Kel and I went to Burger King the other day and we both got whoppers. They’re having a promotion right now where you get a free music download with every whopper purchase. So I gave it a shot last night. Here’s the skinny.

The files you download are in Windows Media Audio (.WMA) format at 128kbs. You can only listen to the files you download, on the computer you downloaded them on. You can’t copy songs from one computer to another. You can burn them to cd 5, but only 5 times. Also, you can only download 4 songs a day. This is to try a deter you from hijacking a truck full of whopper wrappers.

So, is it worth it for one song? Let’s see. First, I downloaded two songs. The search is okay, but it seems that the selection is a little lacking. It has most of the popular music right now, but most of that is garbage. No, Ashlee Simpson is not pretty, and no she can’t sing for shit. Anyway, I found a couple of songs to download. The download was fast enough. The first thing I did, of course, was copy the tracks to my other computer to see if I could play them. It wouldn’t work. Okay, so their copyright crap is working. Back to the laptop, I then burned an audio CD containing the songs. What this did was convert he songs from .wma to .wav. I then took this cd and popped it into my desktop. I brought up Musicmatch Jukebox and ripped the songs off of the cd in .mp3 format. The only thing I had to do was manually set the track tags. I then added these files to my music library in iTunes, and ultimately onto my iPod. Each time you rip, or re-rip music it looses a bit of quality. So the test is to see what the end result sounds like. On my iPod, it sounds pretty good. I was actually surprised at how good it ended up sounding, considering.

What I ended up with was two mp3’s on my desktop that I can do whatever I want with. In this day and age, limiting a download to one computer is stupid. Almost everyone I know has multiple computers, and it’s dumb to ask them to waste two download codes, just so they can listen to their favorite song on both of their own computers. This might not be why this system is in place, but it is definitely a negative by product of it.

Again, is it worth it? If you could download more than 4 songs a day, maybe it would be. But since you have to edit your tags manually, which is kind of a pain, it’s not really worth the time. In the time it took me to get these two tracks from my laptop, to usable files on my desktop, I could have downloaded 3 cd’s from KazaaLite. And it cost me a blank CD-R in the process.

Conclusion: Burger King free download with whopper deal=crap