[GuruTech]

hey all!
Which site do you use to download mp3 songs for your mp3 player?

 

[classakg]

Buy Cd's...iTunes store, Hdtracks.com

 

[GuruTech]

thanks i liked that link

 

[desktophifi]

That site its actually on the ads of here... 

 you can use spotify. 
Always remember to get your music legally. 

 

[teofilrocks]

Amazon MP3. A new free song every day and a new $3 or 4 album on sale every day 

 

[Cianyx]

If you have to pay, CD's are always a better option. Remember, you can't make love to an mp3

 

[Uncle Erik]

Just a friendly reminder that we do not discuss illegally downloading music at Head-Fi. Please limit this discussion to paid services and music in the public domain.

I occasionally buy a track from iTunes, but usually hunt down used CDs to rip into lossless. I also grab music off archive.org, which is entirely in the public domain.

 

[resonantLux]

I usually try to buy the CD's. For new releases I usually order from Amazon (usually the best price, plus free shipping). In the case of many older rock/pop bands however, the only CD's that are still in print are "remastered" versions -- which usually just means dynamically compressed more. For those I try to buy the oldest used CD's possible from a nearby music exchange store (within walking-distance of my place).
 
As far as downloads, I've got some Jazz records from HDTracks, but anymore I generally stay away from lossy download sites (eg iTunes, Amazon MP3). I prefer to have a lossless archive copy on both my hard driver, and make lossy copies from it as-needed to play in the car, or on my phone / portable player. Of course, if lossless codecs improve several years down the road, it would certainly be possible to convert my FLAC files into a hypothetical better-compressed but still lossless format. Plus hard drive space is only getting cheaper.
 
For example, my older car stereo will play only MP3, not AAC, so If I buy from iTunes store, that would mean I need to make a lossy copy of a lossy copy  -- at which point sound quality degradaton is bad enough to matter even on a crappy car stereo... For my car I've actually used foobar to burn throwaway MP3 CDs that are replay gain level-matched, and with parametric EQ applied to compensate for my car stereo's (terrible) frequency response. (I'm not thrilled about the idea of spending a ton of money to improve my car stereo... I'd rather spend that money on a system I can enjoy in a comfortable, quiet listening room -- not one with 68dB background noise...)
 
If Apple were to sell their ALAC format in their itunes store, or Amazon sell FLAC downloads, I'd be more likely to go that way. I suspect it's an issue of the record labels intentionally wanting to limiting the quality for download services, anyway -- that way consumers would still have a reason to fork over $11-14 for a disc compared to $9.99 for an album on amazon.

 

[jonathanvaljean]

I usually buy CDs and rip them to lossless format.  I also buy from Amazon MP3 and Rhapsody MP3.  
 
This may be of interest to some:  Rhino.com offers some of their catalog in lossless format.  I have not yet purchased from them, but was impressed to see that they were offering lossless tunes.  I hope that other labels will follow suit someday...  Sigh...

 

[Pachikara]

 anything wrong in downloading music from Russian sites? For eg:
 
www.gomusic.ru
 
the albums cost way cheap, still need to pay.
 
just wondering whther it is legal??
 

 

[dziendobry]

Quote:

 anything wrong in downloading music from Russian sites? For eg:
 
www.gomusic.ru
 
the albums cost way cheap, still need to pay.
 
just wondering whther it is legal??
 

The rule of thumb should be whether or not the artist gets paid for the download, if its too good to be true then it probably is.  You are probably just paying for bandwidth that your using to download the music and the artist sees nothing of it.  I doubt the artist even knows about it.