View Cart / Checkout" link on the top left hand side of the Songs section sidebar. Click on that and you will be presented with the cart overview page again. From there, click checkout. You will then be asked by Paypal if you wish to create a new account, if you already have an account, or if you wish to checkout without creating a Paypal account. Purchasing through Paypal requires no more sign-up than any other online store (such as Amazon.com), so don't let this scare you off. With Paypal you can use a credit card or a bank transfer to pay for the songs, depending how you have it set up. Once you have completed the transaction with Paypal, you should receive three emails. One is from Paypal itself giving you a receipt of your payment, one is from our song purchasing system giving you an overview of what you've purchased, and the last is the most important: an email that contains a links to download page for the songs you have just purchased. Open this email, click on the link provided or paste it into your browser. Once you open the page, you should be presented with a list of links for the songs you have purchased. Click on them one at a time to download each song to your computer. The download page with the links to your songs on it will expire 96 hours after your purchase, so you have 96 hours to download all your songs. If you have any trouble with this process, please email us ASAP. Thanks for supporting RAS! [ Back To Top ] 2. What exactly do I get if I buy a song from you? You get to download a no DRM (digital rights management), honest-to-god 256kbps MP3 file of the song you purchased, to which you can listen any way you like. We use the best DRM of all -- the honor system. By providing the un-encumbered MP3 files to you as we do, we rely you to keep your end of the bargain: by not licensing, selling, distributing, or using the song or MP3 file for anything other than your personal listening enjoyment (click here for the full agreement). This agreement is necessary to our survival, as we are a small band that needs all the financial support it can get to keep making music. That means we need your help to uphold that agreement, and to make sure others stick to it as well. We really appreciate your generous support and thank you in advance for your help in keeping Request-A-Song.com alive! About the MP3s: Our purchasable MP3s are encoded with the famous LAME audio encoder in 256k bitrate format for an incredibly high quality, yet reasonably small audio file that is quickly downloadable and highly compatible with nearly every digital music player on the market. We've personally listened to every 256kbps MP3 for sale on the site and can testify to their superior quality, especially compared to 128kbps MP3s. "Violent House Panda" in 256kbps was nearly an entirely new experience after being used to listening to it in 128kbps for years! When it comes to matching the quality of our source audio materials, save from an actual CD itself, it really doesn't get any closer than this. [ Back To Top ] 3. Why should I buy a song from you when I could steal it? I'll give you two excellent reasons: a. You like our music and want us to make more. b. You're not a thief. You can tell by the way we phrased our question how we feel about this. Quite simply, downloading or sharing a song you don't have the right to is stealing, and it is illegal. If you're not the kind of person who would walk into a record store and shoplift a CD, then there's no reason for you to start your life of crime now. And if you love stickin' it to the man and wear "Down with RIAA" t-shirts, then you're focusing your activism at the wrong target -- we are neither the man, nor are we affiliated with the RIAA. We are a small, independent band just trying to get by. "But guys," you say, "art should be free!" What we do is not only art, but, more importantly, entertainment. Most people pay for the privilege of seeing a spectacular movie (say Spider Man 2) for its entertainment value. If they didn't, all films would be made with a handheld Hi-8 movie camera, and "special effects" would be a guy in tights on a trampoline. If you want us to make more music, make it better, and make it more entertaining, that takes time and labor. And the way things work in our country (USA, for our world listeners), we need to be compensated for our song creation labor, or else we'll use our time differently and be compensated for it otherwise -- by flipping cheeseburgers (..or programming). For more information, take an economics class -- send us your grades and we'll give you a free song! [ Back To Top ] 4. What forms of payment do you accept for song downloads? We currently accept payment through Paypal only (typically using a credit card). But before you fret about not having a Paypal account, consider this: ordering music from us through Paypal requires no more sign up time or effort than buying something through any other online store (e.g. Amazon.com). In fact, you don't even need to sign up for a Paypal account to checkout. But if you do create a PayPal account (which is completely free, by the way), buying more music from us becomes even easier in the future. Paypal will also let you transfer money from a bank account if you prefer, and it also accepts payment in numerous international currencies. Paypal is used by tens of millions of consumers around the world every day for millions of transactions and is a highly secure and highly respected online payment processor. [ Back To Top ] 5. Why MP3 format for the non-free songs? The MP3 format is the most widely used compressed audio format on Earth, and as a result, nearly every audio program and digital music player supports it. It offers very high, near-CD quality audio in a small file size. Our purchasable MP3s are encoded with the famous LAME audio encoder in 256k bitrate format for an incredibly high quality, yet reasonably small audio file that is quickly downloadable and highly compatible with nearly every digital music player on the market. We've personally listened to every 256kbps MP3 for sale on the site and can testify to their superior quality, especially compared to 128kbps MP3s. "Violent House Panda" in 256kbps was nearly an entirely new experience after being used to listening to it in 128kbps for years! When it comes to matching the quality of our source audio materials, save from an actual CD itself, it really doesn't get any closer than this. [ Back To Top ] 6. How come "free" songs are available for sale too? The regular, "free" songs are only offered in a lower quality, 128kpbs bit rate MP3 format for free download. However, since the non-free songs on RAS are encoded in a much higher quality 256kbps bit rate, we thought we would offer the opportunity for our listeners to purchase the "free" songs in the same high-quality 256kbps format if they so desired, instead of being forced to build a Request-A-Song.com song library with MP3s of two different sound qualities. For most casual listeners, however, 128kbps is of an acceptably high enough quality, and it importantly offers a smaller file size and thus shorter download times for quicker samplings of our full works. [ Back To Top ] 7. What's the difference between 128kbps and 256kbps MP3s? Short Answer: 256kbps bit rate MP3s contain twice the audio resolution of 128kbps MP3s and therefore are of higher audio quality and much closer sounding to the original CD-quality source audio than their lower-bit rate brethren. This difference in quality is noticeable, and, in our opinion, highly significant, especially in well-produced songs. The only trade off is that 256kbps MP3s are approximately twice the file size of 128kbps MP3s. Further Explanation: MP3 is a "lossy" audio compression format, which means in order to shrink down the size of the file, an MP3 encoder has to cut out some of the data. The MP3 format primarily trims sound data that represents the really high and the really low audio frequencies that humans are not typically aware of hearing (among other more complex schemes that are beyond the scope of this question). However, many seasoned music listeners complain that those frequencies are necessary for a full sonic experience, even if only subconsciously. The truth is that if you directly compare the audio quality of music from a CD to the same music from, say, a 128kbps MP3 file, you really can tell the difference. The MP3 format sacrifices overall quality for a smaller file size. The size of an MP3 file is mainly determined by its encoding bit rate, or the amount of digital data committed to representing each second of a song. 256kbps (kilobits per second) MP3s store twice as much information per each second of the song than 128kbps MP3s do, and thus, this decreases the amount of frequency trimming (as compared to a 128kbps MP3) by half. The result is quite simple: higher quality, better sounding audio! But also, twice the file size. [ Back To Top ] 8. How many times will I be able to download the MP3 file after I purchase it? As many times as you want within a 96-hour (4-day) time period that starts when the purchase is made and accepted by our purchase system. [ Back To Top ] 9. Help! I never got the song download email. If for some reason you don't receive an email containing instructions on how to download the song(s) you purchased within 48 hours, please email us, tell us your problem, and we will get back to you ASAP. [ Back To Top ] 10. The download link expired before I got a chance to download the song(s). Typically, you have 96 hours (four days) to download a song after you purchase it. If for some reason you can't download the song in time, please email us, and we'll be happy to extend the download period for you (within a reasonable amount of time after the purchase). [ Back To Top ] 11. I'm having trouble downloading the song(s) I purchased. We're extremely sorry you've having trouble. Since the situation can vary so widely between systems, please email us and we'll help you solve the problem ASAP. Thanks for your patience! [ Back To Top ] |
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