mp3 shopping

Hello,

I have started buying mp3's from specialised sites like beatport, dj download, itunes stores etc. and i noticed a considerable price difference between the different sites. I bought a track by Format B. from one and then realised that it was much cheaper in another (I'll avoid naming the sites... they'll have to sort out their sales strategy problems on their own) ... i wonder if it's something to do with mp3 encoding quality?
any ideas ?

The Phantom

 

in general i don't think this would be about quality, but usually about greed - beatport is overcharging in my opinion and i think they'll have to rethink soon or get bitten on the ass. you can usually check encoder types and a bit more info on the vendor's small print pages, but i'm pretty sure the sites you mention will use similar encoders.

anyway, why not check out the world of netlabels? free music released under creative commons licences - usually at 256kbps but you can often find higher quality, or just email the labels to see if you can negotiate a price for a wav or 320. smaller artists, but there's some great stuff out there.

just google net labels, and reaffirm your faith in music..

 

Generally the retailers don't do their own encoding but distribute files encoded by the labels. The 320K mp3 from Bedrock you buy at Beatport is almost certainly the one you buy from Traxsource, except for the watermarking the retailers apply.

 

My experience of Creative Commons is that there is indeed a lot of talent out there, but there is also a lot of crap, and the ratio of crap to talent seems much higher under CC outlets, which unfortunately are often amateur magnets. I haven't found it worth wading through it to find the occasional jewel.

 

That's the good part about Beatport imposing this $300 minimum quarterly sale issue, though-it will start filtering out some of the less talented/less business minded labels that are stagnating BP's servers.

 

do mp3 have a dramatic difference in terms of sound when you use your laptop with an interface on a big sound system

because in beatport they offer yu the possibility to download on wav . but that wouldnt leave me much space in my hard drive more a lot of tracks

 

trackitdown.net is the most expensive i have seen...you can get the same tracks for dollars less on beatport.com

 

itunes store Vs Beatport

Well,
I've got the answer. Itunes store mp3's are cheaper indeed, but it is low resolution stuff and in no way comparable to Beatport's quality... and worse, they dont provide any info on mp3 bitrates, encoding until you've finally bought a song.
Which i recently did and regret and never will do again...
so now u know itunes store isnt 320 kbps mp3 stuff

 

You should be able to figure it out.
Standard iTunes-tracks are at 128 kps.
iTunes+ -tracks are at 256 kps (and a little more expensive).

 

iTunes is crap if you wanna buy tracks to play out - I wouldn't play anything with lower res than 320 kbps, often will play wavs if I can be bothered to buy them, never had any issues playing 320's for the last couple of years tho.

I like beatport for the quality of music you can find on there but I dislike their interface, the price and worst of all the download speeds, they are crap, you have to set it to download and go away for a few hours.

DJDownload has pretty good selection, is cheap and has great download speeds, I also like some of the label specific shops, quite afew labels sell their own tunes online if you can be bothered to look

 

I was just recently looking for two tracks I had on Vinyl that I wanted MP3's of and found them on iTunes as iTunes+ tracks, I was running out of time getting a big old skool set together and stupidly tried to take a short cut. I bought them and was singularly unimpressed with the quality, even at 256K. I ripped the vinyl yesterday and played them as Wavs last night. I used the the ACC and Wavs as sound check files yesterday afternoon and the audible difference was HUGE and hideously obvious.

Word to the wise... take care using iTunes Tracks, the sound quality may not be up to the task.

Phil

 

I love using files I took from vinyl as aiff and convert to .aac

 

I assure you that on a dance floor it would be almost impossible to tell the difference

 

I can assure you that the soundcheck done was on the very sound system that was going to be later playing to the dancefloor. It was there that I observed the very obvious quality differences.

It may not be always evident, but in these two cases the iTunes audio quality sucked when compared to a WAV rip.


Phil

 

I've been collecting older stuff, and am having difficulty tracking down most of it. Beatport seems to hit me with territory restrictions on all the older stuff.

Any ideas?

 

Itunes. It really is one of the better places to get the classics. I'm not an advocate for iTunes (I'm really not) however at the moment it's the cheaper alternate source.

Has anyone tried Amazon's new music service?