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Warp Records Reject DRM, Go Bleep
DJ Phase writes "Warp Records, an independent label for electronic music (featuring artists such as Aphex Twin, Autechre, and Boards of Canada), has made their entire back catalog available thru Bleep, a new digital download service. Individual tracks are $1.35 for those of us in the USA, with EPs and full albums in the $4 to $10 price range. You can download Aphex Twin's rare, groundbreaking Hangable Auto Bulb EP for $4.29. To quote from the FAQ: 'We are at present the only store to offer very high quality MP3 files,' and 'Bleep music has no DRM or copy protection built in. We believe that most people like to be treated as customers and not potential criminals'."
The goatse page is offline after the .cx NIC revoked their domain! (No, this isn't a trick!)
More details here.
I believe potential criminals should be treated like customers too.
But given the color scheme on their website, they treat all their customers as if they wear sunglasses while using a computer.
www.magnatune.com
This was even a story on here a couple months ago...
Thank goodness it is Warp Records I get to reward for avoiding DRM, and not K-Tel.
I skimmed through the whole list of artists (which includes a number of artists that don't have a whole album, only one track on a compilation CD). I'm not an expert on music in general, and especially not on dance/techno/electronica/whatever the heck this stuff is, but I have only heard of two of the 'bout 100 artists they even list.
This is all well and good and The Way It Should Be (TM), but it's not exactly a major breakthrough on the scale of iTunes changing formats, or Vivendi Universal offering MP3s, etc.
They wouldn't regularly be pirated and be resold if they weren't already pirates themselves.
I plan to buy atleast two albums from this place tomorrow when I go to work and can download them faster.
I like the genre already, and I apperciate the token respect.
:D :D Good stuff dude
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
Been reading about this on the IDM list .. and just when I had written Warp of as a bunch of old-timers.
Although I own most of the Warp CD back-catalog already (yes I'm trying to impress all you spotters out there) I look forward to emptying my wallet of cash on all the old vinyl tunes I never bought.
And I can listen on my Mac, my Zaurus, and my linux machine, no need to do the time-consuming DRMBULLSHIT->MP3 conversions!!!
(PS: I get a kick out of the folks who now refuse to buy MP3s because they aren't as "full sounding" as CDs. Didn't we go through this already with vinyl???? I'm happy to listen to MP3s on my shitty MP3 player and shitty headphones, thanks.)
Why not use Ogg Vorbis?
Because nobody cares about vorbis outside of its community of 1056 members. The standard for DRM-free music is MP3. That simple.
Moof.
Unencumbered, high quality digital music. With an explicit 'we choose not to treat customers like slime' policy. This is the sort of service I've been waiting for.
iTunes didn't cut it on either point, but it was moot anyway since I'm forbidden from buying from them in the first place due to geography.
Newer compression schemes may be superior to mp3, but as far as accessibility is concerned, mp3 is hard to beat. Nearly anything will play it with absolutely no hassles, including (most importantly for me) your average linux distribution and the iPod. The only thing that would make this perfect would be if there were an option for downloading the music in a lossless format, so one can recode to one's prefered compression scheme.
Now the only question is, is there anything there that I want to listen to?
at least these guys know NOT to bite the hand that feeds 'em.
It was a good MP3
I have been pwned because my
if an indie can do this and still keep a good eye on their bottom line, maybe some of the behemoths might take a few pointers and realize that some reasonable control over distribution is far better than no control at all.
very sensible. big up warp!
This is closer to a model I can live with. I'm sorry after having lived through the heyday of free downloads it is going to take a new price point for me. I think a subscription model with unlimited downloads and no DRM is more in line with what i would pay for. I am one of those people who feels no guilt with copying. To support artists I'll go to there shows. Props for being DRM free though.
I would like to salute the ashes of american flags, and all the fallen leaves filling up shopping bags.
Was that the last thing the server said after this article got posted on Slashdot?
I subscribe to eMusic.com which has independent artists. The use the subscription method, but you get MP3s and most are high bit rate. I also buy electronica music at WombMusic.com, they have up and coming DJs and artists and sell MP3s by the song. The bitrates range from 192 to 320 (plenty for my ears). If you want to know if you like a DJ you can listen to the song or watch them spin live at TheWomb.com. (Or I just open my office window and listen to them from accross the street.) ;)
For continuing to be groundbreaking in everything you do.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Why not use Ogg Vorbis?
For the same reason no one uses Betamax: no uses Betamax.
740916
After you download them, plz send them to me. Thanks!
"You can download Aphex Twin's rare, groundbreaking Hangable Auto Bulb EP for $4.29. "
Rare? not anymore...
Karma: -2^0.5 . Mainly due to the imbibing of dihydrogen monoxide
I guess "f**k" wouldn't have been such a good name for a music download service.
If it's not one thing it's your mother.
But now people will complain about the price... though perhaps it's a move to get people to buy albums instead of singles.
Who doesn't like free music?
I think there are many on Slashdot who believe the laws that make copying illegal need to be altered. If I knew that this stuff would get into the Public Domain sometime I might feel guilty. Until they rewrite copyright to be something like 14 years like it was originally I will copy without remorse.
I would like to salute the ashes of american flags, and all the fallen leaves filling up shopping bags.
...artists I've never heard of want me to buy their music because they're not using DRM. Uh, that's nice.
If you don't like any mainstream radio music and indie stuff is your cup of tea, that's fine - whatever sinks your sub. I happen to enjoy mainstream rock music and do hear new songs that I enjoy via the radio. For the amazing cost of free, you can experience new music almost anywhere, on a cheap dollar store radio, on a audiophile Hi-Fi set or in your car. Sorry, sitting in front of my computer trying to discover new music by taking time to download things I may not like is not as efficient as listening to the radio while I am already doing some other task, like driving.
The problem is that the recording industry behaves like a bratty child with a lot of really cool toys when it comes to the tracks they play on the air... "Sure, you can play with the ball, but only when I say you can! If you listen to me beg for ice cream for hours, you can play my Nintendo, but only after we play electric race cars first!"
I've always felt that if they play it on the air, I should be able to add it to my collection for free. Judging by current P2P usage despite the RIAA's legal attacks, a lot of people still seem to feel the same way. We want the music we HAVE heard with control to listen to it as we want, not music we haven't heard.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
...but I have been waiting to purchase music from Warp records online for quite a long time. With iTunes and other music services offering mainstream music, albeit DRM crippled, there are so many smaller independant labels that are not represented online.
So, not only is this a step in the right direction for anti-DRM music downloads, its a step in the right directions for getting smaller, lesser known labels distributing music online. I most certainly will be purchasing (its been awhile..hehe) music from this service.
Simple as that. They're trying to do everything we've wanted to see in online music. Support them, and show that it CAN work.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Finally a label seems to have done everything right.
High enough quality (avg. 205 kbps VBR) so that I can't differentiate from the CD, no DRM crap, reasonnable pricing, and they seem to pay the artists adequately :
"Finally, buying music through Bleep means that you are supporting the artists work, and in some cases you are getting mp3's encoded by the artists themselves. After the bandwidth charges and Bleep running costs are subtracted, the artist gets half of the album or track price."
Now if only I had ever heard of one of those bands...
been notified about this un-american attitude of innocent before proven guilty? We believe that most people like to be treated as customers and not potential criminals.
Anyone notice the logo at the bottom? Looks like they're running some sort of OS/2 Warp. Cool!
The whole system of ownership of the land is piracy. We are destroying nature and it is sick. For me, a socialist government with a strong sense of ethnic pride is the only solution.
Holy bleep that's cool I'm going to check them out right now!
Agree with everything except token. This beats out my alternative, mailing Aphex and Squarepusher $20.
Now for to find an address for Muziq.
Wow, their bands run the gamut from A to... well, B.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
23 minutes after the /. post and the site is toast. I'll try again tomorrow though, sounds like it might be good.
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
I really gotta hand it to the folks at Warp for knowing better... the material on their label is not pop. No, you're not going to know every act on their label, and that's the point. They release the best and most diverse electronic type music of any label.
... but Warp is one of those rare labels you can probably randomly buy something out of their catalogue and appreciate it... of course, if you like that kind of music.
Some of their acts may be more well known, like Aphex Twin and The Black Dog (The latter also makes up Plaid with two members out of Black Dog)
Wildly experimental... electronic, blips, bleeps, some dance, some not, highly remixable, highly unsual, not your typical pop formulaic stuff that is structured perfectly into a verse, chorus, verse, chorus, break, chorus to fade type list of things to include in a song. Dare I say... a lot of stuff probably would be considered the electronic equivilent of jazz music.
Highly recommended for those who actually don't mind listening to the atypical electronic stuff.
But hey... I'm excited now, Warp has shown that they're aware of who their buyers are and will treat them like they should be treated: Customers, not criminals. KUDOS!
There are people who are acting badly and there are those who aren't.
Many of the RIAA/MPAA actions hurt both groups indiscriminently.
I'm not pirating or reselling their music but their aggravating "copy control" measures means I can't use CDs I buy with my Network Walkman.
I'm not pirating or reselling their movies but their irritating red dots spoil (to some extent) my enjoyment of their movies.
It is unnacceptable for them to be damaging legitimate users in this way. Not to mention the insanity of devalueing their own product in the process. I am not a criminal and won't be treated like one. I therefore do not buy any such product except in rare situations (eg LotR, I'm seeing Radiohead in concert later in the year so actually listening to the CD first is a pretty good idea). I used to buy about 4-6 CDs a month. Since this "copy controlled" stuff started showing up in Australia I have bought precicely three and only the Radiohead one has DRM.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
it would be the first slashdotting directly resulting in profit...EVER.
Plus, you're getting the same quality as vinyl, since most Electronica/Techno is worked on as 44khz... if they offer really high quality encodes, the quality difference will be negligible... What I really want to see is a label that does classical or something record at >100 khz and distribute the music as 524 kbit [insert uber-format here] files.
Copy protection and copyright has shown itself to be as worthless as much of the music and movies being peddled today. Why bother? The RIAA takes what it wants. Your rights to fair use, artists' rights to control their works, and money that should go to artists, songwriters, and musicians - not to mention your time and money when you are inaccurately targeted and portrayed as a thief or run up against one of their lobbied laws or 'taxes'.
I can't feel too bad about their plight, as my record and songs are currently being sold and relicenced without MY consent. Where is my protection?
The system is broken, and it is only going to get worse for regular music fans and the artists that make music for them and themselves.
So meh on your devil's advocate post.
When you compliment OS/2, you're complimenting Microsoft!
I have been pwned because my
At first glance, I guess the reason Wrap Records (and most electronic music (EM) companies/artists I imagine) and artists do not complain too much about music piracy and some what embraces it, lays on the nature of the music itself. I believe most EM artists earn their salary through live shows at clubs, festivals, radio appearances, etc, rather than cd sales. By allowing the public to get to know the artist's music, if the fans like it, the more popular this artist gets, the more people at EM events, the more money for the artists. Because EM is not as big as most other genres, in most cases there is not enough budget to manufacture an image for these artists, so talent and popularity, based on the quality of the music itself is what determines the artist's success. Unlike most mainstream music, electronic music focuses on the music itself rather than the artist's image.
:D
Then again, it might just be because most EM comes from Europe (specially Holland, Germany) which well is very open about the whole music piracy issue
[alk]
I actually know at least one song they're selling (since it's on the Pi soundtrack), and would actually be interested in buying the album it's from (to start with), and I've bought high quality mp3s without DRM online (from Magnatune.com) previously. However, the site immediately required resizing my browser and clicking randomly to do anything. And the thing to play a song is flash. I suspect the site is also somewhat slashdotted at this point.
I'm their target market, so far as I can tell, but their site design is too much of a pain to deal with.
I agree with the choice Warp records have made. There will always be people who would buy the records because they really like the group. Sharing music/art is the best way to increase the popularity of an artist.
Its too bad that a lot people tend to look at the money instead of the art. Fame and respect I think are more important than money to an artist, if they have those they will have power to change the world.
I personally respect artists/singers/thespians/.../programmers that do it for the art and not from the money. The Internet is the best thing that has happened to them as it gives them a low cost way of broadcasting their talent and get themselves known and respected by their peers.
But money has its purpose too, here are somethings I would do to make money.
What warp is doing is also respecting the people. Sure some of them may be sending them out to P2P networks, but Warp save money on dealing with legal costs.
This money can be better utilized in advertising themselves.
If I was Warp, I would work with radio stations to add a blurb at the end of music radio stations use to go to their website.
Some of the lower end or archived music that is not making too much money I would put on P2P networks as long as they will provide some advertising spaces on their clients. Or the name of the song. With authorization from the artist of course. But I will not give any money to the artist at that point since its not really something that I can make profit on, but at least it will give the artist more exposure for little cost, because we'll just be putting it up on a low end, low bandwidth server probably on a home DSL line and let P2P do its work. We'll just add the ed2k hashes on the website. We would tack in information about how to go to the website within the file names and the ID3 tag.
I would work as the middle man between an artist and concert halls or restaurant gigs. Basically add an extranet for smaller concert halls and restaurants to request artists and artists can put their availabilities on the system, kinda like a scheduler.
I will also partner with an auction site such as eBay to sell products related to the artists.
I would also provide a utility that would provide the creation of custom made CDs which contain songs for an artist or maybe more. Perhaps release it as a Java WebStart program so I do not have to deal with a lot of bandwidth costs for running a webapp.
We would put in information about the song on moodlogic as well, its best to have the correct information from the source.
Its Artists "on demand"
Archie - CIO-for-hire
If anyone's intrigued by this idea but hasn't heard enough Warp tracks to know what's good, I would strongly recommend checking out "Come to Daddy" by Aphex Twin. It's only 8 tracks, so it should be pretty cheap.
"Selected Ambient Works" is also quite good, especially for those times when you want to listen to something subtle but your brother in law has borrowed your whale music CD. Seriously, this guy is very talented. And he drives a tank (no, it's not a joke link - just a strange domain).
Finally, I'm still waiting for the Bleep page to load up, so does anyone know if their artist's videos are alsofor sale? Squarepusher's "Come On My Selector" is my favourite video of all time.
...Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
Churchill
Hmmm... I don't know if you were going for Flamebait but I have a feeling you stepped on a few toes...
Most of the Warp artists are VERY popular with the music Snobbish Elite, and less so with the General Masses.
As a card carrying music snob, I am happy to say that Boards of Canada is the best band in the entire universe (this is a fact, by the way, not an opinion), and I am happy to see this little development.
The catalog is a bit light on the options but there's definitely some tasty aphex twin in there and some prefuse73 and others. The sections currently are:
The check out and download was quite simple: Most of the detail below...
1. Registration was quite easy. just name email address and password.
2. they're taking paypal and mc/visa and SMS text message.
3. They report as you put things in your cart. "Total download size" of my purchase in XX.XX MB and Estimated download time (via 512K DSL/Cable)in MM:SS. The 512k DSL measure is actually accurate for my connection so I'm not sure if they are sniffing or if that is just a metric they decided to standardize on.
4. With my purchases, (indeed the old Aphex Twin stuff (good stuff BTW)) I tried to use paypal and got a " Waiting for a paypal payment report..." in the checkout pane and it kept refreshing but reporting nothing.
5. So I bit my lip and hit the back button (I'm using Mozilla 1.6b). and amazingly enough was actually back at my Paypal Credit/Debit Card option.
6. Checkout was pretty standard and very straightforward with a few unusual options I wasn't used to (I'm from the U.S. so maybe some of this stuff is normal in the U.K./Europe)
7. Interestingly theres the follow card descriptions in the dropdown. Electron Eurocard Mastercard Visa Visa Debit
8. Expiry date are xx Month and xxxx year which is nice unlike the annoying (to me anyway) spelling of the month option
9. There is also a "For Switch and Solo cards only:" Section with "Start Date:" "Issue Number:" fields
10. Strangely you then only have the option to add this information you've filled out to your profile.
11. You then loop through a more normal check out where you can select the card you want to use from a dropdown or add a new card (presumably you'd loop through what I just went through)
12. and you get "When you select 'Process Order' below your card will be debited with the total amount of $X.XX" info and are given a process order button.
13. The frame refreshes and you get "ORDER CONFIRMATION" message and "Your order has been processed succesfully." and a "DOWNLOAD YOUR ORDER" option.
14. It chugged a bit then spit back my dowloads as one big zip or as each track. with the following info below. "Click on the links above to download your tracks. PC users: You will be presented with a 'Save As...' dialog box, use this to choose the location on your local hard drive you wish to save the file too. MAC users: By default tracks will download to your Desktop, unless you have specified otherwise in your browser preferences."
15. I selected the ZIP option and the frame reloads with a bit of chugging then
"ZIPPING YOUR ORDER" "Your order is zipped and ready for download..." "Once your order has started downloading then you may continue browsing the site."and a "DOWNLOADS" button to click.
16: the Download time was respectable even with the site getting slashdotted and every IDM geek, all of which are plugged into computers incessantly (ahem... unlike myself. That's why I'm so tan... or something...), checking it out at the same time.
17: oh also, across the top nav you get the following options: LOGGED IN AS emailuser@emailaddress.tld - LOG OUT - YOUR ORDER - DOWNLOADS - PREFERENCES - FAQ - HELP - That's pretty much it. Damn well done I'd say.
Heil Sig! -Rob
that they succeed, because if they fail, DRM really will be unstoppable (not technically, of course).
Tierce
Who sponsors your feelings?
...but here it goes again. there is a digital download service featuring independent artists called audiolunchbox that offers DRM free decently high quality mp3 and ogg downloads, it's great and is comparable in price to all the other services so far available. the slashdot crowd needs to pick up on this and fast, we can show the recording industry that this is what we want.
What happens if the connection fails halfway through a download? Do you have a way of recovering? Is there a window of a few hours or days within which you can download files without limit?
I have been pwned because my
taken from the bleep.com faq section...
Q: WHY MP3 ?
A: MP3 is the most popular and universal format for digital music. It is the format that people most want, that is the easiest to play freely without any restrictions. We are also considering selling other files formats such as the second generation of lossy formats such as AAC or ogg or even lossless compressed formats such as FLAC or Monkeysaudio. If people are willing to pay a premium for the bandwidth cost they incur, then even 24bit versions of files could be sold.
Warp Records allready was my favorite record label. This is a good signal towards other record labels.
I clicked on the Add to Cart link for the set (ignoring the preview streams, since honestly, I would buy it anyways), and after checking the privacy policy (nothing will be sold, bartered, sent to you, etc for any reason) I tried to create a new account. I was told my email was already in use, and found out that the old regular warprecords.com accounts were conveniently auto-generated for bleep.com, so I just signed in, passed through the normal checkout stuff, entered in my credit card, and two clicks later I had the option of downloading individual tracks or a ZIP of all the music.
I opened this ZIP and found that they were named "01.mp3; 02.mp3" and so on. Sort of annoying, that. The quality is standard 128-320 kb/sec VBR MP3. Winamp gave the MP3s the following properties:
MPEG 1.0 layer 3 (VBR)
44100Hz Joint Stereo
CRCs: No
Copyrighted: No
Original: Yes
Emphasis: None
The ID3v1+2 tags were entered in fully, and included the following description in "encoded by":
LAME 3.90.3 --alt-preset standard
AFAIK, LAME is the best encoder out there, so Warp apparently knows what they're doing. The MP3s sound great. One caveat--when you buy a song or album, you are buying *that download*. Downloads did not remain in any way accessible after the initial post-purchase links were accessed, so you had better hope the download doesn't get broken or lost.
The Good
--Quality encoding, even if it is VBR.
--No DRM (obviously)
--Fast download
--Easy to use store and site navigation
--ID3 Tags fully filled out
--Album prices are great
The Bad
--Generic filenames
--Downloads aren't held as permissions on the site for redownload later
--Single download prices could be better (blame UK conversion)
All in all, I liked Warp before and that might influence how useful this site is to me, but I was satisfied with only a few very small problems, and am looking forward to more downloads.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...perhaps the fact that a lot of people share the entire Warp collection on Soulseek was an instigating factor for the launch of this service?
That's very impressive, as long as they don't insist on gouging customers for bandwidth. It shouldn't cost more than $2 tops to transfer a full 24-bit album uncompressed.
This is the future of digital music downloads, at least for real music enthusiasts and hardcore fans: get the original masters, higher quality than CDs. I can't stress enough that this is a good thing.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
Will others take note of this and follow suit? Exactly how successful does this have to be, in terms of number of songs sold or amount of revenue generated, before other services will reconsider their business practices and drop WMA for MP3/OGG/insert-codec-of-choice-here, axe the DRemember-R-is-for-RestrictionsM, change prices, or any combination of the above? Given enough success, this could be the start of a revolution, or it could be just one bastion of sensibility in a desert of corporate lunacy.
Help protect civil rights from abuse by the TSA - visit TSA News Blog.
http://www.tsanewsblog.com
I totally agree. The labels should put all of their music available for download. Unfortunately, sales of older music would cannibalize sales of the newer ultra marketed artists. For the labels this is antathema to everything they believe in because if they can't take the artists profit and claim it was spent on marketing they might have to pay them.
I would like to salute the ashes of american flags, and all the fallen leaves filling up shopping bags.
What the heck, why do people think that when they for their music, it is best to look for what is most heavily thrown at them. Usually it's sh** that flies best.
Get yourself some new experience and make your own choice. Try sth. out and see yourself. The net technically is probably one of the best chances for music to return from marketing to quality content. Try to be part of that and don't ask for the next hype wave to catch and drive you like a boat without rudder.
I got this album off Emusic last year, and now it has crawled inside my brain and won't get out. I'm not big into electronic music, but I listen to a lot of stuff, so I figured I'd add this. The first few times through it doesn't seem like much of anything, but then it gets hold of you and won't let go.
I got several different Boards of Canada albums and eps from Emusic, as well as music by other Warp artists. (They were available on Emusic back when I had an account, I don't know about now.) So I'm legal. I don't need to buy these albums from the Warp website. But I also know that Emusic paid the artists basically nothing, so I figured I'd head over to the Warp website to pay a second time for some records I've really enjoyed.
Before I got to the website, I decided that the sweet spot was $5. I'm willing to pay -- A SECOND TIME -- $5 for each Boards of Canada album I downloaded from Emusic. (Since Emusic had no download limit back then, everyone on the service, including me, was basically downloading everything they could find -- hey, I found some bands like Boards of Canada!)
But when I got to the Warp website, the price was $10. No way. Vinyl cost $5 when I was growing up, and there's no good reason music should cost any more than that now. It costs less to produce now, and it costs less to distribute. $10/album is too high.
So Boards of Canada has my admiration, and I appreciate what Warp is trying to do, but $5 is the point where my wallet opens up. I guess I'm just not in the "target audience," even though I like the music.
Anything worth doing is worth doing badly -- G.K. Chesterton
They also have Nine Inch Nails, Nightmares on Wax and various other bands that kick ass.
They're also a very open label.
I have the 1992 Polygon Window (aka Richard D. James aka. Aphex Twin) - "Surfing On Sine Waves" album. On the back of the CD there's a nice little bit that reads:
This is the second in a series of (Artificial Intelligence) albums from Warp. If you think on the same wave length, contact/send tapes to Warp RecordsToday they even employ well known sceners like Lassi Nikko (aka. Dune/Orange, BrothomStates), and even sell albums from other less known independent labels featuring other well known sceners like Jaakko Manninen (aka. Mellow-D, MD).
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
What I want to see, (and if any of you venture capitalists out there want to pump some money into it, contact me through slashdot) is [story follows]:
When I lived in Indonesia a few years ago (well, about 20) we used to go to the [pirate] tape shop. We (that's the entire family, mum, dad, me and definately baby brother) would spend hours in the Delta tape shop listening to music at a table on headphones, deciding what of that music we wanted to buy, and then buying what we liked (prices were cheap). I was 10. I bought Pink Floyd, Kraftwerk, the Chipmunks, Hall and Oates (I am ashamed of that one), Hooked on Classics (a bit embarassed about that), Queen, the Police, The Who, and more music than the average 10 year old would find difficult to imagine, both in terms of quantity and quality. It was a nice social event, and I have very fond memories of it.
Now. I have recently fixed up my old CDs to live on a new 30gb hard drive and a dedicated ogg player - old p100 laptop with the jukebox running as root so that ogg123 can run nice -20 or whatever, so I'm sold on digital formats for music rather than having to rely on one piece of removable media per artist or compilation. However downloads do not cut it for me. Me, and most of the rest of the global population are stuck on dialup or no convenient internet access whatsoever. But, we would benifit from the digital revolution.
So: what I want to see is a shop with a load of tables and a load of headphones [you can see where this is going], in a real bricks and mortar shop where you can listen to potential purchases burn CDs, save to removal media, save to hard drive, your iPod and so on. You sell your tracks or albums at a reasonable price, you turn your shop into a social hub, and you can carry an enormous back catalogue, beyond the wildest dreams of music stores as they currently exist. More by using tools like debian's apt-proxy. As far as I can see, this would be like a licence to print money once you get the labels or the artists on board.
So, what would it take. A few terabytes of storage. Cooperation from a critical mass of music distributors. A couple to a few months of time for a small team of programmers.
So, who's going to do it. I'm available as a consultant.
"...we should just trust our president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that." B.Spears 2003
So you could buy those two Aphex Twin Hangable Auto Bulb records on vinyl at Ebay for $185 US dollars (at the least, there's 21 bids and over 5 hours to go in the bidding) or download the whole thing like I did at bleep for 6 bucks and some change. Score!
Heil Sig! -Rob
www.songs.co.il (hebrew site) offers a similar service for mainstream israeli music, and is operated by a major Israeli record label (NMC), is offering music marginally cheaper than iTunes and the like, in a vanilla MP3 format (with WMA previews). Plus, new albums are released online (usually hours but sometimes days) before the disk is released, and there are options for per track or whole disk purchase.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html
...why is Drukqs a corrupt "copy protected" CD in Germany? Was it re-mastered by another company beyond Warp's control or something?
Have you ever heard ogg comapred to mp3 at the same bitrate? It is fairly superior and my hearing isnt even all that good. As a matter of fact I can't hear all that well and I can still tell the difference. I'm not deaf or anything, but my hearing isn't superb like most crazy audio codec people claim. Linux wasn't popular in '91, but we pushed it and its hitting mainstream now. Ogg may not be popular now but its made alot of progress especially considering that it is compatible with some portable players. If we push it hard enough then maybe we can let Ogg be the standard for DRM-free music.
Regards,
Steve
P.S. And its community is far larger then 1056. Where did you get this number from?
For one thing, I have a bunch of stuff from Warp, but I'm always looking for more. And now the fact that they DON'T support DRM, that is just too righteous! I'm going over to buy some stuff now... :) Thank you Warp!
Un-news
Shameless promotion...more or less.
c d.html
:)
If you want to support good record labels you can also check out rewind-records.com which is owned by Soundmurderer, who is also signed to Rephlex (Aphex Twin's label). In the Rewind Single's section there are all decent quality mp3s you can download.
Soundmurderer & SK1 have their CD out here: http://www.rephlex.com/2001releases/rew001/rew001
and I just got the go-ahead to update their website with tracks on their singles at www.rewind-records.com, so check it out if you like Ragga jungle.
Vinyl cost $5 when I was growing up
In what year were you "growing up," and what was the median wage then?
and there's no good reason music should cost any more than that now. It costs less to produce now
What makes you think that? Production (not reproduction) of copyrighted works is a process of research and development, and historically, R&D has been labor-bound. Promotion is also labor-bound. The price in dollars of labor will tend to rise over time; see "cost-push inflation" in any economics book for the details.
www.ghetto-blaster.com
*I used to be quite irreverent and ignorant. I am probably much smarter now. I seem to realize this every 45 days or so.
So I was playing this song... you know... when my computer starts going "bleep bleep bleep"...
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
OK say you have 400 CD's.
Keep good enough record and you can buy them back from the insurance when some shite steals them.
What if the bugger steals you computer with 400 CD's worth on your hard drive?
Thats like 4-6 grand worth to get your collection back (assuming 10 song per CD on average)
With the insurance I have I'm SOL.
What about yours?
sometimes, i go bleep too!
not that it matters, but i do!
erhm? are we talking the same thing here?
bleep
*resistance is futile, or fuzzy, i dunno*
The thing with music you have to realize is for every good artist you can name there are thousands of equally good artists you can't name. There is a supply chain bottleneck and if you believe for one second that the only good music is the music that gets listed on Billboard you've simply bought into the marketing you've been drowning in.
I know I'm not a perfect example of a mainstream music listener, I was a musician (not a good one) and a early internet adopter (broadband too) so I've been poking around a lot more then the average person has probably had the time or patience to.
But just take it on faith, there is some really wonderful music out there. The internets one true charm has been serving music and art on a scale we could only dream of before.
If you don't discover it yourself your children will. Human creativity is truly amazing. And you think it really starts and stops with the names you know? Ouch!
Quack, quack.
drm is useless anyway
all you have to do is to write a driver that emulates a sound card and writes its wave input as a wav. or even better -- loop your normal sound card digital out into digital in. set the volume to max and get LO$$LE$$ conversion to any normal format.
I'm quite surprised that I never could read that approach to DRM on the net.
Quack, quack.
Go directly to Jail! Do not pass Go! Do not collect $200 !
Doesn't really matter who their bands are, they are still doing stuff for the best interest of us (they dont really need to). Artists do need to start somewhere, and MP3's are the best way, the RIAA tries to punish smaller artists. If all the smaller companies do something like this, the amount of variety on our radio's once again will be massive, instead of the same 20 songs being played over and over again, the ones being pushed by the big companies. So, no matter how small the music distributor, this is great for us and all musicians, because maybe for once we wont need to put up fully with the teeny boppers choice of music on the radio, because everyones choice of music will become broad enough that we wont just be listening to what the major music companies shove down our throats
er... If you don't know Autechre or Aphex Twin, you just don't know electronic music. Period.
I was introduced to Autechre via an IRC acquaintance of mine. They're a band that's been experimenting with weird stuff in electronic music for about 12 years.
Go and check some of their stuff out. Aphex Twin's "Selected Ambient Works Volume II" is a true classic of the genre and a great personal favorite. Autechre's "Chiastic Slide" is another good one.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Resonably priced music. Ingenious. I think $10 is a good price for an album; I don't not think $15-$20 is. Way to go Warp, Bleep, et al!
Some quick notes... easy signup, intuitive interface and the canadian dollar is flying high now (haha USD is collapsing!)
I opted for the zipped package of what I bought (6 tracks) downloading at 81 KB/sec (while slashdotted!) quite nice.
The whole process, browsing to completed download took ~ 20 mins.
excellent music, excellent label, excellent service. I'm into electronica and I've been waiting for EXACTLY THIS to appear. Price is a bit on the high side, but considering the quality (avg 200+ kbps VBR, this is high-fi... they know their lame) and _especially_ file format -- unfettered MP3, it's currently justifiable.
very good move. bravo! clapping here, not kidding. I'm telling my friends about this
Boards of Canada
Geogaddi
#19 Billboard Heatseekers chart
#3 Billboard Electronic Albums chart
#10 Billboard Independent Albums chart
Twoism
#16 Billboard Electronic Albums chart
Aphex Twin
Richard D. James Album
#20 Billboard Heatseekers chart
Drukqs
#2 Billboard Heatseekers chart
#154 Billboard Top 200 Albums chart
#6 Billboard Electronic Albums chart
26 Mixes for Cash
#29 Billboard Heatseekers
#3 Billboard Electronic
#18 Billboard Independent
Autechre
Gantz Graf
#14 Billboard Hot Dance chart
Draft 7.30
#9 Billboard Electronic
#40 Billboard Independent
and so on...
You may not have heard of their names but there's a chance you might have heard their music. Aphex Twin is Richard D. James and he uses several aliases including Polygon Window and Caustic Window which are also featured on Warp Records.
Maybe you remember these following references:
There are more.
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
haha
I now have yet another site to show to people so they can see how not to integrate Flash with a site.
Hover-scrolling arrows for text? Navigation elements mysterious and small? Strange layouts that are hard to read, regardless of how big or small your browser window is?
As much as I thought DR was cool in high school, they have not changed one whit since 1997. They are just too cool for you.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
That should have read "Richard D. James". He uses several aliases including Caustic Window and Polygon Window which are also featured on Warp Records.
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
"I was downloading music on the PC, and it was, like, bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep. And then, like, half of my music was gone. And I was, like, heh. It devoured my music. It was really good electronic music from warp records. And then I had to do it again and I had to do it fast so it wasn't as good. It's kind of a bummer."
Free as in mason.
As a long-time Warp/SKAM fan, I couldn't be happier to see something like this both for them and for us. Also, it looks like if you're running IE on Windows (and presumably at least some other browser/OS configuration) you can also stream every one of the audio files, so the whole thing is even "listen before you buy".
As an avid mp3 trader, I can see myself using this a lot. Stuff I could only find before @128k bitrate (not good enough), or wasn't able to find, etc.
Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
Well, here's another label trying to SCREW US OVER! You see, they're trying to kill off music download services so they can hike up CD sales.
"has made their entire back catalog available thru Bleep, a new digital download service."
Oh....ok...well......they're still gonna gouge us on prices!
"with EPs and full albums in the $4 to $10 price range. You can download Aphex Twin's rare, groundbreaking Hangable Auto Bulb EP for $4.29."
Oh...well, aside from sounding a bit too obviously like a press release, um......ok. But, but they'll be DRMed to all hell!
"Bleep music has no DRM or copy protection built in. We believe that most people like to be treated as customers and not potential criminals'"
Well, crap. The preachers of Kazaa and its ilk have been saying these things need to be done before they'll switch. Now lets see if they actually do.
In all seriousness though, it'll be interesting to see if this business model can be successful. And they're a label built on electronic music, which is pretty much the first in this kind of market, genre wise. Definitely interesting to see how the first genre-themed music store will do.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
This looks really cool and once the site is responsive again I will probably buy a few tunes. A few other people mentioned magnatune which also seems really cool. Anybody else have any other suggestions?
--Greg
don't you know that Drukgs are bad, mmmmkay?
Free as in mason.
for non-commercial use, and non-commercial sharing.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
Mad props to Warp, DRM is something for free files at most, you dont want to pay for a crippled file (in probably an inferior format anyway). If i had paid for a DRMd file i would be much more likely to find some tools to crack it and then share it just to spite them, with Warp i would be so happy that they had respected me i would respect them to (even though their entire collection is probably availiable on kazaa anyway).
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I will even - and lean in close here, peckerheads - pay for stuff that I already downloaded for free just to get the aforementioned nice ID tags and bitrate quality I want, not to mention knowing the artists get their due. Yup. And seeing as I would have paid for those tracks I'm not about to go throwing them on a P2P - they're mine.
Also, I'm not in the continental United States but last time I checked my currency converts into USD just fine but you won't take it (I'm talking to you, iTunes). So here I've been, out in the cold, clutching a fistful of dollars, my nose pressed up against the glass of Apple's spiffy new online music store unable to get in. Then along comes Bleep. Not only do they have stuff I couldn't find on iTunes (Boards Of Canada) but - get this - they will actually sell it to me. So I bought, and I'll keep on buying. I bought songs I had already downloaded for free. While looking for those songs I found more stuff I didn't even know I wanted and I bought those too. Hell, while downloading the big-ass zipfile I went back, had another look and now I have TWO big-ass zipfiles to download.
So in closing let me sum up: treat P2P like what it really is - free advertising and marketing info - embrace it then make the damned music available to buy at high quality and DRM free. Do you really think the success of iTunes is because it has DRM?? Do you know what would happen to sales if the tracks on iTunes suddenly went DRM free? Sales would remain constant, and would even pick up as the word got out to ornery pricks like me who just won't touch anything with DRM in it.
But you won't do any of it and Apple and other non-luddites will eat your lunch.
Bite my balls Dinosaurs,
Angry of Sydney
What is up with that, it isn't the American way!
1. When the pin is pulled, Mr. Grenade is no longer your friend.
2. Do not eat iPod shuffle.
I was wearing sunglasses when i checked out their website. i had just gotten to the office and was loading up slashdot in between getting my coffee iv prepped. i offer that their fonts are icky though =)
Morals.. isn't that some fancy kind of mushroom
was UT1-dot. Classic track, with some lyrics that I think every /. reader would like.
"Introducing integrated inside with electronic techno music,
controlled manual by Aphex mind program...
Acid might kill the population."
But when I got to the Warp website, the price was $10. No way. Vinyl cost $5 when I was growing up, and there's no good reason music should cost any more than that now.
I guess you slept in class the day your highschool Economics teacher explained 'inflation'.
Don't get me long, I love Warp. I dig Aphex Twin, and Autechre just rocks my world. BUT Warp is a relatively small label when compared to the big guys out there. Sure, I'll trust Warp and gladly fork over the cash for the music, but if Warner Brothers was doing the exact same thing, would we still be so quick to sing praise? Everytime a major label does anything we raise eyebrows and wonder what deviant scheme the bastards have come up with. IMHO Bleep is great, but it's still just one label out of hundreds, of which only a few really matter to the masses -- and those few are still charging around $15 for a CD.
anyone who has their UID equal to their username deserves to be modded down like the piece of garbage that they are! oh wait...
From the FAQ:
Q: I AM IN SOUTH AMERICA/ALASKA/THE NORTH POLE, DOES THAT MATTER?
A: As long as you have an internet connection and a fairly modern browser (Internet Explorer 6, Safari 1.0, Firebird 0.7) you can access and use Bleep.com anywhere in the world, whether using an Apple Mac or a Windows based PC. Lots of bandwidth and a fast connection obviously helps too
I wish all the CDs I bought were like that.
Bleep doesn't. Follow the link in the OP and check out their FAQ.
I've not tried it out myself yet, but I'm guessing the web-based nature means that it will also work under any OS with an up-to-date browser.
TiggsTiggs
"120 chars should be enough for everyone..."
Recommended.
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
It seems there are many services now offering the download of digital music. Is there an index site which lists them all, and gives ratings on stuff like DRM, file quality, price etc?
Thank you for your review. It was most informative.
Downloads did not remain in any way accessible after the initial post-purchase links were accessed, so you had better hope the download doesn't get broken or lost.
It's trivial for them to only "remove" a download after the HTTP connection is properly closed (or after three days, or something like that). I would guess that they do this. There's little way that this could be used against them, and there's clear benefits). At around a dollar per five megs or so, bandwidth is an awfully small cost. ServerCove sells bandwidth at $89 for 700GB/mo, or 12 cents a gigabyte, to get a rough benchmark. That's about a twentieth of a cent per MP3 in bandwidth. They could probably sequeeze in quite a few retransfers before they need to worry about losing money, given that this is less than a tenth of a percent of their profits.
* I'd like to see ogg vorbis support. Given that this is all automated, I don't see any reason that files couldn't be easily provided in Vorbis format.
--Quality encoding, even if it is VBR.
This confuses me. VBR is consistently more space efficient given the quality you get. Why on earth would you see VBR as a negative?
May we never see th
In many cases, the criminals are better off than the customers. Of course, in these cases the criminals are also known as "executives"
I guess that artists are more than happy with such a system.
Want to know how much iTunes gives ?
Let's overcome our weakness.
Okay, I just went there for the first time. Now, their artist selection is small. Probably too small to go anywhere. However, from a technical standpoint, they are *spot* on. Besides offering music in the format folks want, they even provide a free Internet radio station that you can listen to. If you hear something that you like, you can zip over to their web site and buy it. That's a damned intelligent system.
If I were them, I'd put out a patch for Shoutcast/Icecast in xmms and talk to the Nullsoft folks about doing the same for WinAMP to stream a "buy it" (or at least "for more information on this song") link along with each song. When a song's getting streamed, the user can just click to bring up a page in their web browser to let them buy the song (or album containing the song, or whatnot). That'd make it ideal for folks who want to sell these things. I think you'd see a lot more try-before-you-buy Internet radio stations.
May we never see th
I would prefer that non-Americans were treated as potential customers too. Otherwise, especially with rare stuff, they might have to remain reluctant criminals.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
Beta was technically superior to VHS, being a scaled-down verion of the broadcast-quality U-Matic system. Beta also had the feature that the cassette tape was "laced" the first press of the PLAY button and stayed so until the press of the EJECT button -- meaning that, as long as you had already hit play, you could go from fast wind to picture search {of course, you could fast wind "inside the cassette" if you went straight into that mode from insertion}. Unlike VHS which laced the tape on every press of play and unlaced it on stop -- so fast winding was always done with an unlaced tape. {Modern VHS recorders accomplish the lacing procedure much quicker so this is not an issue}.
Beta also had better resolution, and a recorder whose heads were in good condition could actually record the Teletext signal {transmitted while the electron beam is out of the visible screen area}. However, I don't recall this "accidental feature" being exploited on any movie cassettes; shame, because it would have allowed for {not quite DVD-style} special features such as subtitles and additional {textual and low-res graphics} material to be embedded in store-bought or rented movies. Of course if someone has an example of a prerecorded Beta cassette with teletext, I'd be delighted to be proved wrong.
Unfortunately for Sony, Beta relied on more moving parts than VHS. Most of the TV/VCR rental companies chose VHS for its mechanical simplicity, despite the poorer picture resolution. Japanese-manufactured units {actually built by sewing-machine maker Elna, I think} were badged with the names used by the rental companies, and also sold under the Ferguson brand -- I used to have an old Ferguson 3V22, with "piano keys" and an Audio Dub mode for adding new sound to an existing recording. Follow-up models featured touch buttons and stereo audio {achieved by splitting the tiny edge track!}; but, since the internal TV receiver only decoded the mono FM audio {not all transmitters were broadcasting NICAM till the early 1990s}, and the UHF remodulator only encoded FM mono, this was effectively redundant.
Of course, I haven't even mentioned the wonderful Philips V2000 system. This featured 8-hour , turn-over cassettes and fully automatic tracking, but there were only two manufacturers {Philips and Grundig -- Pye was already dead by then} and the machines just cost far too much, features notwithstanding.
Moral: Being good at your job won't necessarily make you popular.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
They were in my class at Uni before they dropped out, y'know. Oh, yeah, what a class it was - Boards of Canada, Ian "Freenet" Clarke, and me!
(If you look through my previous posts and see me mention Keith out of the Office being in my class too, don't go thinking I'm a silly troll - I did joint honours and he was in my other class)
Probably the same people who buy speakers labelled "3000W", feed them from amplifiers labelled "200W" that draw about 20 watts from the mains, and think they have a 6kW stereo {conveniently forgetting that 230V * 13A = 3kW, so a real 6kW amp could never work from a standard 13A power point -- we're talking those big fat round blue plugs here}. Or maybe the ones who use expensive oxygen free copper cables and gold-plated plugs -- the latest thing apparently is "directional" cables which are reckoned to sound better when the {alternating, in case anyone forgets} current is flowing from one end to the other.
In short, there's a limit to how hi your fi before you start wasting effort
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Warp is UK based.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
Warp is promising to bring all the labels they currently offer in Warpmart to Bleep. That's got to be at least fifty labels.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
Their contracts always give 50% of the profits to the artist. Consdiering they have next to no advertising and promotion budget, this is a very good deal.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
Yeah and you don't have those 18bits on a CD, so why not if your hi-fi set up to this resolution ;-)
It's good that these folks are providing standard mp3 files instead of wacky formats like WMA or AAC, but what about O.G.G.?
Come on dudes, now that iPod is about to jump on board don't get left behind!
And what for a couple of bands??
Why not just buy the damn CD or buy it USED!
Oh yeah those are over priced too!
We believe that most people like to be treated as customers and not potential criminals...
We know the 13 of you who purchased music from our catalog in the past will appreciate this and we hope to double our customer base by the end of the year.
I believe potential criminals should be treated like customers too.
While your line sounds funny, it's actually true, since a potential criminal is not a criminal, ie. innocent until proven guilty.
However, while the label deserves credit for not blindly following the myopic behaviour of the big labels and not supporting the police-state behaviour of the RIAA, the system they operate is at heart still wrong. Artists have no business passing ownership of their work to a third party for all eternity, as this just feeds that greed machine and is the real root of all this evil.
There once was a need for placing oneself into perpetual slavery in some circumstances, but that no longer holds in these days of inexpensive small-batch pressing and easy online presence and distribution. Studios and labels nowadays need be no more than technical and promotional subcontractors, not feudal barons squeezing their serfs dry as in previous decades.
The arithmetic of musical serfdom is just plain scary.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Will you still be able to see the pretty pictures in the music?
That's strange, I some of the early Pulp L.P's were on Warp Records, but I can't find them on this site. They were the rare classics that I couldn't afford when I was really into them at Sheffield Uni in the early 90's.
As one of the most famous bands to have recorded for Warp, it is a bit surprising that they don't sell Pulp. Come on Warp, sort it out, I'm ready to buy.
Okay, I just signed up and downloaded EP7 by Autechre. Very cheap (as a full album purchase), very fast, certainly good enough quality for me and my iPod. I'll be using this service a lot and I hope they really clean up.
For information, payment is either standard cards or Paypal, and after purchase your tracks are made available for a standard browser-based download, either individually or in a zip file. Transfer is very fast (depending on your own connection, natch.)
There are a few oddities with prices - Sabres of Paradise's Wilmot EP is 2.99 complete, which is 1 more than the two tracks bought individually. There are also a lot of small tracks (such as the 'bolts' on Black Dog's Spanners album) that cost 99p for 20 seconds or so. But those kind of tracks you'd only really want as part of the full album, where the average price per track would be far less...
However, given that the selection of tracks and albums is very comprehensive, a few glitches are to be expected, and are easily worked around.
I urge anyone who's interested in online music and hasn't heard of Warp to give the site a try - all the files are available as previews (with fade-outs) and you'll find some wonderful stuff there. Warp's an electronica label, but a very eclectic one. If you don't get on with Aphex Twin, try Mira Calix. If you can't gel with Autechre, check out Sabres of Paradise. If Boards of Canada don't blow your kilt up, listen to The Gentle People. All unique, all worthwhile, all available.
Audiophiles note (because the 'what-no-Ogg' crowd are already in effect, I see) that the FAQ states that Warp are considering offering other codecs, including FLAC, and maybe offering higher bitrates for a higher price. Early days, though - the first thing they need is support. And here's someone who really, truly deserves it for a change.
Put your money where your mouth is.
Join Tor today!
It's worth knowing that Warp was instrumental in kicking off the resurgence of techno during the early nineties. They were responsible for massively popular underground bleep tracks such as "Tricky Disco" and the poltergeist of a track "Test Four" and it's derivatives. Back then, these boys supplied extremely high quality minimal techno. I owe a large portion of my thanks to Warp for inspiring my love for high art minimal tech.
- IP
Magnatune is a social experiment of sorts which may or may not have good music. I don't know. However, the fact I don't know whether they have any good music does say something.
Warp Records, meanwhile, was for quite awhile the most important and progressive group in electronic music, and while I haven't been paying enough attention as of late to know if they still hold this label, I know for certain they continue to push the boundaries of the art.
Perhaps they are not "first" at this particular thing, but they have been offering significant amounts of downloads as samples of parts of their albums for years.
And if you do want to get into a pissing contest of which label "got it" first, my nomination would be Astralwerks. They had, in like 1995 or some shit, I don't even remember, back around the time Dig Your Own Hole was released, before MPEG Layer III even *EXISTED* and when MPEG Layer II was a format almost no one used, realaudio offerings of absolutely huge swaths of their catalog. For most of their releases about that time, you could listen to about half the album without buying it. They also ran a web newsletter letting people know when they'd put up more music, and they'd periodically do one day events where you could listen streaming to entire albums on the day they were released. This was essentially my introduction to electronic music, and I seriously think it helped them-- it led to me buying a decent amount of Astralwerks stuff even though I had to do a decent amount of searching for it at the time...
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Just like to add that the current limitations on 24 bit DACs are around 120dB SNR. The brownian motion of air molecyles sets a boundary of 100dB SNR of mics. Most listening rooms have a noise floor of 30-40dB, while the really good ones have around a 25dB floor. The lower boundary is usually set by ones own breath. The top SPL have been measured at around 130dB for drums.
So do wee need more that an CDs dynamic range? Hell yes. But as a delivery medium, 24 bits is overkill. As a recording and mixing medium, it's barely enough. 18-20 bits will do nicely.
But do we need the extra bandwith from these HQ formats? Do we need 96kHz and beyond? No, why the hell would we? the threshold for human hearing is above 140dB at 20KHz for pristine ears. Even higher for someone who has acutally lived...
The sampling theorem dictates that 40KHz is enough . At some extra to get a headroom. Then fix it at a spesific location for historical reason (that seems to be the only reason, this time due to 44.1KHz master tape format). makeing it a fiendlier size might not hurt (at least make it even), but no need to make it 96KHz. We have no problems designing steep analog filters.
You're welcome.
--Richard Schmuck
Why do these sites always name their tracks so badly? What's wrong with -/..mp3? Instead I get bleep/wap102/01.mp3 -- fucking useful that. At 6.99 an album, I don't expect to have to fix up the filenames like I do with pirated music just so I can know what it's called!
I seriously doubt anyone cares much for my opinion, but in my opinion this is the coolest news I have had in quite awhile. I love the iTunes music store, but the one deficiency it's had in my mind all along-- though I was very pleased when they started carrying Matador and such-- is that they never carried Warp. They haven't even been carrying the albums that are distributed in the states via Nothing.
;)
So I'm just overjoyed about this. I'm going to go home tonight and buy copies of Feed Me Wierd Things by Squarepusher and Amber by Autechre (my current favorite band, more or less), I think...
Now, does anyone know when we will be able to get similar deals from Shematic and whatever the name is of that label the guy from Pole runs?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Without getting into a comparison between their music ( being a subjective matter I'm sure most of you would rather we not waste each others time on that argument ), I think it should be pointed out that warp and magnatunes have significant differences.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but magnatune is a record label created around an internet business model. From day one it's goal has been to create a successful online music label.
Warp Records is an existing and highly successful independent music label that has chosen to embrace an honourable approach to online music sales. This is very significant the the differences between warp and magnatunes on this are very important. They could have very easily submitted their catalogue to an existing online music service, and complied with their restrictive terms and technologies. Instead they have chosen to implement their own system ( using lame encoder is a serious bonus for me ) that does not have pointless drm etc.
Warp Records has been an active an innovative label for about a decade. They were the first record label that I purchased music from directly on the internet ( around 1996/7 iirc ) and today I have just downloaded a rare AFX EP that I have been trying to get hold of for years.
Europe has a vibrant independent music culture and I hope that warp become an example to the entire scene. I wish them the best of luck with it, and I hope others follow in their footsteps.
-- hjw http://puzl.info/
Between this and a couple of other companies mentioned in posts, it sounds like a couple of companies have learned something:
Customer service is the difference between low piracy at a reasonable price and high piracy at any price.
You can acquire music anywhere. You can easy use P2P or copy a friend's CD - the latter has good value as a promotional tool.
But when you treat someone as though they are already a criminal - that they need to protect their music from activities that the end user typically considers legal - the value of music at any price drops. No one can argue that iTunes is unsucessful, but they have a tricky balance - enough DRM to protect against illegal use while allowing quite a bit of fair use. Sadly, this will not last forever. A new tool will come out, or record companies will change terms, or something. Enjoy it while it lasts.
I now respect Warp Records. I'm a sucker for customer respect (part of why I'm satisfied with working at Wal-mart while I'm in college - because they too show genuine concern, at least at 2597 (my store)). I don't even think I had heard of them, but now I'll check out their site. Maybe buy a tune or two.
I noticed they only carry Warp's catalog in MP3 form, although the Warp Mart online CD/vinyl service also carries SKAM, Rephlex, and many others. Too bad, I was hoping to pick up the tracks that weren't on the Caustic Window compilation due to copyright or some other nonsense.
:)
It will be interesting to see if they release the unreleased Aphex stuff, like Analog Bubblebath 5, or Melodies from Mars, both of which I have on mp3, but poor quality. I would most definatly buy high quality VBR versions.
I own most of the Warp catalog in analog, record form. I think the tracks sound harsh and thin on CD. Autechre's albums in particular, sound nice, full and meaty on vinyl, come out with messy treble and anemic bass on digital. I belive one of Autechre's releases even says "Incomplete without record pops and clicks."
I most definatly WILL use the service to download the rare albums I don't own. Hangable Auto Bulb is almost impossible to find in the states, and the second version is even more rare.
I wonder if they would sell T-shirts digitally? Still looking for an AFX one
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Well, for all the people who have been griping about DRM, here's the chance to send a powerful message to those who insist on using it.
I've never heard of most of Warp's artists, and don't much care for the ones that I have heard. Nevertheless, I shall be buying a bunch of tracks on principle.
The only language the people at the RIAA and similar organisations understand is money. Here's a golden opportunity to spell out to them that the community will reward those that treat them fairly. If we collectively shovel a ton of money at Warp (which only requires a small contribution from each of us), then it'll be a powerful wake-up call.
Or are we going to prove to the DRM-pushers that there's no profit in being "fair" and that they were right all along?
Don't forget that one of the most important components of any HiFi system is the human brain. I suspect that this is the only component that is actually affected by higher sample rates and sizes, oxygen free cables and wotnot.
That's very perceptive of you Mr Stapleton and rather unexpected in a G Major
When I was a LOT younger than I am now, I used to work for Sound Warehouse in the vinyl section. To this day, I still mix to relax in the afternoons after work (apparently most people seem to get jittery at 140bpm... not me, heh). LFO was one of the pioneers of the rave scene in the early 90s. Seriously great music, really took me back to even go through their catalog and see some of the old rare stuff that I'd spend all day looking for as a kid. Oh my god, Baby Ford =) I still remember Chilren of the Revolution when it first came out, really cool really powerful track. I remember we got a promo vinyl of it for the store and listened to it at insane volumes after close.
These things are priceless, HIGHLY recommended site. Notable for all the shit it doesn't have, like popups or annoying flash navigation bars.
Wow, good call by Warp to do this =)
-chitlenz
Imagination is the silver lining of Intelligence.
Give me a decent quality mp3 or other format with NO DRM for $.10-$.50 each and I will spend $10-$30 per month on music. Offer me this crap with DRM and I will spend zero.
Boards of Canada / Geogaddi
one of the better electronic albums of the last few years.
listen to samples at amazon if there's none
at warp (their website was clearly not prepared
for this onslaught from reg and slashdot users)
Nightmares on Wax ...
(only one so far, but NoW kick serious ass)
Now, if Morr music were to do this, I would have _no_ money left.
If IBM. Novell and other can be on the good side, why not one of the big recording labels?
They just need the cojones, they would find many friends and would be pleasently surprised.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
For a second, I thought I was reading about Slashdot in the future or about a bad Startrek reference.
There is a *ton* of classical stuff that isn't available; the market isn't big enough. And there is a back catalog of classical music recorded in analog that is performed by legendary artists and conductors.
Classical music fans would freak out if they could download high-quality stuff from the 30's through the present.
These folks will pay money for this stuff, too.
I think the record companies are missing out *big time* with their approach. They could be twice as profitable with less expense if they made their back catalog available for download.
There is already Fictionwise and Baen Books, where I have bought oodles of DRM-free e-books, and now pepole in the music industry are joining in.
Bravo! The clue is spreading!
because your URL doesn't say, ya moron, it's just a whiny .gif with no information
"I'm happy to listen to MP3s on my shitty MP3 player and shitty headphones, thanks"
isn't the point of new technology to be an advance? Maybe you'd be happy with wax cyliders? I mean, hell, you just need a steel needle, no electricity.
People aren't complaining about lossy compression per se; they're complaining about it replacing *what you admit* is higher fidelity in a CD for about the same price. Remember, a lot of us rip our CD's to MP3's, CD's don't lock you out of any options.
Why should we pay more for *inarguably* less?
Even though we, the technological cognoscenti, consider any form of DRM to be an encroachment on our rights and furthermore a "broken" product, we need to realize that non-independent music will NEVER EVER be legally released to the wild in a totally unencumbered form. Never.
Indie music will be and often already is freely purchasable, but anything from the major labels will simply have to include some form of DRM. You..oops, 'we'...bitch about iTunes as a "good idea but totally unacceptable [because of DRM]"; did you not listen to what Steve said about the copy protection, that without it, there would be virtually no large-label music for sale online? That the RIAA et al. will simply not allow 'free' mp3s to be sold? Dystopian perhaps, but reality for the time being.
I do understand the arguments against DRM, and I would LOVE high-quality unencumbered mp3s, but at least for the forseeable future, you/we're simply going to have to compromise a bit. (If you have any interest in owning major-label music, that is.) Hell, maybe even SUPPORT iTMS - would you rather have that DRM scheme, which is arguably the best middle ground, or WMA's total-lockdown?
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Featuring artists such as who, who and who???
BTW, anybody got torrent links to these files? $1.35 a song my ass!
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
What a suprise. Someone throws their hands up to make an excuse as to why they don't want to pay for music. Pay for it or don't pay for it. Quit with the long fucking sob story about how you're "not in the target audience". I saw this exact same retarded crap on the thread about mini-ipod's. Slashdot: News for Nerds and Economics failures.
The incredibly useful message boards were actually canned altogether, at least for a while, and the file download limits were reduced to such a degree (only 2 or 3 album's worth per month) as to make the system far less attractive than illegal alternatives. And the balky download manager, which had been required for some time, has, AFAIK, not been improved.
However, they were offering pretty good 192KBps VBR files for most of their catalog for most of last year. They had a lot of recent stuff by independent pop artists and a lot of older jazz and classical material. I downloaded perhaps 40 albums, and still listen to many of them regularly.
To be fair, the Emusic users who were banned for too much traffic were downloading truly insane amounts of music - like 100+ tracks per day for an entire month. Yes, Emusic should have deliniated clear limits in the EULA, but most people have a little more common sense - how is a US$15 per month subscription going to pay record-label royalties (which averaged seven cents per track, as I recall) for two thousand or more tracks? (2000 x US$0.07 = US$140) Obviously, it can't. Of course Emusic had a problem with that.
It appears that the layout does not work properly with firebird (0.7 at least). I can scroll through the artists, but not the releases... the panel extends past the window border.
Another thing is that I think they need to work out some of their pricing: you can purchase all 3 tracks from the Anti-Pop Consortium's Ghostlawn EP individually for 3*$1.35=$4.05... or buy the whole release at once for $4.29. All in all though, it's a great idea. It seems they are taking after Mille Plateaux who released a large portion of their catalog on eMusic.
"Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion." - Democritus
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
What's this "we" stuff? You act like a criminal, therefore we all act like criminals?
Good recs-
Here are a few of my own:
Plaid:
everything by plaid and black dog (members shared) is great, but IMHO "double figure" is best
Luke Vibert (wagon christ) - Yoseph
Nightmares on Wax: a little more trip-hoppy than IDM-y - excellent- particularly carboot soul
Boards of Canada: truly their own sound (melodic, trippy, uplifting) Its hard to say which of their albums or EPs is best- get em all
and of course check out Autechre, Aphex(also polygon window) Twin and Squarepusher
and if you run out of good stuff on warp (good luck)- some of my other fav artists: B. Fleischmann, Freescha, Casino vs Japan, Solvent, Matmos, and Tortoise
i do the same thing myself, actually. unfortunately, i can't always find the album i want, and in that case i'm willing to make a compromise with the powers that be. itms is to me more inconvenient than restrictive, so i can live with it, ymmv.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
What makes you think that?
Back when I was growing up, in the mid-70's, records were hugely expensive to make. Popular bands were huge, and the prominent ones took months in the (incredibly expensive) studio to produce records. Band members, hangers-on, pharmacological and handgun needs had to be taken care of. Session artists made tons of money bringing their expertise to the studio. Famous artists earned lots of money making lavish album convers that folded out to two or three panels. Full-size glossy album inserts including lyrics, art, photos and the like were common. The records themselves were produced by a complicated physical process that had a much higher failure rate than today's pressings. And you could go down to your local record store and get it for $5.
Boards of Canada is two guys in their apartment and a few computers. Their label wants $10 to download a few files from them.
Anything worth doing is worth doing badly -- G.K. Chesterton
I'm glad they finally launched this baby but some of the songs I wanted the most aren't on there (Sweet Exorcist: Test Tone 1-3, Wooden Spoon "Souf Souf"). Hopefully it's just a matter of time before the complete back catalog is up.
"Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space..."
Besides the layout being horribly screwed up, I get this message in every "column":
--
UNKNOWN IP ADDRESS
You appear to be visiting the site via a Proxy server. Please revisit without the proxy server so we can determine your location.
support@bleep.com
--
Guess I won't be buying anything from them any time soon...
Don't bother responding to that git. Trying to explain to the unwashed about the benefits of Ogg Vorbis over MP3 is like trying to tell a caveman the difference between a blender and a food processor.
Ok, so they provide MP3's without DRM. What license do they provide when you make a purchase? MagnatuneCreative Commons
Dear Angry of Sydney,
Wow! I'm really glad that I logged in to Slashdot this morning -- if I hadn't, I might have missed your touching letter!
Well, I'm afraid that's all the time I have for today -- got to go scour the web for more customer reactions! Best to leave no stone unturned, you know! And this way we save so much money by not having to have a mailbox!
Very Truly Yours,
The Music Industry
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
Rephlex is a completely seperate entity. Thus, unless the Rephlex artists decide to ditch Rephlex for Warp, chances are it won't happen.
Not to start any trouble here but... Have you ever used Ogg or looked at the codec and/or source? It is superior and compresses better while retaining the same quality as mp3. The developers are extremely intelligent and ogg is being used in many places because of its benefits. EA Games used ogg in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, ogg was used in Soul Rever 2, and in Unreal Tournament 2003. Many developers are starting to realize that it is superior. Linux is arguably superior to windows (and please no comments on GUIs) and Microsoft hired thousands of people to develop that. Just because its free doesnt mean its bad, that is a common misconception. Microsoft can hire whoever they want but they can't compete with brilliant minds across the globe collaborating to produce something better for free. Microsoft uses a ton of free source code for various things and government agencies, like the NSA, have shown that Linux and BSD are more secure and reliable. It's fairly simple to prove that Ogg is of superior quality when you put the codecs side by side.Its one thing to argue about someone's opinion on whether or not something sounds better, but you can't argue anything when comparing codecs. Its clear which is the best, and it just also happens to be free.
Regards,
Steve
Listen for yourself
Or heres the documentation proving it.
I'm running Firebird .7, Flash 6.0 r79, kernel 2.6, alsa-base .9.8-3, and debian testing. Sound is going through esd .2.29. I get garbled sound.
Can you say INFLATION??
Take a look at the Inflation Calculator. It only goes as far forward as 2002, but $5 in 1975 is equivalent to $17.54 in 2002, it will be even more than that now. So the cost of the music has actually almost halved. Stop whining that things aren't free and either pay up or shut up.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
nuff said.
Is that the new term for "mutant commie traitors"?
Well, I thought it was funny.
Too bad you got mod-robbed.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Got this reply from their (quick!) support: -- This should have been fixed so you can access the site. We made changes this morning in response to feedback such as yours. Have you tried it today. If so, please can you tell me what specific problems occured ? If you couldn't access the site at all, then I think it may have been because we were absolutley over run with traffic today. New hardware going in tomorrow should mean we can cope better with the demand. Hope this is helpful,
Last time I check, Bleem was sued to extinction. Will this music service goes the way of the ill-fated emulator?
I've got the Hangable Autobulb EP on vinyl. I have never seen another copy, forget where I got it (probably Grammaphone in chicago). This is one of the best Aphex records IMO. Glad to see warp is being nice about the Mp3s and DRM stuff. Most of the Warp artists are looney and probably are not into music for the fame or money, so they probably don't mind to much that their work isn't digitally 'protected'. It would have been simple to just add their catalog to the iTunes music store, but then they would be making WAY less per download (probably).
TallGreen CMS hosting
Aside from Shoutcast/Icecast streaming purchase data links, it might also be a good idea to have an ID3 tag (as well as the Ogg equivalent) containing a purchase link. This would make it easy for online music providers to put out low-fi music files with "buy it" links to pages to let folks buy the music.
:-) No Internet radio bandwidth costs, and you still let folks try-before-they-buy.
Furthermore, if this approach is taken, online music providers could even use P2P networks to distribute their low-fi samples.
May we never see th
This is cool, and definitely a step in the right direction. But for $9.99 I can buy a used copy of most any album, and get full quality sound and the cover art package (which is important to me, although my tastes aren't primarily in electronic music, which seems to often have pretty sparse packaging). If they were selling MP3/ogg singles for, say, 50 cents or less, I would probably buy a bunch as a replacement for things like Kazaa, which are mostly try-before-you-buy mechanisms for me. Still, way to go Warp.
Now, when Relapse Records gets on board with this, I'll be all over it. Those old 7" splits are fucking hard to find.
Just trying to open someone's head! I mean "mind!" Open someone's mind, um, to the possibilities! With explosives!
Just gotta throw in the plug for one of my favorite artists (favorite ever, not just on Warp). BROADCAST! "The Noise Made By People" is flat-out brilliant and one of the best albums of 2000 easy. If you're into Stereolab, film music, French pop, or melodic and organic electronica you should definitely check them out. Their latest, "Haha Sound," is good as well and one of NME's top 50 of 2003.
so 'Intelligent dance music' is neither dance nor intelligent. Is this music?
Have you ever heard ogg comapred to mp3 at the same bitrate?
Why, yes as a matter of fact. But if you'll kindly reread my post you will realize that I wasn't bashing ogg vorbis from a technical stand-point. Everything I said was true apart from my obvious underestimation of the vorbis community size: ogg vorbis isn't the standard.
Moof.
i'm sorry but this is actually a VERY well designed page. check warprecords.com for more examples of TDR's genius
Artist: Aphex Twin
Track: Bit
Price: $1.35
Length: 6 seconds
Oops! $810 per hour LOL!
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
You misspelled "commie mutant traitors".
P.S.
Parent post was mis-modded as flamebait. It was a genuine geek-humor refference.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
best experienced slightly left of sober.
Ok I just spend 100 Euros on the store...
LFO
Boards of Canada
GAK
F.U.S.E.
Aphex Twin
Jimi Tenor
It's great, for my part - I love it!
That should answer his complains...
Mute, another UK based electronica record label, is doing this. It wasn't there whole selection, just "net-realeases."
I actually tried to submit it as a story a few months ago, but whatever.
I too was using Mozilla and paid with Paypal, but it disappeared into a white blank page while 'zipping'. Afterwards there was no record of my order. At first I liked the idea, but the bastards robbed me. Itunes has never stiffed me like that.
Support contacted me and helped me out. I was able to download all my tracks eventually, but the 'zipped order' approach didn't work for anything, so I had to download things individually. A good idea, but the user experience aspect of it has a way to go yet. But they did make an effort and did not stiff me. I'm sure Wal-Mart would have told me to get fucked.
Agreed. However, I have to say "Ogg" sounds like something a caveman MIGHT actually have in his vocabulary. ;p
Un-news
The preview tracks are actually a reasonable quality to just listen to, and are freely downloadable.
X XX
p ?selection=WAPXX_DM&audio=WAPXX_DM-NN" | findstr "key="
.. then search the output for key=XXXXXXXX and put it into the original URL.
I 6u . It's only mono 90kbps or so, but that's good enough for a preview.
They are all in this format:
http://bleep.warprecords.com/player.php?key=XXXXX
where XXXXXXXX is a code representing the song to be played. This key can be discerned from the album code and track number as follows:
wget -O - "http://www.warprecords.com/bleep/current_item.ph
For example, doing the above procedure on "WAP108_DM-02" (Track 2 of Red Snapper's The Sleepless single) results in a key of gESddI6u. This can then be loaded into your favourite URL-based mp3 player as http://bleep.warprecords.com/player.php?key=gESdd
I purchased 4 albums from them in two orders.
1 order I downloaded after the huge rush without issue.
But the one I downloaded during the rush had problems.
out of 30 or so tracks, I could only download 5.
Support got back to 24hrs later (understandable, as I'm in EST, their in GMT), they said I should be able to download it all now. No such luck...
Here I am 4 days later and I'm still missing waiting to get the rest of the music I paid for.
When it worked it worked great, but when there was problems it seems they weren't entirely prepared.
I'd even settle for a automated response stating their dealing with a high volume of issues or whatever, instead nothing but silence.
And don't forget it was used in Microsoft-published Halo for PC.
If it's in you sig, it's in your post.