Legal Music Downloads

I think kazaa is legal now,

I don't think it is...

they had leaflets in dixons, and i could swear it was for it

iTunes is a cheap music service and the downloads are very quick but you are stopped by DRM from sharing files and playing it on anything other than iTunes.

BUT

if you burn it straight to CD after buying it and then re rip it as MP3 or whatever, you can play it on anything.

I fell victim to this when I downloaded an album from them and then found it was in an iPod/iTunes only format so I burnt to CD then ripped it in another program so I could play it on my MP3 player. Bear in mind a lot of music will have DRM attached and can thus restrict what plays it. The iTunes one is easy to get around (and now I'll probably be told off by Charles for telling people how to probably break the iTunes EULA) but plain and simple, you've paid for the music and you shouldn't have to be tied into using an Apple piece of crap just because iTunes offers the best deals. 

Yeah, that's pretty much what it said on Wikipedia, which is why I was put off, since I have a Walkman, not an Ipod, though it did say that more recently they've been selling some stuff as MP3 without the protection due to demand?

No other problems with them then? 

Not sure if you know but iTunes have recently introduced iTunes Plus, where songs are encoded at a higher quality (256kbps) and are DRM-free at no extra cost, so there are no restrictions on them. Not all songs in the library have them, but look out for the + sign next to the price

watch out though, they're still watermarked, so if you "lend" them to a friend, you could potentially get in trouble...

Joelxxx

Well.... I tried iTunes after all. Having gone and got myself a giftcard so I wouldn't have to give out bank details, I wasn't happy to find I couldn't use my card without setting up an account with a bankcard. Damnit. Nevertheless... seems ok thus far. The details they encode into it don't tranfer onto CD format, though, right?

To be honest, it's mostly so I can get the odd song to dj at the clubnights without having to buy the whole album. Thanks guys I shall be back to panic when something goes horribly wrong!

Indeed you are correct, they will not follow the music to CD...
Joelxxx

while now a moot point, amazon have a drm free legal music download service. they are the only people to manage to get all of the big 4 to allow the mp3 downloads to be drm free.

http://www.amazon.com/MP3-Music-Download/b?ie=UTF8&node=163856011

as a small point, aac->cd->mp3 encoding will reduce the quality.

Damn... I'd have probably tried there first. Oh well, iTunes seems ok so far for what I want *touch wood* As for the quality I think it'd mentioned that on the article I read on wikipedia too. I'm not overly worried about it tbh, my ear isnt that finely tuned. You're talking to a girl that has MP3's of CD tracks that were originally from a vinyl album!

 Thanks for the heads up though, might try amazon if theres owt I cant find on iTunes

No, because that's not against the Ts&Cs of the server. I hate Digital Rights Restrictions (or Management if you're on the other side of the fence). I believe I should be able to listen to music however the fuck I want. I'm also very aware that it just takes one link to infringing material to be spotted and acted on my the RIAA to make running my server unfeasable....

Be careful if you intend to transfer a lossy music format to CD. Get it wrong and it'll sound awful. The thing with psychaccoustics is you can't easily measure what's lost except by listening to it, and I'm increasingly noticing things sounding wrong when played in a club, where you feel the music as much as hear it.

If you can find the music for sale as a FLAC then jump on it, as it's a lossless codec. And whatever the format, a 44.1kHz sample rate will cause less prblems when transfering to CD, beyond that you get what you pay for.

I should point out that it's the material you (pay for) download that is the legal issue, not the service you use to aquire it. Most Peer to Peer services have legitimate uses.

Kazaa is a legal product, and the service is legal to use as long as you don't use it to aquire or distribute materal that you don't have permission to do so with. The program Kazaa Lite and similar are of dubious legal standing as the software itself may infringe copyrights patents and trademarks associated with the Kazaa brand. In europe the whole idea of software patents just doesn't happen, so a lot of Software that is of dubious legality in the US is OK to use here.

Beware of download sites that are legal in the country in which they operate but of dubious standing elsewhere. There's a well known russian one.

Magnatune is pretty awsome, as the artists involved get a much fairer deal, and you can get FLAC and Ogg/Vorbis if you're so inclined. Magnatune also trade through Amazon. Of course their artist collection is somewhat non-mainstream.

 These days I try and buy music direct from the artist if I can, but this depends on the artist. 

I'm fairly sure the allofmp3 loophole was never as legal as they suggested it was, and was hence shutdown. I may be wrong. Are they still operating?

You're forgetting that in theory a well kept vinyl can produce far superior sound to any cd or other digital media, as it is recorded in analogue format. At the end of that day, no digital media is entirely lossless. One can merely minimise losses by increasing the sampling rate and the frequency range recorded...

Joelxxx

I wasn't suggesting the vinyl itself was any worse quality-wise. What I meant was that I've taken songs across formats before and not found the quality unsuitable for my own use (not yet tried any at a clubnight though, so it could be, as Charles said, a problem there perhaps...)

That and I'd presume taking a song from vinyl to CD would be likely to loose more sound quality than digital to CD?