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The New MP3.com: 3rd Time a Charm? 213

Posted by michael from the what's-in-a-name dept.
macdaddypunk writes "Two weeks ago, CNET unveiled Download.com Music (mistaken by some for the new MP3.com). A week ago, they told the press that the real MP3.com was open for business, yet the site itself still said "coming soon." Today, MP3.com is finally live, and off to a sputtering start. It's a combination of tech articles and a meta-search for major-label downloads. For example, with a single search you can find that 'Abbey Road' by the Beatles is not available for legal download at iTunes, Napster, or anywhere else. The tech content includes such gems as 'how to copy your old vinyl records onto CDs.' The real news is what it does NOT include: no free downloads, and no indie artist community. (As reported earlier, the former MP3.com archive of 1.7 million songs was instead resurrected by another independent music community). The new MP3.com's search results don't even include the 3,500 indie artists from Download.com Music."
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The New MP3.com: 3rd Time a Charm? More

The New MP3.com: 3rd Time a Charm?

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  • All we need is Netcraft's confirmation. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Wednesday May 12, 2004 @04:33PM (#9131817) Homepage Journal

    For example, with a single search you can find that 'Abbey Road' by the Beatles is not available for legal download at iTunes, Napster, or anywhere else. [...] The real news is what it does NOT include: no free downloads, and no indie artist community.

    This submission sounds less like a news item and more like a proactive obituary. It's "mp3.com" in name only.

  • Ummmm (Score:5, Funny)

    by MikeXpop ( 614167 ) <mike AT redcrowbar DOT com> on Wednesday May 12, 2004 @04:34PM (#9131827) Journal
    ..But this doesn't change the fact that CDs last a lot longer [than vinyl]
    Excuse me while I hit the article writer with my jazz records from the 40's. Sheesh.
    • yeah, wasn't ther an article on /. a few days back that prettymuch disputed this claim. I'm not enough of an audiophile to care, but I would the author would know his stuff.

      • Re:Ummmm (Score:3, Insightful)

        by MikeXpop ( 614167 )
        Anything comparing a record's longevity to a CD's is priceless. Not to mention completely futile. I have records that are >60 years old. They survived carelessly laying around my grandparent's house. Compare that not to music CDs, but to CD-Rs which the article is talking about, and you have complete idiocy.

        Tons of articles and comments pass through /. every once in a while about wether CDs really do sound that much worse than vinyl, which may be something you're remembering. For me, that's kind of a mo
      • It depends on how you look at it. As a physical media, CD-R may not last very long compared to a vinyl record. But from a data point of view, the data can last forever. Everytime you play the record, it degrades a little bit, and you can't copy it without introducing more degradation. However, with a CD-R you can create a fresh copy of it every year and the 10th generation will be exactly the same as the 1st (more or less anyway).

    • Re:Ummmm (Score:3, Informative)

      by ax10m5 ( 737795 )

      Sorry to say, but while your vinyl record may be durable, if your record player broke down you would be screwed. Vinyl record players are really expensive and difficult to find anymore.

      My father has a huge collection of vinyl records that he accumulated in his youth. They sat in storage for years until around 1996 when I bought him a brand new record player. I had a hell of a time finding one and I think it cost me $400.

      It would probably be much harder now to find such a setup for that price.

      • Uh.

        Isnt the DJ Scene pretty much keeping records alive?

        One Google Search Later... [needledoctor.com]
      • ...Or maybe not. Googling for the string "turntable prices" returns over 91,000 hits. Of course, I'm not a turntablist, so I don't know if the ones the DJs use can be cranked up to 78RPM for the really old shellac records. If your dad had some of those, finding something to play them might be a problem.

        • Any decent DJ turntable can do all three standard speeds.

          http://www.djmedieval.com

        • Re:Ummmm (Score:5, Informative)

          by ajs318 ( 655362 ) <sd_resp2@@@earthshod...co...uk> on Wednesday May 12, 2004 @05:56PM (#9132845)
          You don't need to be able to run the turntable at 78rpm. Just play the record at 45rpm and correct the speed digitally. sox is your friend. However, you really need a special stylus to track the fatter grooves of 78rpm records properly; the ones designed for microgroove {45 / 33 rpm} records do not touch both walls, but instead tend to dance about in the bottom of the groove and produce extra noise. On the other hand, the bottom of the groove is more likely to be undamaged {fat needles ride high}, so try it first and see what works.

          You will require a sound card with a line input, and a preamplifier with the appropriate equalisation characteristic {for a magnetic pick-up cartridge} or a very high input impedance {for a ceramic cartridge}. Don't even think about using the mic input, even though in this case it doesn't matter about being mono: the equalisation is wrong for magnetic, and the impedance is too low for ceramic. To go from 45 to 78rpm use sox song_at_45.wav song_at_78.wav speed 1.733. Alternatively, if you have a very good sound card which lets you set the sample rate precisely, recording at 25442Hz will give the correct speed when played back at 44100Hz. The cut-off frequency will only be about 12.5kHz this way, but in practice this isn't such a problem as the old recording equipment had less bandwidth anyway.

          Note you will almost certainly have to perform some additional low-pass filtering. Read the sox manpage and experiment. A spectrum analyser {hardware or software} will enable you to determine the bandwidth of the signal; anything outside there should be discarded.
          • Or you could just get a deck that outputs a pre-amped line signal instead of a phono signal or a deck that outputs SPDIF (Numark TTX1s can do line, phono, and SPDIF, for example.)

      • Re:Ummmm (Score:4, Informative)

        by Mwongozi ( 176765 ) <slashthree AT davidglover DOT org> on Wednesday May 12, 2004 @05:02PM (#9132244) Homepage
        $400?! [google.com]
      • Depends on what you want in a turntable, and whether it's needle or laser read.

        Best Buy has turntables starting at $99, Circuit City the same, etc.

        Flea markets and thrift stores should have turntables as well. Just check around.

        And $99 for a component isn't too expensive, even with $29 DVD players from Wal-Mart (which is worthless).
      • I've bought two turntables in the last year for less than $20 each. Granted, both were used...one via eBay and on at a stoop sale.

        If that doesn't do it for you, you can always get a new one for way under $100...take this one [jr.com] as an example.

        That's probably equivalent to a standard low end component CD player. And most new vinyl (yes, they still release new records - mostly indie and club stuff, but some major label as well) is less expensive than the equivalent CD. I don't even need to bother mentioning
      • You can buy a DJ quality Technics for less than $400. I recently (1.5 years ago) purchased a belt drive Denon player for less than $200. You can still find plenty of record players in the $100 - $200 range with pretty good sound. Once you get it about the only think that can go wrong is the belt, needle, or cartridge; all of which are easily replaceable. The hard thing now is to find a stereo that has an adequate phono stage. You almost have to buy a phono preamp to listen to vinyl, and that can set yo
    • "Excuse me while I hit the article writer with my jazz records from the 40's. Sheesh"

      Keep up that treatment of your records, and they wont last the next story.

    • Re:Ummmm (Score:3, Insightful)

      by jwlidtnet ( 453355 )
      There's also this gem:

      since a digitized sound loses all of the sonic information between its sampling points

      Clearly written by someone who doesn't understand how PCM works.

  • indie artists (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Shakrai ( 717556 ) on Wednesday May 12, 2004 @04:34PM (#9131831) Journal

    Perhaps this is more properly a subject for a JE but does anyone have any forums/websites with a list of Indie artists that aren't signed to a RIAA member (and not just the RIAA members that aren't on the board -- i.e: the big 5)?

    I don't think I (or most people) can cut RIAA completely out of my life because I do like a few of the artists (though I'll be damned if I'm going to buy a DRM'ed file from any online source -- used cds rock) but it would be nice to expand the horizons and check out some indie artists in the genres that I and my family/friends like.

    • Re:indie artists (Score:3, Informative)

      by tobes ( 302057 )
      You can check out my site (www.musicmobs.com for those with sigs turned off). There's a lot of RIAA stuff on there, but the entire site is constructed out of people's playlists, so really there should be any number of non RIAA bands as well (and there are). Just find a major label band that you'd like to find an indie alternative for, and start digging deeper through the related artists till you find something previously unheard of.

    • ZeroPhase? (Score:2, Informative)

      by gearmonger ( 672422 )
      I think (note that implies less than 100% certainty) that zerophase.net [zerophase.net] has what you're looking for. They're very independent and very into supporting innovative ways to (legally) share music.

    • Use RIAA Radar (Score:3, Informative)

      by reptilicus ( 605251 )
      While it's not a forum/website with a list, it is a handy tool one can use to tell if an album is affiliated with an RIAA label or if you can buy it guilt-free: http://www.magnetbox.com/riaa/
    • RIAA Members [riaa.com] Check what the label of the artist you are listening to is and check if that label is on that list. So, if you have a choice, then try to buy cds from labels NOT in that list !

    • Re:indie artists (Score:2, Insightful)

      by MightyYar ( 622222 )
      RIAA Radar [riaaradar.com] was already mentioned, but I'd like to add that they also have a Top 100 Indie chart. [magnetbox.com]

  • Too many cooks in the kitchen (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ax10m5 ( 737795 ) on Wednesday May 12, 2004 @04:34PM (#9131834)
    Why are so many hopping onto this downloaded music craze. I thought Apple Itunes, which looks like the field leader, was not making any profit at all, and was just using it as a tool to boost thier ipod sales. Does Walmart and mp3.com really think they fare much better?

    • Why are so many hopping onto this downloaded music craze. I thought Apple Itunes, which looks like the field leader, was not making any profit at all, and was just using it as a tool to boost thier ipod sales. Does Walmart and mp3.com really think they fare much better?

      Wal-Mart is doing it for the same reason as ITMS is -- they want to attract people to the Wal-Mart website [walmart.com] and hope they will buy other stuff. Apple hopes their DRM lock-in will make you buy an iPod.

      As for mp3.com who knows yet? Whateve

    • Re:Too many cooks in the kitchen (Score:4, Informative)

      by twofidyKidd ( 615722 ) on Wednesday May 12, 2004 @05:52PM (#9132772)
      You haven't looked at the site, nor have you read the article submission. MP3.com's sole purpose is NOT to sell legal downloads, just like everyone else. They are a multi-purpose site. Digital music news, user guides, compatibility guides, etc. I, for one, like the site. I think it's got a lot of useful info, it acts as sort of a catch-all for user discussion, and it even looks good. I hope they succeed in at least becoming a good, central source for digital entertainment.

      I thought Apple Itunes, which looks like the field leader, was not making any profit at all, and was just using it as a tool to boost thier ipod sales.

      I feel I have to address this since it seems to keep coming up. Apple might not be making any direct profit from download sales, and maybe neither is anyone else, but someone is, and that "someone" are labels. Given the notion that the business-end of the labels appear to be the least tech-savvy people on the planet, consider iTunes and the rest as the outsourced end of the labels' distribution methods. What I'm getting at is that the services probably aren't going to ever make the money they should in volume, but probably just enough to keep them around as another marketing tool for the labels'. It's like web-banners. You may never click on one, but if you see them enough, you're bound to become familiar with the service/product/etc. that the banner advertises.

      Anyhow, wasn't one of the aims of the "downloaded music craze" to improve the quality of the product from the consumer point of view? Consider this: There's about seven or eight legal download services that I consider to be the "primary" services. Together, they make up a fairly large music catalog, and not of just pop music. I can buy a whole album's worth of music for considerably less than what I'd pay at a retail outlet, like a Sam Goody (nearly half the cost if you consider tax on a $17.99 album.) In nearly all the cases, I can burn a CD of the music, which means I can pretty much do anything with it after that. And for those of you that are running Linux, let me ask you this: would it kill you to go out and get a generic windows box, and set it up so that it specifically handles music only? I mean if you are that adamant about not using windows, then don't, but for christ's sake don't act like you have no other option. In most cases, if you don't like anything that iTunes or the like carries, then you won't be needing windows anyhow. Case in point: Audio Lunchbox. [audiolunchbox.com] 192 Kbps .mp3 format downloads, accessible through a web browser on nearly any platform, and 100% free of DRM and other nonsense.

      You have options, and it has gotten better. You still can't walk into a store and preview the music before you buy it, but you can with most of the legal download services. It's a pain in the ass nowadays to use P2P apps for downloads because it takes too damn long, even on my cable modem, mostly because I have to find it first, then I have to try and find a decent sound quality, and then there's the viruses, and what have you...99 cents, you have what you're looking for, right from the get go, it downloads fast, it sounds GOOD ENOUGH (I'm not an audiophile, nor do I care to be one, that's too much work for too little enjoyment)...it's basically a whole lot less of a pain in the ass.

      I'm just trying to be optimistic about the whole "downloaded music craze" and hope that it only gets better as time progresses, because everything can stand to improve. If you ask me, we are at a much better place than we were 3 or 4 years ago. Granted we could have all gone without the bullshit lawsuits and the DRM/DMCA crap, but as history will tell you, if you can't learn from your mistakes, then you won't be around long enough to keep making them.

      • You have options, and it has gotten better. You still can't walk into a store and preview the music before you buy it, but you can with most of the legal download services.

        Still can't? You used to be able to, at better stores. All that I know of have stopped allowing this, however.

  • Screw pay-to-download mp3s (Score:3, Interesting)

    by TerminalInsanity ( 720167 ) on Wednesday May 12, 2004 @04:35PM (#9131841) Homepage
    If you insist on paying for what you can get for free, cut the middle-man and just send the 50 cents directly to the artist that made the music, because thats about all they get from that 15 bucks you would spend at the store

  • Wow.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by phaetonic ( 621542 ) on Wednesday May 12, 2004 @04:36PM (#9131862)
    I haven't even bothered to use iTunes or any other service that sells music online. I thought I'd play with mp3.com, since they have a pretty nice section of eletronic music. It turns out they give you an option to download the music file from various sources, in various formats, including ogg! On top of this, they tell you if the file is DRM'd or not. I might actually be a customer once the "coming soon..." is replaced with an actual link for purchasing.
    • Me personally, I think I'll rely on what I've always used to find music: Google.

    • Re:Wow.... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Hmm, if you like electronic music, definitely stay away from iTunes or Napster, the services have a laughably small selection. I'd recommend SoulSeek (www.slsknet.org) - a free, no spyware P2P program which has a lot of hard to find songs, specializing in various types of electronic music...

  • You mean... (Score:4, Funny)

    by arrow ( 9545 ) <mike.damm@com> on Wednesday May 12, 2004 @04:38PM (#9131889) Homepage Journal
    The new www.mp3.com.com.com.com...

    (if you don't get it, visit other C|NET sites.)

  • Excellent! (Score:5, Funny)

    by patrixmyth ( 167599 ) on Wednesday May 12, 2004 @04:40PM (#9131920)
    ~For example, with a single search you can find that 'Abbey Road' by the Beatles is not available for legal download at iTunes, Napster, or anywhere else.

    Just what I always wanted, a search engine that would tell me where I couldn't find what I was looking for...

    • Re:Excellent! (Score:3, Interesting)

      by swb ( 14022 )
      [...]or anywhere else.

      I actually wouldn't mind a search engine that gave definitive negative results. I could stop looking and move onto something else.

  • Supporting Independent Music (Score:5, Insightful)

    by lotsofno ( 733224 ) on Wednesday May 12, 2004 @04:40PM (#9131928)
    really, the best route for anyone wanting to listen to music is to stick to more independent material--there's enough good stuff out there to last you several lifetimes.

    that way, when you buy a song from Magnatune, Bleep, or Audiolunchbox, you WON'T be:

    1.) sending your cash to the RIAA
    2.) attributing to the success of a service that fronts the RIAA, supporting the operation of tyrannous record labels with your cash
    3.) supporting propietary DRM
    4.) locking yourself into using iTunes or an iPod as your portable player

    by opting for other services that aren't iTunes/Walmart/Sony/Rhapsody/etc.., you WILL be:

    1.) sending more cash to the musicians you like
    2.) attributing to the success of a service that better represents and compensates the musicians you like, without restricting how you listen to your music
    3.) free to listen to your music however you want, whether it be with winamp or foobar, linux or whatever OS you use, ipod or rio karma
    • we all know that if/when i start checking out independent music (and others follow), the RIAA will assume that it's not that i don't WANT their crappy stuff, just that i'm downloading it for free, and sue everyone i know even more aggressively.

      that's what bothers me about their strategy. they assume that there are two options: A)i buy their music or B)I download their music for free because i just can't resist their fabulous marketing techniques.

      the other option, C) I am not interested in RIAA music or am
    • At last count, iTunes carried music from over 450 non-RIAA affiliated independent labels. You don't have to avoid the iTMS, just be careful what you buy there.
    • Regarding the notion of "Supporting Independent Music" I hereby plug:

      CDBaby [cdbaby.com], a good service, with good music, run by good people.

      A little while ago, I happened to whip up a best of CDBaby [turnstyle.org] site (selections based on their editor picks, and here presented via my PHP/ASP app Andromeda [turnstyle.com]).

  • This is mp3.com like this [chevrolet.com] is an Impala SS. Dual chrome exhaust tips and a supercharger doesn't make a front wheel drive V6 into an Impala SS.
  • Read the article about converting vinal to optical...

    Notice the steps...
    Step Five:
    Step Seven:
    Step Eight:
    Step Seven:
    Step Eight:

    Note: Repeat steps three to eight for the other side of the LP.

    Step Nine:

    Wow, that's great!

  • Disbanded groups (Score:3, Interesting)

    by RobertB-DC ( 622190 ) * on Wednesday May 12, 2004 @04:44PM (#9131995) Homepage Journal
    I'm still wondering if there's a way for a band that has disbanded (heh) to put its material back on garageband.com. I'm particularly interested in a bluegrass group called Big Twang -- for details, see my mirror [dixie-chicks.com] of their now-defunct site. They had three songs at mp3.com, but since the band was gone by December 19, 2003 [trusonic.com], I guess there's no way to get their account back.

    Of course, the .mp3's are safe... on my hard drive. Don't tell the lawyers [dixie-chicks.com]!

  • "News"? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Saeed al-Sahaf ( 665390 ) on Wednesday May 12, 2004 @04:46PM (#9132015) Homepage
    The real news is what it does NOT include: no free downloads, and no indie artist community...

    This is only "news" if you haven't paid any attention at all to who owns MP3.com, and the "general trend" in on-line music sites to charge for downloads. Really, to say this is "no surprise" is even an overstatement. Just another music-for-sale download site. Move along...

  • I was depressed to see that section on mp3/digital format players was a far cry from what the 'old' mp3.com had. Instead of listing pretty much every player (portable or not), it now appears that the only players listed are the ones that have paid for the spot ! I could be mistaken, but I did not see any mention of mp3/wma home appliances (ala audiotron) nor did i see any of the lesser known brands of portables (like the nex II). So what was once a shot at getting the 'lille guy' in front of the world, is

  • improper page loading.. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I just tried loading this site with my Opera 7.23 browser and its completely out of sync.. The right side (main area) of the front page is blank and seems to have loaded at the very bottom of the page leaving a huge empty white space where there should be content.. and the left sidebar menu is improperly aligned and doesn't look as it should.. anyone else having this issue with their browser?

    You'd think they would at least test their new site in more than one browser before such a massive launch.. sigh

  • CSS Based Layout (Score:5, Interesting)

    by colinramsay ( 603167 ) on Wednesday May 12, 2004 @04:46PM (#9132029) Homepage
    I found it interesting that MP3.com is the third large site to relaunch recently with a CSS-based layout. Fileshack and Blogger (with Blogger being an education for all web designers) have also used CSS in their new layout.

    The point? Interesting to see that MP3.com are forward thinking - in their web side anyway.
  • I used to find the hardware forum on mp3.com fairly useful back when MP3 CD players were new. With this new site that subject is crammed in with posts like "WHAT IS BETTER QUALITY???? MP3 FORMAT OR WAVE??? REPLY!!"

    C|Net should really separate MP3 hardware topics from the generic "Tech Guide Discussion" board they've got now.

  • 1.7 million songs? What does that tell us? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by phr1 ( 211689 ) on Wednesday May 12, 2004 @04:48PM (#9132054)
    I read recently that there are around 30,000 CD's released in the US every year. At ten songs (average) per CD, that's 300,000 songs/year released on CD. I don't know how long the original mp3.com was around but it was probably less than 5 years, and it probably put up mp3's at a faster rate near the end than near the beginning. But even at a uniform rate over the whole 5 years, it sounds like one web site was distributing more songs per year all by itself, than the entire CD industry released put together. Add to that the number of musicians who distribute their stuff through their own sites, and it's clear there's a heck of a lot more music being released as gratis downloads than as proprietary CD's.

    Some people blame diminishing CD sales on unauthorized CD copying; others blame it on technological obsolescence (people buy DVD's instead of CD's now); still others say it's because poor artistic decisions by record labels result in releasing uninteresting music that people don't want to buy. I haven't yet seen a connection made with authorized, freely downloadable music, that people can listen to instead of buying proprietary CD's, just like they can run GNU/Linux instead of buying Windows, Apache instead of IIS, etc. Sure, a lot of mp3.com downloads are crap, but lots of commercial CD's are crap too.

    Another really good site, by the way, is Magnatunes [magnatunes.com]. They publish entire CD's under a Creative Commons license and you can download the complete CD's in mp3 format and pass around copies noncommercially. You can also pay to download in FLAC or Ogg Vorbis format, or buy commercial licenses (e.g. if you want to use one of the CD's as a movie soundtrack) through a simple web interface. There is some really excellent music there too.

  • everyone wants to be Google.

  • MusicVine (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Dracolytch ( 714699 ) on Wednesday May 12, 2004 @04:55PM (#9132144) Homepage
    Well, OK, so the site is disapointing.

    One good thing that it DOES have is the musicvine. Shows the relationship between artists in a (not horrible, not great) flash interface.

    This sure beats using Amazon to help me find the relationships between artists, and scouting out new sounds for my "distinct" tastes.

    ~D
  • Download.com Music (mistaken by some for the new MP3.com)

    Not to be mistaken for CNet's mp3.com.com.

    Which does, of course, exist [com.com], but is not redirected to Download.com Music [download.com].

  • So, MP3.com is trying to be the place to go to search for music, none of which is actually in MP3 format. It all makes sense now.

  • Oh Joy (Score:2, Insightful)

    by autosentry ( 595252 )
    I can look forward to even more spam from these folks! Seriously, they were still heaping mounds and mounds of promotional crap when they weren't of any real use to anyone, crossing that fine line between chutzpah and bullshit many, many times.

  • What's the point? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DynaSoar ( 714234 ) * on Wednesday May 12, 2004 @05:16PM (#9132404) Journal
    Why bother to use a name that ends up being misleading? MP3.com == downloads. Garageband has picked up the old playlists and music.download.com is growing into what MP3.com was. About the only thing it could be is a come-on for pay-per-song portals, and it'd take the peculiar thinking of a dedicated marketoid to think that'll go over.
  • Don't you just hate it when your favorite insightful, helpful, or even downright revolutionary websites/programs get cancelled, only to be replaced with what is essentially a neutered, brainwashed shadow of its former glory?

    Like Napster before it, it seems MP3.com has fallen victim to the RIAA's insatiable greed. What before was a bastion to new, emerging, and often innovative bands is now pay to listen, and no indie artists.

    I like to call this the Zombie Effect - websites and P2P programs are killed by a h

  • I only ask because this sounds like something I can *possibly* dig up off of Everything2 [everything2.com].
  • and under Opera the site breaks horribly, which is nice

    Rus
  • Napster, Itunes, Walmart, mp3.com - eat your hearts out.

    You can buy Abbey Road online here. [allofmp3.com].

  • Abbey Road (Score:3, Informative)

    by swillden ( 191260 ) * <shawn-ds@willden.org> on Wednesday May 12, 2004 @06:59PM (#9133659) Journal

    For example, with a single search you can find that 'Abbey Road' by the Beatles is not available for legal download at iTunes, Napster, or anywhere else.

    You can find it for download here [allofmp3.com], in your choice of format and bit rate (up to 384kbps), DRM-free, for $0.01 per MB (and, BTW, when they say MB, they mean 2^20 bytes).

    As I understand it, it is a legal download [allofmp3.com], though it probably makes the record labels angry.

    (How is it legal? IANAL, but my understanding is that it works like this: Under Russian law, there is apparently no difference between broadcasting over radio and "broadcasting" over the Internet. allofmp3.com pays royalties just as though they were a radio station and thereby obtains the right to "broadcast" over the net. I'm sure the RIAA is trying to figure out how to close this loophole in Russian law, but they haven't been able to do it yet. Oh, and AFAIK there is no law against importing music files from Russia, although it may be the case that you're supposed to pay some sort of import duties.)

  • How about: 3 strikes you're out.

    Mp3.com once had a good thing going with the many indie bands I discovered there. Over time, it went more corp-signed-artists, and began to mostly resemble the crap I heard and the radio and was trying to avoid. Now, free downloads and indie are both gone... what makes it different from any other mp3bandwagon.com outfit? Seems to me all they have is a name, and many other names have already eaten away at that mindshare whilst they'be been away.

  • Now, I am free. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Vinnie_333 ( 575483 ) on Wednesday May 12, 2004 @07:55PM (#9134160)
    Yeah, I recently recieved an e-mail from garageband.com telling me I could re-post all of my garage bands songs by just clicking on a link. But, I figure, I'm better off without a label holding me back, yeah know? I need to be a free man, making music for me, not for some guy in a suit ... sitting at a computer ... clicking buttons and stuff ... any way ...

  • Why...? Allofmp3.com (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Eric(b0mb)Dennis ( 629047 ) * on Wednesday May 12, 2004 @08:09PM (#9134282)
    Why even bother with any of these music services when allofmp3.com still exists and accepts paypal? Almost any music i want, in any bitrate i want, in any format i want (sometimes even lossless) With a great download manager that sorts my mp3s perfectly... all for what, .60c an album in 160kbps ogg?

    Probably not legal in the US, but the russian government fully backs it, and with it accepting paypal to charge an account, I'm a happy customer.

  • Still Trying to Figure Out... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MacWiz ( 665750 ) <[moc.liamg] [ta] [45nameizg]> on Wednesday May 12, 2004 @08:09PM (#9134283) Journal
    ...how Universal was able to sell the licenses of 1.7 million songs it did not own to Trusonic, who was then able to sell them again to GarageBand.

    Universal made $31 million selling the independent library, that they CHARGED musicians to post.

    Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum...
  • On the file sharing networks I use, it only takes one search to download Abbey Road.
  • I read the article on LP-to-CD, and they keep talking about doing this in Goldwave and selecting that option in Goldwave ...

    Last time I looked, Goldwave was a Windoze program. Has that changed, is there version of Goldwave for Linux now? If not, obvious question, what software WOULD one use to do this job in Linux?

    This is not academic, when packing to move from NY to FL, in spite of all I discarded, I kept several boxes of LP's, a couple of old turntables (may need some work or a new cartridge), and a c
    • Gnome Wave Cleaner [sourceforge.net]. I haven't done much with it yet but it looks pretty versatile.
  • Clean your LP and perhaps your stylus. LP: At the cheapest, try water and mild dishwashing liquid. I'd never do that, but most probably have that around. On a level higher, get yourself a Discwasher LP cleaning kit--basically a big velvet-like brush that gets into the grooves along with some cleaning fluid. There are more specialized vinyl cleaners that do a better job of cleaning ingrained mold, dirt and grease from grooves, but obviously will come at a higher price. If you're really serious about your vi

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