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Paul McCartney Releases Album As DRM-Free Download
Medieval Cow writes "Sir Paul McCartney has a side project called The Fireman and he's just released their new album, Electric Arguments, as a digital download. Why this is of interest to this community is that he released it 100% DRM-free. You can purchase just the digital files, or if you purchase a physical CD or vinyl copy, you are also given access to the digital download. Not only that, but the download is available in 320-kbps MP3, Apple Lossless, or even FLAC format. If you're interested in trying before you buy, you can listen to the entire album in a Flash player on the main page of the site. It's so nice to see a big musician who gets it. Bravo, Sir Paul!"
In fact it's been there since the 20th November.
Anyone know good sources of legal free downloadable music? There's a lot of it out there, but sometimes hard to find. Here's what I've stumbled upon recently.
Don't whistle while you're pissing.
The song in question is I Wanna Be Your Man, written by Lennon and McCartney. The Rolling Stones released it as a single in 1963, before the Beatles did. It was their second single, reaching number 12 on the UK charts. The Stones' first single reached number 21, so I Wanna Be Your Man could be considered their first "hit" if you think of "hit" as meaning "top 20". The song was also the B side of the first single the Stones released in the USA.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rolling_Stones_discography#Singles for more music trivia.
If you RTFS it has FLAC.
This is good news, even if it's another major artist, rather than the whole record industry!
The producer that is the other half of the project - Martin Glover a.k.a. Youth is well known in music production circles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Glover
His side projects Dragonfly Records and Liquid Sound Design lean towards the more psychedelic aspects of trance and dub. The liquid dub styles promoted through Liquid Sound Design in particular are releases that are well worth a listen and feature some really stunning production values.
http://www.liquidsounddesign.com/index2.htm
It's the kind of music you generally won't hear anywhere else ... try it! :)
Peace,
Andy.
Weird, complaining 320 kbits is too much then asking for a lossless download..?
Regardless, right there in the fucking summary it says they're offering FLAC as well as MP3 and Apple Lossless.
Or instead of hunting for a 20+MB download...
ffmpeg -i in.flv -acodec copy out.mp3
mplayer in.flv -dumpaudio -dumpfile out.mp3
...or just listen to it in the flash player already and buy it if you like it.
I've sampled it and I find it good-ish, but not impressive. Still, I am tempted to buy it just to "make a statement"... I know. Silly me.
Monkey's Audio better than FLAC since when? Windows only, no portable support, more difficult to transcode, higher CPU usage at decode. Well, the latter is probably a non-issue, since there is no portable support whatsoever, but still.
When you have been famous for years, to the extend just your name is known to almost everybody, abandoning the classical publishers not only ie easy: it gives you MORE advertisement (e. g. a paper hree on /.)
OTOH, when you are a completely unknown new band, then you must be courageous. I for one will be happy when there'll be a post here listing the last ten courageous little groups trying http://magnatune.com/ .
And in case you were among the happy few knowing Magnatune, let's mention a foreign, minuscule one for classics mainly: Zig-Zag
Herve S.
Janis Ian claimed quite the opposite in an article from all the way back in 2002: It's the "biggest selling artists", if anyone, who are to be concerned about sharing - the "average" band/artist hardly receives money from their label but gets a lot more exposure (and thus income) from shared music.
Then again, that is more-or-less also the argument behind the existence of the Baen Free Library in the first place, where this article is hosted. Go check it out if you like SF.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
You can listen to the last Metallica album in whole, on their website (http://www.metallica.com/index.asp?item=601231). They also sell all their live shows as drm-free mp3...
Yesterday I have seen the first TV advert on German TV which said (in german obviously) somthing like: "musicload.de: pure MP3, no digital restrictions".
AFAICT DRM was a topic for gamers but not the average music customer. The DRM topic has hit the mainstream Media now.
-S
Just purchased the MP3 version. It is, as claimed, mpga 320K, DRM-free. In addition to the tracks, you get cover artwork and liner notes as jpgs.
The range of purchase options is very interesting. $8.99 for MP3 files and artwork, $12.99 for a CD, $29.99 for a direct metal mastered double vinyl record, and $79.99 for a DVD containing 24bit 96Khz tracks, and a second DVD containing multi-track session files for a selection of the album tracks.
The purchasing experience was flawless: create an account, give a credit card (with optional choice of saving the number or not; I chose not), get a zipfile of the downloads. Not a wasted keystroke or mouse click.
This really is the way I want to purchase my music. Two big thumbs up from the consumer angle. Lots of choices, low prices, immediate downloads, supports the artists.
The perfect shopping experience.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
The audio is a 128 kb/s mp3 audio stream packed inside of a flash video file.
Mplayer will demux the stream and dump the audio to a file with no loss in quality (I imagine that most semi-functional video software will do this).
So it isn't good enough for someone who is fussy, but it is plenty good enough for your typical music fan (who is going to be playing it back on $2 headphones, or their laptop or cellphone).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
My Cowon iAudio 7 plays Ogg Vorbis and FLAC just fine.
I kind of don't like the idea of doing a transcode to another compression format because of the potential of substantial sound quality loss if the transcoding isn't done properly. :-(
OMG... there should be a "Lossless compression for dummies" and you should deffinitely read it.
FLAC compression is similar to ZIP, RAR, GZ, etc compression in that the files you get contain the same information (e.g. music) as the ISO (if ripped from a CD) or the source from where it was compressed.
"Transcoding" from FLAC to say, OGG Vorbis is the same as compressing from the raw WAV (or ISO image if you like) to your favorite vorbis quality. Therefore there is absolutely no quality loss, by definition.
So, "transcoding not done properly" is only a matter of the encoder you use (Lame, xyph.org, aotuv, etc) and will give you the same quality as if encoding the same audio from an original CD.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'