Entertainment For Lively Minds
Music downloads
Posted by billyous on 4 July 2009 - 2:09pm.
Other than iTunes, can anyone suggest a decent music download site? I often find that iTunes doesn't always have complete albums of some of the artists I prefer - generally the track(s) that I particularly like!
Thanks in advance.
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Personally...
I'd recommend the Word Magazine Download Store. Millions of tracks, most of them available in 320kbps, DRM-free mp3.
Thanks, Fraser..
for your objective recommendation. I'll check it out, now*
(*I'd forgotten that The Word had such a facility!)
I'm amazed
As an Emusic subscriber, I'm amazed that iTunes has bits missing from albums. I've only very rarely come across that in Emusic and I'm sure I've never seen it att 7Digital/Word or Amazon. How on earth are they the most successful with yet another restriction?
Part albums
I've generally found that this "partial album" problem is some some sort of licensing issue, i.e. if iTunes only has a partial album then the other sites will also have the same partial album as well.
Overall, though, I find 7 Digital the best site as most stuff is available at 320k. Why have less ? You can always rips the tracks to a lower bitrate if you want to save space and keep the better quality files for better equipment / different environments etc.
Beware re-ripping
Reripping isn't a good thing though because the algorithms are based on the expectation that all the information is available to work on. Once a track has been through a lossy compression some information is obviously lost and can't therefore be used to decide on it's importance against the other information still left.
7Digital isn't actually 320k anyway (unless it's changed since the last time I downloaded from it) 320 is the highest level of a VBR compression.