$3 of any $5.99+ mp3 album - Amazon

I have never purchased MP3s from Amazon, but there are a number of albums that I would consider getting at the prices they offer. Does anyone know what bitrate they use for their MP3s? Most of my collection is 320Kbps, with a handful at 256Kbps. My hearing may not be the greatest, but I never noticed much of a difference between 320Kbps MP3 format and FLAC. I do however hear the difference between 320Kbps MP3s and the lower bitrates. I stopped buying from iTunes a long time ago because all their audio files sounded like crap. Has this been improved in recent years? I would imagine that Amazon must be similar in terms of quality at this point in time, but I couldn't find their bitrates listed on the site anywhere. Admittedly I didn't dig that far, so perhaps someone here can reward my laziness?
 
They use mp3 VBR at around 256K, which is bad because they should at least give you choices of which bitrate to download. I could have pirated flac...
 
I too wish Amazon had lossless.... for now though their 256kbps vbr seems mostly fine to me, though not perfect. I'm happy enough to buy things on sales and with freebie codes at this quality. Thanks OP!
 
Audio quality on Amazon MP3s is average quality. I also agree that Amazon needs to improve their audio quality to make their mp3 more desirable.
 
Thanks for sharing this. I missed a previous $2.99 deal a couple of days ago(through Google) so I'm glad I was able to get something at that price this week.
 
Antiflash said:
Just FYI Google play sells 320kbps MP3 and usually have competitive discounts
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Google Play is a big pain in the butt. I believe it's CBR. I actually prefer Amazon's download service. I hate the Google music app for the PC. It sucks. Just randomly grabs songs off your computer and puts them on the cloud, often against your will. And then there's NO WAY to differentiate them from google purchased songs, making it a very difficult and stupid task to sort out the mess on your cloud.

Google Music makes me HATE the cloud. Amazon's service makes me love it. Not limited to 2 downloads per track (although google will let you do it more than twice upon calling them and requesting it.) Google are good people and they actually provide phone support like Amazon, but their cloud service for music is sadly lacking. Amazon's could stand a bit of refinement too, but it's ahead of google's by a good bit.

And to the OP, thanks! I picked up the code. Now to shop for music! Too bad none of the slew of $5 sale albums count. :eek:
 
Amazon's also offering song matching now, and you can re download from the cloud any time to any device (none of that cache/pinning business, just a simple stream or download choice)... Price is pretty reasonable too, I just renewed for $25/year (from last year's free promo) and it gives me a ridiculous amount of space for music plus 50GB for data. Amazon's catalog is bigger too since they have all major studios.
 
I dare anyone to be able to tell the difference between a well-encoded 256 kbps MP3 and a lossless FLAC file. You'd need extremely high end equipment and well-trained ears to do so, and even then, barely.

If anything, it's much easier to tell the difference between analog LP and digital CD (some prefer the LP).
 
Thanks OP. Just picked up the new 10 years album for $7.99 after credit that I wanted!
 
beowulf7 said:
I dare anyone to be able to tell the difference between a well-encoded 256 kbps MP3 and a lossless FLAC file. You'd need extremely high end equipment and well-trained ears to do so, and even then, barely.

If anything, it's much easier to tell the difference between analog LP and digital CD (some prefer the LP).
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I hate having to sound like a broken record (pun intended) every time this comes up, but: while you may be right, the consumer should still demand lossless for purchased music. I transcode to different formats for different devices and purposes (i.e., low-bitrate AAC for my phone with crippled storage capacity, high-bitrate MP3 for work, FLAC at home). If I get a lossy copy when I purchase, then I can't really do that anymore. Plus, just on principle, why should we accept a regression in audio fidelity when even a FLAC album is typically 300-400 MB? That's far less data than a typical NetFlix movie stream.
 
brettjrob said:
I hate having to sound like a broken record (pun intended) every time this comes up, but: while you may be right, the consumer should still demand lossless for purchased music. I transcode to different formats for different devices and purposes (i.e., low-bitrate AAC for my phone with crippled storage capacity, high-bitrate MP3 for work, FLAC at home). If I get a lossy copy when I purchase, then I can't really do that anymore. Plus, just on principle, why should we accept a regression in audio fidelity when even a FLAC album is typically 300-400 MB? That's far less data than a typical NetFlix movie stream.
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While I agree with you, storage is becoming increasingly cheaper (iPhones and Nexus/HTC phones aside!) so the reasons for transcoding anything are becoming increasingly rarer...

This is why I still buy the CD for any artist's whose entire album I'm interested in, just so I can rip my own FLAC copy (which I do transcode to MP3 for anything but home use), and I don't mind paying a couple extra bucks to do so. I probably won't shed a tear the day CDs finally go the way of the dodo, but I will be slightly disappointed if we don't have the option to buy lossless copies online by then.
 
Impulse said:
While I agree with you, storage is becoming increasingly cheaper (iPhones and Nexus/HTC phones aside!) so the reasons for transcoding anything are becoming increasingly rarer...

This is why I still buy the CD for any artist's whose entire album I'm interested in, just so I can rip my own FLAC copy (which I do transcode to MP3 for anything but home use), and I don't mind paying a couple extra bucks to do so. I probably won't shed a tear the day CDs finally go the way of the dodo, but I will be slightly disappointed if we don't have the option to buy lossless copies online by then.
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Where can we get lossless from these days, anyways? I definitely hear and understand where you're coming from. Honestly, I might be willing to spend a bit extra on Amazon for lossless, but I can't afford expensive headphones, so I don't really need lossless. It would still be nice, though...
 
brettjrob said:
I hate having to sound like a broken record (pun intended) every time this comes up, but: while you may be right, the consumer should still demand lossless for purchased music. I transcode to different formats for different devices and purposes (i.e., low-bitrate AAC for my phone with crippled storage capacity, high-bitrate MP3 for work, FLAC at home). If I get a lossy copy when I purchase, then I can't really do that anymore. Plus, just on principle, why should we accept a regression in audio fidelity when even a FLAC album is typically 300-400 MB? That's far less data than a typical NetFlix movie stream.
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On the principle of it, I understand what you mean and it makes sense. But too often people assume that lossy encoding that is MP3 is analogous with crappy. To those people, I bet they won't be able to tell the difference between a properly encoded MP3 (and for the most part, Amazon does it very well) and a lossless file of the same song.
 
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