Best music download service?

Skillz'n Magic

Weaksauce
Joined
Mar 6, 2008
Messages
114
It's finally time for me to join the 21st century and find a music download service. I haven't payed attention to it much so I don't know all the services out there or which ones are the best. I'm looking for recommendations. My stipulations are:

I will not use itunes, napster or wal-mart services.
No DRM
High bit-rate. 320kbps would be most desireable. Anyone even offer that high?
I don't want a subscription, I just want to download mp3's.

I've looked at Amazon quite a bit and like them. I see they offer no DRM and 256kbps mp3's, but like I said, I don't really know what's out there.
 
The Amazon service is about as good as you're going to get. I was going to say if you've got a Zune or plan on getting one (a good idea considering), then the Zune Marketplace for the cost cannot be beat by any other service at this point. And with the Zune HD coming out soon, the sooner the better, I'd say it's worth looking into. I'm not absolutely sure about their bitrates, however. DRM is an obvious thing, unfortunately.

Nobody is going to give you massive amounts of non-protected music for a low price, it's just not going to happen.
 
I like Amazon. They aren't perfectly consistent with their encoding practices, but it's hardly an issue. They almost always use LAME 3.93 or better (usually 3.97 or 3.98) and -V0 for ~240kbps VBR. The odds you'll be able to discern -V0 from 320kbps CBR are pretty slim.
 
Funny, I do have a Zune (I won it) but never thought of the Zune Marketplace because I hate their software so much. :p


I just downloaded Rise Against's "Appeal to Reason" album (AWESOME album BTW!!! :eek:) from Amazon. Very easy and it sounds great.

Thanks for the posts so far.
 
I was surprised to find that the Napster tracks for purchase are now 240Kbps Lame MP3 (DRM free). You get 5 free tracks/month with a $5/month membership (unlimited streaming). Their tracks used to be 180Kbps WMA.
 
Personally, I like Amazon although the only other one that I bought music from was the (now-defunct) buymusic.com store. One-click is nice. They also offer a cheap album-of-the-day and, lately, a free song of the day. There's also samplers out there every now and then that are free. It's a pretty solid service and no DRM.
 
Amazon is supposed to be pretty good. Also depending on what kind of music you like, I also buy my music from Bleep.com. They offer 320k mp3's and wave files. Very reasonable prices and I'm a big fan of all the artist they carry. You can preview tracks before hand, buy individual tracks or whole albums. I love it.
 
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