Thursday, September 23, 2010

Buying Music Online in Lossless Format

Most of my recent music buying has been used CDs via Amazon.  I can't bring myself to pay $10 for an MP3 version of a CD when I can get the CD itself for about the same price.  (Amazon's MP3 encoding is perfectly fine, as far as I can tell they use LAME by default, with most CDs encoded at 256K or V-0 which to most people is indistinguishable from lossless).

But personally, for the right price I'd much rather be able to download the music in full CD quality.

HD Tracks has a pretty decent library of lossless music at around $12 for a CD, including a good portion of the ECM catalog.  And recently I picked up a couple of Eivind Aarset releases from Gube Music which appears to primarily carry music by nordic artists, again for about $12 after the exchange rate.  (I'm currently also working on a post about Aarset's "Live Extracts CD).  No DRM, liner notes & cover art in PDF format, I could get very used to buying music this way, I hate having to wait a week for the CD to get here in the mail.

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