iTunes Plus, the new "standard" for Apple's iTunes store, uses 56-Kbps AAC encoding but it's DRM free. That means there are no limits to how many times you can "burn" copies, and it means that the file will play on a lot more devices, including Mac and Windows computers, and many more portable digital music players than iPods.
In early January, Apple announced that they were switching to iTunes Plus, and that you could "upgrade" previously purchased songs for a fee (30 cents a song, 60 cents a video, 30% of the price for most albums). The problem was that you had to upgrade 'em all in one fell swoop—which could be pretty pricey for lots of us. Plus, there are songs that, to me, just weren't worth it.
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priced in three "tiers," the newly released and very popular tracks are $1.29, a very large number (in fact, most tracks)are still $0.99, and some are priced at $0.69. All ten million plus tracks are now DRM free, and are iTunes Plus, which means that you can copy them, burn them as many times as you wish to CD, and play them on an unlimited number of players, though you may have to convert tracks if your player doesn't support AAC, the encoding standard Apple uses. The good news, aside from the absence of Digital Rights Management restrictions, is that all the tracks are encoded at the better sounding 256 kbps, which of course also means the files are a bit larger in size.
