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Audio Lunchbox: Music with no DRM
An anonymous reader writes "MacCentral just posted an article on Audio Lunchbox, an online music store dedicated to music by independent artists and labels. ALB offers all of its music in DRM free MP3 (192 kbps) and Ogg Vorbis (Q6) formats with iTunes style pricing and a completely web based and platform independent delivery system."
If you want non-brand-name music for $0.25 a song, try http://www.emusic.com, which offers 40 songs for $10 a month. It used to be unlimited, but they cut back awhile ago.
You have to hunt for the good stuff, but overall, Emusic isn't bad. No DRM, either.
Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories
Here use this link to be sure. RIAA Radar
You can be sure that the music you purcase doesn't support the RIAA efforts.
Here is another service along the same lines and even less evil: Magnatune, "we are not evil." Pay as much as you want (within reason, natch'). There is not a huge selection yet, but maybe if more peeps start buying from them....
Well, we only have 12 indie artists so far. Canadian indie stuff... anyway www.hearsaymusic.ca! mp3s 1 dollar Canadian (192kps)... 30 second samples (128kps). And in contrast to what indiepool (Canadian puretracks' indie thing) does, we do not charge anything to get onto the site, and encoding. We take a share of the sales.
Cheers,
Daniel
=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=
Daniel
http://people.cinn.ca/daniel/
Open music is what Magnatune.com sells. From the site: "All songs are available in MP3, CD-quality WAV, OGG, FLAC and MP3-VBR: download whichever formats you like." The best part is you can download and audition the music, then decide what you want to pay, if anything. "Magnatune lets you choose how much you want to pay for your downloaded album. The more you choose to pay, the more the artist makes, because at Magnatune, half goes directly to the artist, while the other half supports Magnatune." They are also members of the Creative Commons.
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated in any way with Magnatune.com. This is just a really cool idea whose time has come.
has a great selection of FREE music (live and studio). Look under Archive.org -> Audio -> Net Labels.
there's no place like ~
I'm sure they could use FLAC.
The problem is that these things are to be downloaded, a full CD in FLAC runs in the ~300M (please correct me if I'm wrong) range, you are going to burn a lot of money on bandwidth like that.
If you have the same problem, save the m3u file, copy-n-paste the contents into your browser. It would then launch winamp and I could preview the songs. I don't know if it was Winamp's problem or not, but what a PITA. Instead of streaming it, why not just link to the partial mp3 itself? Sheesh.
Now on the service, I wish it were a little cheaper, but I might check them out. I have been mass downloading songs from MP3.com, burning them to a CD, and listening to them in my car. (MP3 capable car CD player - best thing EVER) It is kind of cool to hear indie artists, but you do get a lot of garbage in there too, just guys in their basement. But it is still interesting.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Well, quickly checking over the Audio Lunchbox site, I see that they provide samples from each track that you can listen to before buying them. You can listen to samples from each artist to find those that you like. No more gambling.
www.furthernet.org
live recordings from artists who allow taping at their concerts, all free, all legal, & theres *some* big names in there too
www.magnatune.com
indie record label. their motto is "we're not evil" you can download music, or pay for it (you determine the price to a degree) and if i recall properly i first heard about it on slashdot
I think now would be an appropriate time to mention that if you're into independent artists, and you like physical media, check out CDbaby.com. Tons of great independent artists, good prices, and a good portion of the money actually goes to the artist.
:^)
Plus, their shipping notice email is cool.
You probably shouldn't click this.
This music store comes through where Apple failed for me. I download iTunes, and I wanted to like it, I wanted to possibly save for an iPod, but the store interface was crap. I don't feel I'm alone on this, but here's why: There weren't enough categories. There were no ties between like bands.
Audio lunchbox divides the music up so much better. It has hardcore, four metal subcategories, a bunch of rock categories and even a seperate punk category (these are just my tastes). iTunes, from the searching I did, would label all this "alternative/rock". By doing this, it was hard to find bands that don't have radio exposure and thus hard for me to buy music unless I wanted the radio top 40 garbage.
//Blessed are they that run around in circles, for they shall be known as wheels.
To add to the emusic idea.
After looking at the Punk and Rock sections of the audio lunchbox offering. Emusic has a very large number of those releases that are being offered at cheaper rates. Not to mention the site design and features are much better. I don't think the audio lunchbox people even started to look at an effcient site design. So far browsing it has been akin to pulling teeth.
Emusic also does not use DRM. Their files are "alt-preset standard" LAME encoded mp3s.
For anyone looking for independent label releases online I would stress Emusic as an excellent place to start.
I reviewed this music service (among many others) at Breakdown Industries and it stacked up very favorably. Note that the reviews are biased toward independent artists (i.e., RIAA-free).
Read the review here..
Magnatune offers a multitude of formats including Ogg, MP3, WAV, and FLAC.
You really can't tell if you'll like the music by listening to the free previews that pretty much everyone gives you? eMusic does 30 seconds, and I think iTunes does too. I'm not sure about the others, but I think Magnatune even lets you listen to the whole song, or listen to a big streaming audio feed of everything they have.
o m/o rds.com/d byramen.com/
You could also listen to radio stations which play those sorts of music. Blatant plug: WMBC radio, in my sig, plays a good deal of it. We also have shows that suck, of course, but you're not going to like everything our DJs do, and vice-versa. See, indie artists have radio stations and review sites too; you just have to look a bit harder. That goes along with it being less expensive and restricted.
Indie CDs are generally less than those by major label artists, and the indie musicians get to keep more of the money. But $2 is pretty ridiculous; it's not as though these artists don't work as hard on their songs as major-label ones, or as though the songs aren't as good. Many of these artists will let you download a song or two from each album in unrestricted MP3 format; The Archenemy Record Company is pretty generous with this.
Some URLs to get started:
http://wmbc.umbc.edu/ (shameless plug)
http://www.cmj.com/
http://www.allmusic.c
http://www.archenemy.com/
http://www.warprec
http://www.tgrec.com/
http://www.fuele
http://www.luakabop.com/
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
try http://www.emusic.com, which offers 40 songs for $10 a month.
If you're already an emusic.com customer, and you find emusic.com's "My Collection" page to be a slow, tedious, pain in the ass, and you'd prefer to download to your local harddrive an HTML page showing every album you've downloaded from emusic.com with links back to each album page at emusic.com, get this free program for Windows, Mac, or linux:
Get Collection.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Magnatune has been mentioned before, and it offers entire albums from $4-$18 (it's up to you how much you want to pay), free access to streams of the music you want to preview, and you end up purchasing two downloadable .zip files: one with pre-compressed .mp3s, and one with WAV files(!) -- and no DRM whatsoever.
I've bought two albums to date (mrEpic and Brad Sucks) and recommend them both highly. Enjoy!
QTConvert allows you to fix that problem concerning the DRM issues, without having to burn to CD first. An MP3 export component is available (based on LAME and in early beta, but it does at least produce MP3s) here. Note that you will need to also download the LAME framework there, too. It's all free and sources are available for the component and framework. This is all OS X only though. If someone feels like porting the component to Windows, be my guest.
I'm still in development on these things, but have to spend some time on putting food on the table for awhile. Then I'll get back to these.
Regards,
Lynn
http://www.allofmp3.com offers DRM free at 1cent a megabyte and appears to be perfectly legal as well. They also support multiple bitrates for mp3, ogg, wma and other formats. I can purchase anywhere from 15 - 20 full albums for $10. I don't see any music service beating that anytime soon.
The road between democracy and tyranny is paved with secrecy in the name of security.
Magnatune have a whole collection of non-mainstream music, with a particular emphasis on classical stuff (which suprised me a little initially). They offer FLAC encoded audio providing you actually pay up (the mp3/ogg are try before you buy too).
Perhaps audiolunchbox can be persuaded to go the same way. Its certainly nice being able to burn full quality CDs of the music I bought online.
http://www.magnatune.com