[jewman]

Apparently, Walmart just started a new "custom CD" service. This is a great idea! Time and time again, I find myself shelling out $10-20 for a CD, when, with the exception of a few occasions, I only bought it for a few songs. It's exactly $4.62 (oddly specific) for the first 3 songs, and 88 cents thereafter. However, before I build my first custom CD, a few questions:

Where does the music come from?
Does Walmart take it straight from their highly-compressed mp3 library, and proceed to transcode to wave, aiff or whatever music files on a regular CD are encoded to?
Or does Walmart take the songs from a lossless source, preferably the original CD?

As I am writing this, I am beginning to think that a store as cheap as Walmart is not going to crack open a CD every time they need a song from it, but tell me what you guys think. Will these songs be high quality, or just the same quality as the ones in online music store?

Here's the link.

 

[Uncle Erik]

There's no technical information at the site, but I'd suspect Wal-Mart licensed all the songs and probably burns them in Red Book.

Still, the best way to inexpensive (legal) music is with a turntable. Used records are cheap - you can find them for a under a dollar all the time.

 

[Kilane]

I'm more weirded out that for some reason an 11 song CD put together as a "custom CD" all from the same artist costs less than buying the thing in the first place.

 

[infinitesymphony]

Unfortunately, unless they specifically say that they have a lossless archive, Wal-Mart may just be contracting another archive's lossy resources. Don't count on anyone to get this kind of audio service 100% right unless it's a dedicated audio store (and even some of those have been lax about providing lossless versions of music).

Quote:

Originally Posted by Uncle Erik /img/forum/go_quote.gif Still, the best way to inexpensive (legal) music is with a turntable. Used records are cheap - you can find them for a under a dollar all the time.

True, but the idea behind making your own CD is convenience / ease of access to favorite songs, which is definitely not a benefit of using a turntable and a bunch of records.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kilane /img/forum/go_quote.gif I'm more weirded out that for some reason an 11 song CD put together as a "custom CD" all from the same artist costs less than buying the thing in the first place.

Yeah, I had a similar moment when I saw that a Guitar Hero album pack cost $18.99 while just buying the CD cost $9.99.