I’m looking to start buying digital music and move away from streaming everything. So far I have tried google music but the downloading is extremely limited. I would rather not use Itunes…
I just want legal mp3s I can download and use how I want.
Thats a good joke. Last giant retailer online that I used was beemp3 but that was like 2009.
Amazon sells DRM free mp3s.
Bandcamp has more independent artists but there are multiple audio formats and a good chunk of the money goes to the artist.
4 Likes
Not as easy as I had hoped.
Amazon won’t work for me because I’m in Canada.
I think I’ll use Bandcamp and Google Play if I need to and just keep a good backup so I don’t need to re download.
Thanks for the input!
2 Likes
7digital perhaps? That’s my go-to place for digital music.
1 Like
Thanks! It’s nice to have the flac option. That is exactly what I was looking for.
1 Like
They’re great indeed. Two things worth noting though :
1 ) Out of the 1400-ish songs I bought there in the past 8 years 
, about a dozen can’t be downloaded anymore because 7digital’s agreement with the rights owner expired. The songs are still listed in your library, but they’re not storing them on their servers anymore so you just can’t download them anymore.
So be sure to keep backups or in a couple of years you may have to download some songs again “elsewhere”.
You did pay for the right to listen to the song whenever and however you want, so downloading it via less legitimate means shouldn’t be a moral issue.
2 ) If you like FLAC, always look for the FLAC versions right away. There’s no upgrade option, if you buy an MP3 and later on want the FLAC version, you’ll have to buy the song again at full price.
At least that was the case when they just started with FLAC and I asked them if I could upgrade my existing MP3 collection at the cost of the price difference.
Thanks for the info, this site has everything I’ve been looking for so far! I will be backing everything up for sure.
What do you use to down convert to MP3? I need that for my car but would like to have flac for listening in the house.
fre:ac (link to official site’s download section) should do the trick for converting. It’s free and open-source.
It’s nothing fancy in terms of UI, but it has tons of options (too many for the average user in fact, it’s just crazy how configurable it is) and I have yet to come across a converted file that had any issues. It handles metadata and album art just fine too.
You’ll need to configure the MP3 encoder (to set your preferred bitrate etc) by clicking the gear icon first, tell it where to export the converted files and then you should be good to go. drag-and-drop is supported.
2 Likes
Audacity is also another free and open tool that will convert from flac, wav ect to mp3, its not really set up as a batch tool but it has an amazing feature set for doing things like noise suppression, silence removal, dynamic range compression ect, which can be super useful if your creating a version to play back in a less ideal environment, like a car, want to play several songs back from different band\albums but have the same volume levels or want to save time off things like podcasts (you’d be amazed you gain almost as much back from shortening all the gaps between sentences and topics as you do speeding up the audio, but it doesn’t have the same comprehension penalties.
2 Likes
I will check both programs out.
Thanks for all feedback!
1 Like
fun fact about car radios.
They usually struggle with flac, but they will generally play WAV. (don’t ask me why cause I don’t know)
Flac is uncompressed however it treats periods of silence as though there is no data there which saves disk space.
Wav is also uncompressed, but it assigns data to periods of silence. This means that the file sizes are a bit bigger than Flac,
If possible I try to get my music as wav so that I can keep in on an external flash drive and play my music on pretty much any device that takes usb.
1 Like