linux friendly music download site or cracking drm

Post by **dann** » Fri Aug 12, 2005 8:38 pm

This really sucks! The wife wants to get an mp3 player of some sort and download songs legally. I have not found a linux friendly service aside from MP3Tunes.com and quite frankly, the songs she wants are not on there.

I seem to have two choices, iTunes or any other site that offers drm'd wma files. I figured I would give buy.com a spin and ended up with a drm wma I could not play at all or convert to mp3. I could not even get it running on the iRiver. That's freakin ridiculous.

Is there a friendly site or a way to crack the drm so the file will play in linux? Honestly, we don't want to share the files, we simply want to listen to the music legally!

Post by **Patrick** » Fri Aug 12, 2005 8:52 pm

Lsongs:
http://lsongs.com/
is linux friendly but unfortunately they don't have much of a selection of artists. Hopefully that will improve as time goes on.
There was a web based music service I read about a while back that was supposedly linux friendly. I can't remember the name of it.

bosshoff · Post by **bosshoff** » Sat Aug 13, 2005 7:26 am

http://www.emusic.com

They don't have major labels, but iTunes really doesn't have that great of a selection either. Other than that, there is the "burn disc, then re-rip" method, which might be able to be done virtually in windoze via

nero -> img file -> mounted in daemon tools -> ripped by something

However, I haven't ever tried it, so I don't know. Ripping will cost you music quality though, which is lame.

Post by **Patrick** » Sun Aug 14, 2005 2:02 pm

Patrick wrote:There was a web based music service I read about a while back that was supposedly linux friendly. I can't remember the name of it.

There's the following:
http://magnatune.com/
http://www.ind-music.com/

CptnObvious999 · Post by **CptnObvious999** » Sun Aug 14, 2005 5:03 pm

I use AllOfMP3.com. They are a russian company that offers songs for very cheap and offer online encoding which means you select which codec you want (ogg, mp3, mp4, wma, etc) and the bitrate/quality and it will encode it and charge you accordingly. They have a pretty good selection of music (not as much as iTunes but fairly close). I have been using them for about a year and I love them. (My whole music collection is OGG Vorbis

)

Judland · Post by **Judland** » Sun Aug 14, 2005 7:52 pm

CptnObvious999 wrote:I use AllOfMP3.com. They are a russian company that offers songs for very cheap and offer online encoding which means you select which codec you want (ogg, mp3, mp4, wma, etc) and the bitrate/quality and it will encode it and charge you accordingly.

Wow! This is a great site! They have all kinds of the music I listen too. Thanks, Captn' !

I'm going to have to blog about this one.

Post by **dann** » Sun Aug 14, 2005 9:30 pm

I thought about them, but this site is not legal to use in the US. If they really wanted too, the RIAA could come after you for purchasing stolen material.

CptnObvious999 · Post by **CptnObvious999** » Sun Aug 14, 2005 11:27 pm

dann wrote:I thought about them, but this site is not legal to use in the US. If they really wanted too, the RIAA could come after you for purchasing stolen material.

according to this article allofmp3 is not illegal in the US. Even if the RIAA did say it was I realy doubt they would even bother sueing you. There are millions of music filesharers out there sharing billions of songs and I doubt they would go after someone who is paying for their songs over someone who is stealing them. I don't know much about legality so I don't know anything for sure. You could try http://www.mp3.com, they can give you a pretty chart of all the sites you can get the song(s) and if it is DRM protected or not.

Judland · Post by **Judland** » Sun Aug 14, 2005 11:31 pm

A little bit more information on the subject.

According to this info., the artists do get residuals, and that's what's important to me.

Post by **Patrick** » Mon Aug 15, 2005 10:47 am

Article from March regarding the legality of Allofmp3.com:
http://slate.msn.com/id/2115868/

It was banned from Germany recently:
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/6618.cfm

And this from January says it's not legal:
http://techlawadvisor.com/2005/01/allof ... ussia.html

Post by **Patrick** » Mon Aug 15, 2005 11:06 am

I noticed ads at the bottom of the Slate article for these sites:
http://www.ezmp3s.com/mydownloads.htm
http://www.ez-tracks.com/
http://mymusicinc.com

Don't know if they're legal.

bosshoff · Post by **bosshoff** » Mon Aug 15, 2005 11:07 am

Well, that site is definitely illegal. I mean, the beatles don't license like that, but yet all their stuff is on that site...makes one wonder. I am so fed up with the RIAA that I really don't even want to buy or download any corporately-funded music anymore. I just hope more artists keep releasing independently or with better labels; it is so much easier to do so in the age of the Internet.

Judland · Post by **Judland** » Mon Aug 15, 2005 11:34 am

The thing that gets me is, can't the U.S. record label companies see how much money they could be making if they'd just give their customers what they want?

That seems to be the way of big businesses... it's not enough to make lots of money, they want ALL of the money.

If they'd only give me the music I want to listen to at a fair price, I'd buy from them without a second thought.

Paying AllofMP3.com, at 2 cents a megabyte, is more economical to me than taking the time and effort to find the same music on a peer-to-peer network.

But these record companies don't see it that way. They think, if they can get 2 cents a MB, then why not 5 cents? Why not 20 cents? Why not a dollar? So they screw us 'cause they think they can get away with it. In their mind, its justified.

Goes to show you who has the right idea and the hearts of the music listening public.

Post by **dann** » Mon Aug 15, 2005 11:42 am

This really sucks, particuarly with ALLOFMP3.com. The old addage is if it "sounds to good to be true, it must be!" Whether the site is legal or not seems to be up for constant debate, but no matter what it's definetlyin the grey. The other half is the ethics. How close to piracy is this? Do the artists actually get a cut of the profit?

When it comes down to it, I don't mind paying a fair price for a song. I think $.99 is very reasonable. But only paying a few cents sounds like someone is getting ripped off big time.

Apparently the latest iTunes is not running yet in Wine; I gave it a shot myself and although I did not research this too much, from what I have gathered it is still a few releases off (Wine is) until there will be iTunes support.

So what it boils down to, being a Linux user, is that either I purchase the CD's and rip them myself; or I use ALLOFMP3.com.

The other route is to puchase the songs off of iTunes and burn them to cd. I can then rip them off again. Of course I am loosing audio quality in the process, but I doubt we'd notice that much. The one song I have tested sounds fine.

Post by **Patrick** » Mon Aug 15, 2005 11:49 am

dann wrote: The other route is to puchase the songs off of iTunes and burn them to cd. I can then rip them off again. Of course I am loosing audio quality in the process, but I doubt we'd notice that much. The one song I have tested sounds fine.

I won a bunch of songs off of Itunes from drinking Pepsi at work. I had to do what you describe. Burn to CD and rip & re-encode. I recently heard a quote from Steve Jobs, when answering whether Itunes would get ported to linux. In short, NO!
Fvck Steve Jobs! I won't buy anything form Itunes in the future. I probably won't ever buy an Apple computer. Bunch of effing tools!