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[jough]

Hey,

I recently bought an MP3 player (a Rio Nitrus) and was looking for an easy legit download site where I could pick up a few albums in MP3 format.

I found eMusic.com, but their selection was awful. I got 100 free downloads with my player and had a really hard time finding 100 tracks to get.

BuyMusic.com, RealMusic.com, and iTunes.com all use proprietary software that uses DRM - not open MP3s.

And the prices on most of these places are AWFUL.  I can get new CDs around here for $8.99 and rip them myself, then sell the discs for $5.00 and essentially pay $4 for a whole album on MP3.  That's about what the files are worth to me - so $.99 per SONG is just ridiculous - especially for albums with lots of short songs.  Do these sites charge $99 for NiN's "Broken"?  I wonder.

Anyway, I can't find a legit source to buy non-crippled regular MP3 tracks in decent bit rates with a good selection.

It's no wonder the kids love gnutella.

[slink]

I have to say I generally prefer to rip my own mp3s anyway. I, given the DJing, like to have everything in 192 Full Stereo high quality, and can't always guaruntee getting such things online.
I can just hear the difference between 192 and 128 and refuse to put that through 20 or 30k of PA.
I'd like to use 256 or higher, but space is an issue when you already have 29Gb (apparently, having just looked) of music on your machine. And there are still about a million CDs on the list I have of ones to get!

I'd just Soulseek them anyway if I was going to download them. If I'm not willing to go out and buy the CD, especially if you can do so for $4, then I wouldn't get round to getting it if it weren't illegally... So I figure!
Hell, the artist would probably prefer that I had the music than didn't and still refused to give them money. Unless it's like, Phil Collins or some shit but then there's no chance I'll have it anyway.
I do still buy CDs, but only when I can. And Soulseek introduces many new things to buy proper copies of, as well as weeding out the shit I don't want to buy after all.

So yea...

[CortJstr]

The only pay site I've used is eMusic because they had a lot of exclusive stuff for a while. Like obscure TMBG stuff and the Pixies Purple Tape. The problem with eMusic is that they've avoided major labels and only have indie stuff and early works.

Slink, have you considered a lossless format like Monkey's Audio?

[slink]

Slink, have you considered a lossless format like Monkey's Audio?

Yes, but unfortunately I am locked into using mp3 for the foreseeable future. That and the fact that I have 29Gb of mp3's, means converting, reripping and refinding some of that would be a nightmare or epic proportions.
The software I use to mix with (mk I as I have a hardware mixer) doesn't play anything but wav and mp3.

[jough]

Yeah, I downloaded some of the unique content to eMusic, but other than selection, they seemed like the best bet.

But man, they have pretty much no real albums by any decent bands, except for indie stuff I already have, like for instance they have every Pixies album.

So there's no legit site to download MP3s?  Is the RIAA aware that we have no legal choice to download popular music?

[slink]

Is the RIAA aware that we have no legal choice to download popular music?

Someone may have at one point made them aware of this. As well as telling them that legitimate music sales have increased over the last 4 or 5 years since file sharing became far more prevalant.
ARIA - the Australian RIAA - made some sort of announcement saying that 'wow, p2p has done great things for us', but the RIAA are steadfast fascists.

[jough]

Admittedly, when the original Napster launched I thought it was great and downloaded music like crazy - both singles, albums, and a lot of stuff I already had on CD but thought would be cool to have on my hard drive.

What started out as a novelty became the primary medium I use for listening to music.  I actually bought a CD a few weeks ago (Kill Bill Vol. 2 Soundtrack) but right away I ripped it to MP3 and have been listening to it that way.  I'll keep the CD because I have the other Tarantino film soundtracks, and to re-transfer the disc later if needed to another format, etc.

But in general I only listen to MP3s or Minidiscs (often recorded from MP3s).

I really have no interest in DRM licences - how is this convenient or useful to me?  If I buy a CD I can rip MP3s and transfer them to any PC or portable device I'd like.  I don't share over file sharing networks.

Now that I have a portable MP3 player I wanted to buy some MP3s legitimately online and so far haven't found a site to allow this.

RealMusic has a feature to burn the downloaded files (FLAC files?  They're supposed to be lossless) to CD - so maybe that's an option - download whatever weirdo format they offer, use their software to make a Redbook Audio CD, and then rip that to MP3.

Seems like a hassle, though.  What's wrong with MP3s?  If I can't buy them I'll download them one way or another.

You try to do "the right thing" but the bastards just won't let me.

[arkabee]

straight out of russia:
http://www.allofmp3.com

[jough]

Dude, I said LEGIT.

I would not give these people my CC#.  Puh-lease.

[jough]

I know Mac people rave about iTunes, but my player doesn't support AAC, and they don't appear to offer MP3s either.

But is there a way to convert from one to the other?  I did a little reading up and found that AAC is generally considered an antiquated and inferiour compression format, yet somehow Apple has made millions by selling songs for too much money (i.e. much more than you'd pay for a better quality/tangible item CD) using this codec.

I'm seriously boggled. I figured there'd be 100 different pay download sites by this time and the only thing I'd have to determine is what's the best one to use for my needs.

The RIAA has been annoying me so far with their stance on file sharing, but without anyone offering a viable legal alternative they really need to shut the fuck up.

I'll stop downloading shit for free when I can get as good quality and selection through a legit pay site for a decent price (i.e. LESS, not MORE than a CD).

Fuck you, RIAA, FUCK YOUR STUPID FACE!

[andalucia]

straight out of russia:
http://www.allofmp3.com

I really really like the way that site prefaces every update announcement with "Dear Users!"
See?  They are the friendly kind of Russians.

[sjlimmer]

I know you can buy albums from playlouder, but I think they're windows media format, not mp3.

[CortJstr]

I would've loved to follow this conversation more closely today. Stupid job. But anyway.

Issue 1: the mp3 format itself is not free. Most encoders are actually illegal themselves. Fraunhofer owns the format which is why Blade was distributed from only certain countries and LAME was only available as a .dll until recently (LAME stands for Lame Ain't an Mp3 Encoder) and why we now have ogg vorbis as an open-source alternative.

Album sales dropped around 2000 because of the economy in general, and because this was the exact time Clear Channel and Viacom/Infinity Broadcasting were buying up all the radio stations. The narrowing playlists ensured less diverse music and fewer bands making it thus fewer albums going gold/platinum. But the industry blamed trading and now it's too late to admit the mistake without looking foolish. Hence they'll never support a non-DRM format.

Hell, even mp3 supporter John Flansburg was recently quoted in Wired about how he was dismayed that blank CDs outsell all music CDs.

It is possible to go from one format to another with varying degress of difficulty but unless your source file is lossless (like Monkeys Audio) there will be a noticable quality loss in the resulting file.

A lot of people take an iTunes file which is indeed quite an ugly little format and burn it to an audio CD (which is allowed 7 times or something like that). Then rip and encode from that CD to mp3 or ogg. The problem is even if you make the mp3 file with something like --alt preset insane you can never recover the audio lost by in the original iTunes encoding. And in fact it will just sound worse because each format removes different bits. aac or wma to mp3 is going to sound roughly the same as a tape of a tape off the radio.

[jough]

I don't know - I've been converting high bitrate MP3s (256kbps) to mid-bitrate WMA and the resulting files sound pretty good - very close to 160-192Kbps MP3 files, at half the file size.

PlayLouder is another one that doesn't have much content, and certainly nothing mainstream.

I'm looking for Rufus Wainright's albums, some old Rolling Stones albums, some 80s-90s Prince, etc.

[CortJstr]

I don't know - I've been converting high bitrate MP3s (256kbps) to mid-bitrate WMA and the resulting files sound pretty good - very close to 160-192Kbps MP3 files, at half the file size.

I was exagerating a bit in my post but this situation is also different. A 256 mp3 is still going to have most of the file, and wma is a suprisingly decent format especially considering who owns it. So you're going from quite good to pretty good. But if you start with a lower bitrate file from a worse format then you'll have more problems.

But if you're sticking to just computer speakers you'd probably be fine either way. Now if you have a nice soundcard going into a nice stereo then you might notice some problems.