DescentBB

Posted: **Fri Sep 24, 2004 2:21 pm**

I want to download 40-50 songs legally, but don't want to pay $1 each for them. Never done this before and I've heard a lot of stuff about spyware, etc. from some sites. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Posted: **Fri Sep 24, 2004 2:29 pm**

SoulSeek

Posted: **Fri Sep 24, 2004 8:31 pm**

http://emusic.com

Excellent source for not-quite-mainstream music at great prices.

Posted: **Sat Sep 25, 2004 12:01 am**

Buy.com Music Downloads has songs from $0.79 to $0.99, and they've got new "High Definition" (256kbps, as opposed to 128kbps--twice as much audio information) downloads. I've been very happy with the service. The songs are downloaded to your computer in the form of special protected Windows Media Audio files.

Posted: **Sat Sep 25, 2004 10:12 am**

'special protected windows media audio files'

I'll stay FAR away from that site. besides, 256k is crap.

Posted: **Sat Sep 25, 2004 7:03 pm**

Do any of these actually sell .mp3's? Because as much as I don't like Microsoft's music protection, I trust Apple's even less.

Posted: **Sat Sep 25, 2004 10:56 pm**

Emusic.com is strictly real, unencumbered, non-encrypted mp3.

Posted: **Sun Sep 26, 2004 9:04 am**

Testi, the number of people on the DBB with psychic ability is surprisingly small..

would you please elaborate. How can twice the kbps be crap?

I would share your misgivings about the WMA protected format if I weren't able to record it to any other format I could need. As it is, I look on it as holding the high-quality information of the song I now own. If I need an mp3 version, I just do a little recording.

Posted: **Sun Sep 26, 2004 9:24 am**

Allofmp3.com has provent to be pretty good. 1 cent per MB download. You can even specify (in most cases) the bitrate. You can even preview the songs.

Posted: **Sun Sep 26, 2004 2:27 pm**

256kbps is not near the quality of a cd, which is what they are trying to sell you for your dollar. 128 is even worse. thats barely better than radio quality. a cd is like, 1100kbps or some such number. 320 is the best you can get with mp3 isnt it? i can hear a huge difference in my car and in my sennheisers. the only way i dont hear it is with lesser equipment. but i'm an audiophile.

dont use music match either imo. i won a free download from a pop machine at work, and i used it. you dont have to play it with music match, but you do have to have it installed or it wont play in winamp and you cant burn it to another compilation (at least with nero you cant).

i would never give them a dollar for that crap. the only way i'll ever give them a dollar per song is if they give me a .wav with absolutely no quality drop that i can convert or not at my own preference. all these restrictions make the 99 cents not worth it.

Posted: **Sun Sep 26, 2004 3:09 pm**

Comparing Raw-CD and bitrate is apples and oranges:

FLAC will get that down to ~700kbps. 100% lossless. So now 320kbps is 50% of CD quality.

Audio compression (mostly what you get on Pop music these days) will save you ~30% of the space again with no perceptual loss (now down to 450kbps). Chop off 15% of the frequency response (so now you have 30-18,000 Hz response) and you have now managed to get little effective reduction in quality and are at 320kbps or near enough.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=122789&cid=10322803

Posted: **Sun Sep 26, 2004 7:31 pm**

Oh, wow, I didn't know it would be so much lower than CD quality. Dang. I guess when I think of the file size comparison between one of these WMA and a CD's WAV it makes sense. It still puts Buy.com ahead of iTunes, though, which only offers 128kbps.

Posted: **Mon Sep 27, 2004 9:57 am**

My mp3's are average 500k. To hear one of them, and then to hear the same song @ 128k is like listening through laptop speakers.

Also, once it's encoded, you can't re-encode it as anything else and have it be any better. It's not like a zip file where you can extract the data and recompress it.

Posted: **Mon Sep 27, 2004 1:27 pm**

moo

they should do listen tests at higher bit rates tho.

Posted: **Wed Sep 29, 2004 10:20 am**

Ok, I just figured out that the songs on my Bad Company soundtrack CD (songs that were in the movie Bad Company)--a commercial music CD--are 172kBps (I divided the songs' size in kiloBytes by their length in seconds. I got the size and time information from Sound Forge 5.0. Where do you guys get such high numbers?

I'm going to try this on another CD, also.

EDIT: Hmm.. maybe it's the difference between kB(ytes)ps and kb(its)ps that I'm stumbling over...

172kBps = 1376kbps

"A few more tests..." -Willy Wonka

Posted: **Wed Sep 29, 2004 10:51 am**

I just tried it with the Gladiator soundtrack CD, and it comes out to the same bitrate (1378kbps, to be a little more exact).

Well, that answers it for me. Even the 256kbps songs are only 18.5% of CD quality. I can't believe they even use the term "audiophile" in their advertisments.

Then again, these songs sound really good.

Posted: **Wed Sep 29, 2004 11:17 am**

(It's kb as in bits)

Rip the songs VBR (Variable Bit Rate), or the highest vbr your software supports, and you'll get 300-500kb. For example, I have a Satriani song (right-click,Save As) on my site (Someone never heard him before) and it's 574kb.
Flat bitrate is garbage. And it makes the file larger. You're stuck with 192/whatever for every part of the song, from the soft sections to the slammin' ones. Which means your soft passages are wasted space, and your slammin' riffs are cut off at the waist. VBR expands the bitrate for loud parts, and does a little extra compression for soft stuff, more accurately representing the song.

I did all my mp3's with an oooold copy of RealJukebox. Why? 'cause it supported proper vbr, one interface, good record speed, and proper naming conventions. Nothing else I've tried was worth 2 bits.
I then used TagScanner to batch strip the Real bloat from the header, and rewrite the tag properly. Encoding it with Real adds about 70kb (in size) to a song. All proprietary crap. Tagscanner is adept at fixing this.

Posted: **Wed Sep 29, 2004 11:18 am**

Well the reason that most audiophiles deem 256k "acceptable" is that most of the crap that gets cut out is inaudible to the human ear (I think the human audible range is from 20-20,000 Hz, but correct me if I'm wrong). I've noticed that the first things to get distorted in an MP3 are drum tracks, however.

Posted: **Wed Sep 29, 2004 11:20 am**

Yep, bass turns to mud at low bitrates. And, a few frequencies get stripped, so you miss the ambience of the music. Sounds flat and tinny then.

Posted: **Wed Sep 29, 2004 11:23 am**

Go Vorbis go.

Posted: **Wed Sep 29, 2004 8:27 pm**

I just started looking at allofmp3.com and you can download in whatever quality you like. You just pay per megabyte so the higher quality will cost more. They have flac and other lossless options as well.

Posted: **Wed Sep 29, 2004 9:45 pm**

allofmp3.com can't be legal, though. There's no way that $0.01 per MB could even cover royalties.

Posted: **Wed Sep 29, 2004 9:52 pm**

I just started looking at allofmp3.com but I found the site because it was mentioned in a rcent issue of Popular Science. I figured if they have it in there next to the likes of Itunes then maybe they checked it out. They also state that it's so cheap because of the low rouble value or something like that.

edited for typos

Posted: **Thu Sep 30, 2004 7:09 am**

allofmp3.com wrote:Is it legal to download music from site AllOFMP3.com?

All the materials in the MediaServices projects are available for distribution through Internet according to license # LS-3М-03-79 of the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society. Under the license terms, MediaServices pays license fees for all the materials subject to the Law of the Russian Federation "On Copyright and Related Rights". All the materials are available solely for personal use and must not be used for further distribution, resale or broadcasting.

Users are responsible for any usage and distribution of all materials received from AllOFMP3.com. This responsibility depends on the local legislation of each user's country of residence. AllOFMP3.com's Administration does not keep up with the laws of different countries and is not responsible the actions of non-Russian users.