Downloading Music

[williwm1]

What is the best way to download music legally. ???????

[CrowdAds]

[skip252]

Go to a free, legal site like Jamendo or the Internet Archive and go at it. They've got literally thousands of files, usually good to very good quality. Lot's of genres and a wide variety that will fit mosts tastes. There's no charge for what you get there but donations are happily accepted. Amazon also has quite a few free downloads. Usually not the latest stuff but it will surprise you sometimes.

If you want the commercial stuff Amazon is worth checking out. I've heard iTunes is decent but I'm not installing it to find out. I've heard some stuff from both that couldn't be distinguished from my best EAC FLAC rip that was transcoded to the same format.

With a little searching you can find lots of files to help fill out your library. However if you're thinking the torrents or anything like that, thats not a subject that discussed here. Read the forum rules.

Discussion of illegally trading copyrighted material is strictly prohibited and may result in a ban.

[williwm1]

no I was not discussing anything illegal, I should refrase the question what is the best way to download music legally?

[skip252]

I wasn't making an accusation of any type. There have been a few people that didn't understand that illegal file sharing is strictly prohibited here so I felt it best to make that clear immediately. If that offended you then you should make your idea clearer from the beginning.

If you are talking about how to download from a particular site your browser should handle that. Usually it just takes a right click on the link and then"Save as..." if the download doen't start immediately. That would depend on which browser you use and how you've set your preferences.

If you are talking about sources I gave you the names of two of the most common of those. There's several more that you can find easily in a google search.

If neither one of those is what you need to know some of the other members or I can probably help. Asking more detailed questions would help us to help you.

[williwm1]

Just a question. Is converting youtube to mp3 legal??? I´ve heard of it but I always wondered if it was.

[lestatar]

^ Might be a bit of a gray area, both here and online. However, my past experience with youtube vids indicates that the vast majority of the audio is of poor quality, certainly not worth the effort to convert/transcode/demux.

Far better to purchase the songs online somewhere or RIP from the original source CD.

Amazon music store is often overlooked I feel - some great prices, generally excellent selection and usually HQ LAME VBR rips. Also, Amazon offers some surprisingly good tunes/CDs available for FREE downloads.

[skip252]

I'm not that familiar with the legality but I know that it's done. You should read the Youtube TOS and draw your own conclusions.

I can't figure why anyone would want that low quality crap. I'd rather spend the cash and get it at a quality level I can truly enjoy.

[Machiventa]

The best way is to purchase music through iTunes, Amazon, Zune Marketplace, etc.

And you could try out the Songbird media manager which allows you to browse sites that offer free tunes and it'll automatically download them for you or instead it'll just load them as a playlist and you can stream them. A lot of artists give out free tunes to blogs and music sites (NME, pitchfork, etc) and that's an easy way to grab em.

[Adub]

I really like amazon for digital purchases as they use LAME encoder and you can generally get 256/320/V0 rips.