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Legally downloading music, please don't get this thread locked.
italianranma
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Hey guys. Didn't mean to start a big discussion or anything. Anyway if you followed my previous thread, I'm through buying from iTunes. The reason is that in the past 3 years I've had 2 laptops and 2 PCs: and now if I get one more PC, I won't be able to listen to most of my collection. I like the a la carte nature of iTunes music store, and I don't like buying CDs(who wants to pay $15 for a CD when they only want one song?). I've heard Amazon is pretty similiar, but what other choices are out there? How is the new and improved Napster? What about realplayer?
My wife and I each have an iPod, and I like the iTunes music player, so whatever I buy needs to be compatable.
Please don't start talking about DRM.
My wife and I each have an iPod, and I like the iTunes music player, so whatever I buy needs to be compatable.
Please don't start talking about DRM.
飛べねぇ豚はただの豚だ。
italianranma on
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First thoughts:
If you already have an Amazon account, it's frighteningly easy to buy music. Click once, download an app, and it starts downloading automatically.
Annoying feature: Every time it makes a move it brings up a popup in the toolbar. Since I download stuff fast it's almost always going off.
The music automatically added to my iTunes Library, which is really nice. The interface isn't as unified as iTunes, obviously, but it seems easy enough to navigate. The music never "expires" or gets locked out, either.
If I can figure out some way to turn off these fucking popups it'll be my music delivery method of choice.
edit: Found it, File->Preferences->Turn off balloon popups.
It's still almost too easy to buy music. I just burned $8 in about four clicks.
mp3.
There is no DRM at all, which means it's compatible with everything.
Anyway, Amazon seems to be the way to go for me. Uses DRM-free MP3s, and is cheaper than iTunes.
I'd still buy CDs if possible. Sound quality is better, and you get a nice CD and case and whatnot.
Amazon doesn't allow you to re-download content, so whatever you buy you'll probably want to backup immediately.
We were talking about this in the mac thread, and apparently the only way to get rid of that computer (without resetting all his account associations) is to de-authorize it from that computer. Which, having been incinerated, probably is a bit of a stretch. I was told apple will reset all your associations back to five open slots, once you use up all available 5 slots, if you ask them to.
Also, a lot of songs use Itunes Plus, which is DRM free (for the most part. but it is tagged still, so they will know who pirates it if you pirate it).
This. I have never heard of this de-authorising from the individual PC thing. It sounds crazy and not the truth. Because it isn't.
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eMusic used to be my favorite one. This was 6 or 7 years ago and the model was unlimited downloads for a flat-fee. I found a lot of music that way and it can be a great way to discover artists. But their new system is rather irritating as far as predicting the number of tracks you will be likely to purchase. I re-subscribed for a free trial to see how it had changed and immediately found myself skipping albums I wanted to download because I could only get the first 10 tracks.
I think for value and selection Amazon is a good bet. They don't get some of the nice exclusive deals that iTunes does but they are generally cheaper and have no DRM. The last thing I bought from them was the new Brian Eno for 5 bucks the day it came out. I honestly have not had a chance to listen to it but that album is selling for more from every other retailer I came across.
• Independent music
• Amassing playlists one song at a time instead of buying entire albums
You can still find some more mainstream stuff there, and of course you can get a whole album at a time, but it's annoying because eMusic doesn't account for albums in the "download credits" you get each month. This is no problem for your average 10-track album, but for something like Max Richter's latest orchestral concept album with 24 little tracks, it feels kind of dumb to blow most of your monthly credits on a single album, while at the same time it's kind of unfair to acts like Godspeed You Black Emperor! whose albums consist of three 15-minute tracks.
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Can you "re-rip" 256 kbps MP3's into 256 AAC without it sounding bad afterwards? May be a dumb question, but I know very little about these sorts of things. :P
Yes. It'll sound a little bad. What the hell would you do that?
Because I'm ripping my entire CD collection as 256 AAC, and I'm horribly OCD, so the thought of having mp3s strewn about my collection bugs me. I should get help. :P
Doing this would be idiotic. While reripping the MP3 to an AAC file won't make it horrible sounding it will not sound as good as the original MP3. It would be a waste of time and a waste of your money.
As for redownloading music, are CD-Rs or DVD-Rs too expensive for anyone? My machine does daily backups but I also back up web purchased music on CD-R/DVD-R and keep it out of the way. iTunes will burn music CDs that maintain all of the library metadata for songs so if you do have to reimport them you won't lose ratings or custom sorting. It's pretty simple to make a smart playlist that contains all purchased tracks and hit the "Burn" button.
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So I was using iTunes before, and curisoty made me check this thread, and inside I hear of this Amazon store, so I went to check it out. Over there, I saw a DVD I liked, and added it to my cart. Then I saw the suggestions, with new products that came out, and so on.
Now I just ordered almost 200$ worth of DVDs just from checking this stupid thread.
Fuck you all.
:P
Nope. Not from WAV to FLAC and vice versa at least. I haven't used the others but it's probably the same.
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If anyone want to download live shows taped from various sources and from various bands which allow it, the Live Music Archive from etree has a bunch of stuff from a lot of bands in a few different formats.
Obviously only certain artists are going to be on here but hey you might like something.