Here's a good, relevant topic for this site: how do you go about collecting music?
Personally, when building my music collection, I use all avenues of acquiring content -- “legal” and “illegal,” corporate and independent, paid and unpaid, etc.
I live in China, so for most non-Chinese content, I use the two sites http://melodishop.com and http://www.mp3va.com. They’re paid sites, but are super-duper cheap with anything from old American country to ‘80s Italo-Disco to the latest rock, pop, and dance tunes from all over the world. Incredibly huge databases of music content, good sound samples, good sound quality, fast download speeds, and very-well organized. And they’re actually legal, too.
I also use Google and Baidu searches for various songs and artists, along with the website http://www.myfreemp3.biz, which is another good one for obtaining songs you can’t find otherwise. Occasionally I’ll use http://www.cdbaby.com for independent-musician material. It’s got a plethora of good pop music from independent musicians. I sometimes explore indie dance-pop on that site and get some good songs off there, but it’s definitely quite “pricey” at $1.00 per song. But it’s also chock-full of unique content you can’t find elsewhere. As for iTunes, I almost never use iTunes for music downloads unless I absolutely have to, since it’s also really pricey, and without the uniqueness of content like CDBaby.
Here in China when adding Chinese pop and disco to my collection, I usually go to a small CD shop that’s about three blocks from my apartment, and buy several various-artist albums (each album has 3 CDs apiece, and about 50 songs total) for around 5-to-8 U.S. dollars per album, which amounts to about 10-to-15 U.S. cents per song. I know I’m getting a good mix of songs with good sound quality, even if I can’t read a lot of the characters. I then take those CD albums home, rip ‘em to my computer, convert ‘em to MP3 at 192 kbps, and add ‘em to my collection. I also figure out the pinyin for the artist names and song titles, and input those into the file names.
Anyway, back in the ‘90s in the “halcyon” days of CDs (while living in the U.S.), I was averaging around $1.20 per song while building my collection. Those European dance imports were especially expensive. In the last 6 years, in contrast, I’ve been averaging less than $0.10 per song. Oh, and as for file sharing,...one thing I enjoy doing here in China sometimes is opening up an older version of LimeWire, and sharing my entire collection of 9,842 songs on Gnutella! No stupid and corrupt RIAA lawsuits, here. Hahahahahahahaha!
Well, I’m curious about your music tastes, whether you collect a lot of it, and how you do it. Post some good site links and fill us all in!
Personally, when building my music collection, I use all avenues of acquiring content -- “legal” and “illegal,” corporate and independent, paid and unpaid, etc.
I live in China, so for most non-Chinese content, I use the two sites http://melodishop.com and http://www.mp3va.com. They’re paid sites, but are super-duper cheap with anything from old American country to ‘80s Italo-Disco to the latest rock, pop, and dance tunes from all over the world. Incredibly huge databases of music content, good sound samples, good sound quality, fast download speeds, and very-well organized. And they’re actually legal, too.
I also use Google and Baidu searches for various songs and artists, along with the website http://www.myfreemp3.biz, which is another good one for obtaining songs you can’t find otherwise. Occasionally I’ll use http://www.cdbaby.com for independent-musician material. It’s got a plethora of good pop music from independent musicians. I sometimes explore indie dance-pop on that site and get some good songs off there, but it’s definitely quite “pricey” at $1.00 per song. But it’s also chock-full of unique content you can’t find elsewhere. As for iTunes, I almost never use iTunes for music downloads unless I absolutely have to, since it’s also really pricey, and without the uniqueness of content like CDBaby.
Here in China when adding Chinese pop and disco to my collection, I usually go to a small CD shop that’s about three blocks from my apartment, and buy several various-artist albums (each album has 3 CDs apiece, and about 50 songs total) for around 5-to-8 U.S. dollars per album, which amounts to about 10-to-15 U.S. cents per song. I know I’m getting a good mix of songs with good sound quality, even if I can’t read a lot of the characters. I then take those CD albums home, rip ‘em to my computer, convert ‘em to MP3 at 192 kbps, and add ‘em to my collection. I also figure out the pinyin for the artist names and song titles, and input those into the file names.
Anyway, back in the ‘90s in the “halcyon” days of CDs (while living in the U.S.), I was averaging around $1.20 per song while building my collection. Those European dance imports were especially expensive. In the last 6 years, in contrast, I’ve been averaging less than $0.10 per song. Oh, and as for file sharing,...one thing I enjoy doing here in China sometimes is opening up an older version of LimeWire, and sharing my entire collection of 9,842 songs on Gnutella! No stupid and corrupt RIAA lawsuits, here. Hahahahahahahaha!
Well, I’m curious about your music tastes, whether you collect a lot of it, and how you do it. Post some good site links and fill us all in!
Another good point for a NAS : my bittorrent client runs on the NAS, not on my personal computer. Actually all my data management, including work files, has been delegated to the NAS since I bought it, it also backs itself up automatically on my CrashPlan account too.
