MP3's from the internet

[Allee]

Did anyone here use WINMX for downloading music from the internet?

When it went down last year I stopped using it. I reconnected on the patched network last month but it's useless, the file transfer is incredibly slow and crashes all the time.

What does everyone use to download? I've had LImewire and Ares suggested to me as being pretty good for mainstream stuff. Any other thoughts?

I did contemplate going legal and using Napster.ca, but their catalogue doens't seem to run much past current top 40, and I don't download enough to justify $15 per month...

[nekdut]

If you're going to pay, just go with iTunes. A little pricey, but at least its legal.

Allofmp3.com is another pay service but its downright cheap, as low as $0.08 a song and they have a pretty solid collection. Questionable legality though ;)

[Allee]

I thought ITunes was for IPod's only? (I'm showing what a tech dropout I am now) ... My somewhat ageing MP3 player is a pre-IPod Creative.

[Derf]

I haven't downlaoded any mp3 for a few years, so I'm out of the loop, but I've read on the pay services. iTunes seems ok, but it's proprietary format, you can read the files on your computer, but not on any other mp3 player than an iPod. All other sites use Windows Media. Be very careful, because with some services, you can't listen to the songs once you've stopped you subscription. All songs from all services (except eMusic) contain DRM (Digital Rights Management), so you are limited with what you do with the music you buy. There are some tools for iTunes format (called hymn), but I don't know of any for Windows Media (that does not degrade the files).

[kjl]

Yeah, iTunes-purchased songs can only be played on iTunes and on an iPod, until those JHymn guys can crack the new fairplay codes, or unless you burn a CD from the iTunes-purchased AAC and then rerip the CD (or some other crappy lossy conversion)

It is a source of huge frustration to me, as it means I can't play songs I own over my wireless music setup at home. Bastards.

These days I buy off of iTunes and then download the same songs via eMule.

[Speedzilla]

If you're going to pay, just go with iTunes. A little pricey, but at least its legal.

Allofmp3.com is another pay service but its downright cheap, as low as $0.08 a song and they have a pretty solid collection. Questionable legality though ;)


AllofMP3.com is the way to go (at least until they get shut down). Buy an entire CD for $1.50-$2.00

iTunes sucks. I'd have no problem paying a buck a song if I could just have it in an MP3 format from the beginning.

[D-Sub]

itunes isnt the only one though...

seems odd to pay for something that the money isnt going to the rightful owners.

www.beatport.com
www.addictech.com

two Ive used...mainly dance music though.

[Jack Michaud]

Limewire lights up my spyware detector.

yeah, iTunes does require you to drink the Apple kool-aid, but it works. And if you have an AirPort in the house, you can broadcast your tunes to your stereo.

Just remember - mp3's and their ilk are crap for anything remotely resembling somewhat serious listening. Their only use is for walkman-type applications. CDs are still the only way to get audiophile quality digital music. And the retrogrouches would argue only vinyl delivers audiophile quality...

[D-Sub]

I have my CD collection ripped to Ogg (Q6 which is a VBR about 180k) and things sound just FINE. Tends to sound a little bass heavy, and a little brash when real loud, but hell...

[skatha]

Vinyl really is the only way to hear the whole spectrum of sound for a recording. The digital system compresses both the high and low end frequencies-BUT, as I told my dad in our big CD v. LP argument a few years ago, you wear off the higher frequencies within 2 or 3 plays with an LP..hence recording to casette tapes with the first play....

I have about 250 LPs-most I have only played once
My dad is a big classical fan and has even more LPs of classical music-most not cared for correctly....
Plastic wrap off
paper liner in place
stored vertically

I opted for Napster for loading up my Creative Zen...
On it is
"Never been to Spain" by Three Dog Night
"It Don't Matter to Me" by Bread
"A Common Disaster" by the Cowboy Junkies
"Angel" by Fleetwood Mac

Not your typical top 40 fare

[D-Sub]

skatha

Im sorry for correcting you, but...vinyl recordings are not full spectrum reproductions either. Know what RIAA EQ is? CDs are 16bit/44k recordings, which is technically the highest we can hear according to ...Nyquist Theorem? something like that...anyway vinyl, when recorded, is heavily EQ'd to keep the grooves under control, then that same EQ is applied to all phono preamps.

http://stereos.about.com/od/gtgtturntables/a/riaa_eq.htm

you want good digital? 24/96 .wav. Some are even doing 24/192 now.

Ive done a lot of digital audio in the past, and still thought 16/44 was plenty sufficient.

gosh, another tangent. I suck.

back OT...Ive always thought that 192k MP3s were perfectly suitable for listening, but I have never, ever, not even once, downloaded something illegitimately. Having tried to sell my own music in the past, I can not morally do so.

[Allee]

D-Sub, downloading music from the internet for your own personal use is not illegal in Canada, as proven by court case...

People have some interesting takes on downloading. For myself, I have a rule that if I like more than 3 songs on an album, I'll buy it. Otherwise if I can just download the one or two songs I like, I will. I also use it to trial stuff that I certainly wouldn't buy. Sometimes I end up keeping it, more often that not I junk it. It's actually a good way for artists to "spread the word" ... some of the radio station options like Pandora, etc, are great.

192Kbps does fine for me. I only use it to relieve the monotony on long trips in cars and planes, or as background when I work around the house. I'm hardly an audiophile so as long as it sounds OK on a car stereo, that's all I care about.

Jack, I was warned that Limewire was a virus nest. But the AllMP3's looks really good and has the older stuff that I'm after ... I'll give that a spin tonight.

[kjl]

How is downloading music for your personal use not illegal in Canada? Seems like it's just theft to me...

I believe in following the spirit of the law, but not necessarily the rule of law. If I buy songs off iTunes and then own them, but can't play it on my non-Apple wireless system, I'll "illegally" download them. If I bought a CD once but lost it, I'll happily download the songs again. If I download songs and decide I like them, I'll buy the CD, though I may never take the plastic wrap off.

I agree in principle with DSub, possibly because I also work in media. I think illegally downloading music is no different from walking into a store and stealing a bag of candy or a laptop computer, except that the sum total of the work and effort that went into creating the music or movies happens to be easily stored in digital format.

[Allee]

How is downloading music for your personal use not illegal in Canada? Seems like it's just theft to me...

Dunno, ask the judge. But that was the ruling thar came down a couple of years ago. The RIAA was a little pi$$ed. But it means for me, as a Canadian resident, it's legal ...

[D-Sub]

Allee

its not about legality to me. I dont believe in most laws anyway. But, if I create something, I own it. Whether or not I should receive compensation for that ownership is debatable, no doubt.

if I sounded like I was condemning, I really wasnt. I dont agree with getting things for free that are otherwise for sale. To me it seems cut and dried. Agian, not from a legal standpoint but from a moral one.

Yes, there is the exposure argument. Ive heard every. single. argument. Been over this whole thing time and time again.

yes, it is a great way to preview. I remember when Borders used to let you listen to CDs first. I bought SO many I wouldnt have, and avoided buying many that I might have.

anyway...if product a is for sale legitimately and ethically with correct ownership, it seems to me that any effort to circumvent a sale is immoral in a capitalist society.

you live in canada. youre not even bound by the laws of capitalism ;)

[LeeW]

Allee, welcome back from New Zealand.

And FWIW, everybody, I do myrhapshody. Does me good. Been going legit since a friend of mine got busted for ring of warez stuffs. Been a reality wake up call, and went legit all the way since then.

Oh yea, my mp3 player's a samsung with the capacity to do videos. YH-999 model.

:biggthump

[Jack Michaud]

I have my CD collection ripped to Ogg (Q6 which is a VBR about 180k) and things sound just FINE. Tends to sound a little bass heavy, and a little brash when real loud, but hell...

Played through a real system, they will sound like crap when compared to the original. Disk space is cheap. Your music collection is priceless. Rip everything using lossless compression, then make 128kbps "portable" copies from those for your mp3 player.

[D-Sub]

sorry jack, but youre mistaken. I've A/B'd on a decent home stereo, and on my studio setup where I spend many many hours and know the sound intimately, and the .ogg format does not sound like crap.

and "lossless compression" is an oxymoron. Audio compression removes information, always. I think FLAC and AAC just use a formula to do the removal, and the opposite to "put it back" at the end

as for home listening...CDs. The ripping is just for portable anyway. Car, riding (well, never have actually) exercise etc. Nice having my entire collection on a 60GB player with TONS of space left over!

[kjl]

"lossless compression" is an oxymoron. Audio compression removes information, always.

That is not true - there are compression schemes which do not remove information (e.g. FLAC, ALAC). It's just that people tend to use lossy compression instead for the much smaller filesizes, and since most people (like me) can't tell the difference anyways, or lack the ultra audiophile equipment.

[Derf]

I use ogg (-q5) and flac for my CD's. I haven't tried them on my stereo, but it sounds good on my computer speakers.

To have them sound good on my stereo, I would need a better computer setup: right now I have a PIII, a Maxtor/Promise ATA133 card (because of my large drive) and an Ensoniq AudioPCI. I suspect that the traffic on the PCI bus from the ATA card interferes with the sound card, making it jump/stutter.

Speaking of hi-fi sound on a computer, anybody using an M-Audio sound card? From what I have heard, Audigy is Lo-Fi compared to it.

[Derf]

I opted for Napster for loading up my Creative Zen...


I hope you read the fine prints saying, and I quote,:


It is necessary to maintain a Napster subscription in order to continue access to songs downloaded through the Napster service.

[Allee]

I hope you read the fine prints,:

You can use Napster Light to buy and keep stuff. You can do lots of cool stuff on Napster and Napster-to-Go but you do need the subscription key ... I can't use to-Go because I'm still running Win2000 (old school!)

[D-Sub]

That is not true - there are compression schemes which do not remove information (e.g. FLAC, ALAC). It's just that people tend to use lossy compression instead for the much smaller filesizes, and since most people (like me) can't tell the difference anyways, or lack the ultra audiophile equipment.

compression = loss. Explain how something can become smaller without removing information?

Im pretty sure that FLAC simply uses an algorithm to remove data, and the same algorithm to put it back when playing

[kjl]

compression = loss. Explain how something can become smaller without removing information?

Compression is not necessarily loss.
you say: "5555555555"
I say: "10 5s"
you say: "123451234543212345"
I say: "a=12345:aa432a"

Same exact information, but I saved you a few characters in both cases. I'm not sure exactly how audio compression works, but in general the way compression works is by taking common patterns in the data and replacing them with smaller tokens that your decoding algorithm knows how to expand back again. There are, of course, much more exotic methods out there, but the key idea is that you may have made the data smaller, but you have not lost information. You can also tailor the algorithms to the particular kind of data. e.g. if you replaced the string "terror" with "\A" and the string "JonBenet Ramsey" with "\B" you could probably reduce the size of all the news websites by 80-90% ;)



Im pretty sure that FLAC simply uses an algorithm to remove data, and the same algorithm to put it back when playing

That's exactly right, except that you should use the word "encode" instead of "remove" - FLAC and other lossless compression algorithms encode data into smaller, more efficient formats in a reversable way such that the decoder (your media player) can reproduce the exact data.

You seem to use computers a fair bit; the ZIP compressor is lossless - otherwise none of your programs would run when you decompressed them.

[kjl]

Oh, hey, some interesting reading here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossless_compression
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Lossless_Audio_Codec

Apparently FLAC is definitely more exotic - prediction to guess at upcoming samples from the last few samples and then storing the difference between the guess and the real sample? I have no idea - I have now reached the end of my fakey hand-wavey BS. But definitely some interesting reading off of those articles.

[Jack Michaud]

sorry jack, but youre mistaken. I've A/B'd on a decent home stereo, and on my studio setup where I spend many many hours and know the sound intimately, and the .ogg format does not sound like crap.

Well I don't know what an .ogg is, but the difference between a lossless file and even a 256kbps mp3 is quite obvious to me on my system. And I'm not bragging about my system, it's not <i>that</i> great. (well okay, my Transparent speaker cables are friggin' awesome, probably better than anyone here's except maybe Gilmour's, but only because I got them for 70% off when I worked in a hi-fi store for a summer)


and "lossless compression" is an oxymoron.

umm, see kjl's posts. Actually much of what goes over the internet is losslessly compressed, especially text. If the html file your browser requests gets corrupted en route even by one <i>bit</i>, your file has to be re-sent.


as for home listening...CDs. The ripping is just for portable anyway. Car, riding (well, never have actually) exercise etc. Nice having my entire collection on a 60GB player with TONS of space left over!

CDs get scratched, fingerprinted, lost, stolen, bitten, etc., especially by four year old boys named Teddy, and one year old girls name Dory. Also, you can't play a shuffle of your <i>entire collection</i> in your CD player (assuming it's not a jukebox).

[Steve Dold]

If the html file your browser requests gets corrupted en route even by one <i>bit</i>, your file has to be re-sent.Not just the packet containing the error?

[Neil Gendzwill]

D-Sub is right in that most audio compression schemes in use are lossy, simply because lossless schemes don't provide sufficient compression. For example, the LZF encoding used in zip files provides something like 4:1, depending on data. MP3 compression for a 128 kbps is about 11:1 and most people can't detect the difference between it and CD in typical applications (portable stereo, car audio) but can tell on a home system. At 256, you need a pretty good stereo to hear the difference. But there's better music codecs than MP3 around now. The ones we use for XM have better compression, although I can't tell you details.

Lossy audio compression schemes count on certain characteristics of the anticipated data. Some of them use perceptual techniques, in other words they count on known characteristics of the human ear and the way we perceive music to fill in lost information.

On the extreme end, something like AMBE can compress about 350:1 compared to the CD standard but it's specialised for the human voice. If you try to pass white noise through AMBE, it comes out sounding like a bunch of mumbling men as the codec tries to make sense out of it. Such codecs can't pass music or pure tones very successfully so that causes some problems in telephony applications.

[Derf]

Well I don't know what an .ogg is, but the difference between a lossless file and even a 256kbps mp3 is quite obvious to me on my system.

Here is some info on Ogg Vorbis:
Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis)
Vorbis.com (http://www.vorbis.com/)
And it is an open format, contrary to mp3 that belongs to Fraunhofer.

From the double blind test, at equivalent bitrates, ogg came on top over mp3.

[dr. sandman]

Any one else use Soul Seek? Maybe not the biggest or best, but usually a decent and somewhat eclectic source. Never paid a dime, but my brother-in-law recently tried to use it and said it was prompting him to pay. If I remember, that was an option, not a requirement. Check it out
www.soulseek.com (http://www.soulseek.com)

[Jack Michaud]

Not just the packet containing the error?

ahem, you are correct sir.

Here's a distantly related question....

Is there any difference between a regular blank writable CD and one that says "music" or "audio" on it somewhere?