Slashdot Mirror
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 ~
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.
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.
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 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