Bandcamp

Along with HDTracks, Bandcamp is the leading online store when it comes to buy music in a lossless format. They specialize in "indie" music, but the catalog has a wide range of artists.

Since it's the St-Jean Batiste in Québec, I bought the album "Les chemins de verre" by the band Karkwa. It's not a brand new release, it's been available for over a year, but I've heard the song "Marie tu pleures" on the public radio and it has been on my purchase list for a long time. Lovely track, it reminds me of the mood of the Elephant 6 crew and I just bought my tickets to see Jeff Magnum [of Neutral Milk Hotel] at the Pop Montreal festival, so I was in the perfect state of mind it hear this.

Not many french artists are available outside iTunes. Most of the local labels don't offer a lossless purchase. Even a MP3 download is rare. It's nice to see that a big label, Audiogram, distribute their music on Bandcamp.

The album cost 12$, it's the same price no mather the format you choose. On iTunes it's 8$, so that fixed price make the MP3 pricy, but the FLAC format is cheaper than the CD version.

Once the payment is completed [I use PayPal], you are redirected to the download link.

It you use iTunes, you can follow my step-by-step guide to convert the FLAC into Apple Lossless format.

A note on how to find music you like on Bancamp

Since a lot of unsigned and little known bands are using Bandcamp, a nice place to discover them is the the blog Crawdaddy. They feature a Bandcamp band of the week.

 

Some Rolling Stones albums on HDTracks

HDTracks appears to be on a roll lately. They just added some Rolling Stones releases to their super high definition catalog. It's available in either 88khz or 176khz (both 24bit). This is a very good news and hopefully we will continue to see new high profile offerings in the future.

Here's what Teri Landi from ABKCO has to say about the remastering:

"Many years of research went into locating the original mono and stereo analog tapes that would be used in ABKCO's Rolling Stones Remastered Series. That research revealed a treasure trove of first generation tapes - true stereo masters from The Stones' 1964 Chess Studios sessions including the unedited version of "2120 South Michigan Avenue," Beggar's Banquet at its correct speed and Let It Bleed with splicing that indicates that the original intention was to leave little spacing between each cut. 

For the analog to digital transfers, vintage reel-to-reel tape machines were utilized - a modified Ampex 351 with original tube electronics (full track mono and two track stereo) and an Ampex ATR-102 modified with Aria Discrete Class-A Electronics (full track mono and two track stereo). A Sonoma DSD digital audio workstation was the chosen high resolution format and Meitner Design ADC8 and DAC8 MKlV converters were used for the conversion process. Cables used were the cryogenically frozen type supplied to us by Gus Skinas of Super Audio Center. Gus also provided much guidance to Jody Klein, Steve Rosenthal and myself for our first time use of DSD technology. For this HD Tracks release, the Bob Ludwig mastered DSD files were converted to both 176.4kHz and 88.2kHz high resolution PCM with Weiss Saracon conversion software."

Right now the following albums are available: The Rolling Stones, The Rolling Stones No 2, 12 x 5, Big Hits and Through The Past Darkly.

Favourites like Let It Bleed and Beggar's Banquet should be available in spring or summer. This is the full list of upcomming releases:

Out Of Our Heads | December's Children | Aftermath (US) | Let It Bleed | Out Of Our Heads (UK) | Aftermath (UK) | Between The Buttons (UK) | Beggar's Banquet | The 60's UK EPs - The Rolling Stones/Five By Five/Got Live | Singles Collection | Between The Buttons (US) | Flowers | Their Satanic Majesties Request | Metamorphosis | Got Live If You Want It! | Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out! | Big Hits (UK) | Through The Past, Darkly (Big Hits, Vol 2) (UK) | Hot Rocks | More Hot Rocks | The Rolling Stones (US) | The Rolling Stones Now

The 88khz are 19.98$ and the 176khz are 29.98$. (You can use the coupon code STONES10 for a 10% off)

You might want to read the overview of HDtracks I did back in january.

HDtracks

I've decided to give HDtracks a try. Since I wan't looking for anything in particular, I started with the top 25 best sellers section. In third position is "Jazz side of the moon, the music of Pink Floyd". Sounds cheesy but the critics on Amazon are good and this youtube sample is not bad at all. Intriguing. This will be the first album I buy on HDtracks.

This is an example of an album available at the highest quality: 192khz/24bit. In this case, you have the choice of three levels of quality (and price):

• 192khz/24bit FLAC files for 26.96$, separate tracks for 2.98$
• 96khz/24bit FLAC files for 17.98$, separate tracks for 2.49$
• Regular CD format 44.1khz/16bit AIFF or FLAC files for 11.98$, separate tracks for 1.49$

The checkout process is painless. You can select to pay by credit card or PayPal. [I choose PayPal]

One the payment is completed, the browser redirects to a page where a Download Manager is automatically downloaded on my computer. It uses Java, so I guess it's the only software requirement. Once started, you need to enter your HDtracks user/password before the download can start.

The download manager has a limited interface, there's not a lot of information available. The size of the download don't even shows.

The download was a whooping 2.46GB, every 192khz FLAC file weight about 300MB. That's a lot of data!

In addition to the audio files, HDtracks provide a PDF of the entire CD booklet and a small JPEG of the album cover.

It's now time to listen. In a follow-up post I'll detail how to listen to 192khz on a Mac computer.

Yeasayer - Live at Ancienne Belgique

There's a good critic of the new Yeasayer release on Pitchfork today. The live album is available for download on their website for a "name your price" amount. You can get it for free or you can pay either 0.99$, 2.99$, 4.99$, 7.99$ or 9.99$. You decide. Available in FLAC or Apple Lossless.

Girl Talk - All Day

Today in the New York Times magazine there is an article about Girl Talk. His most recent album, All day, is available for free on his label website, Illegal Art. You can download the 484MB FLAC format here in either one big song or in separate tracks.

The BQE

Good news! Asthmatic Kitty Records is offering a voucher to download the FLAC digital version of a vinyl album. In this case, I had the opportunity to grab Sufjan Stevens' The BQE.

Matador's Buy Early Get Now

The new Yo La Tengo, Popular songs, is available through Matador store feature "Buy Now Get Early". Preorder the album and get immediate access to two songs from the new album in FLAC - Periodically triple or double & Here To Fall.

Later in august the album will be available online as a stream. Exclusive MP3s will be offered and the physical album will come with a bonus album, the soundtrack to the movie Adventureland. You get a poster too! It's all mentioned here.

Thanks to OMG Vinyl for the tip.

Zunior

It's time for a first FLAC purchase on Zunior: The Phenomenal Handclap band for 10.88$. I've already wasted my money on the iTunes album but a CD-quality version was needed. Songs like Testimony really shine with those FLACs!

The process is really smooth. As soon as the credit card is validated you can download the files. No download managed needed.

Zunior is probably the best lossless online store for indie music, while Boomkat, Bleep and others focus on electronic music. They are the cheapest option too.

Music is here

I found a lossless music store that I didn't know about: Music Is Here.You can download everything in FLAC and albums sell for around 10 to 12$. The catalogue seems to be a hit-or-miss. For example they carry XL recordings like Thom Yorke but not Radiohead.

Somehow some albums are not available in every country. For example I can't get Gotan Project's La revancha del tango. Odd!

St. Vincent - Actor

4AD (Beggars Group USA) is selling Actor on FLAC for 10$.

Unfortunately, you can only download the MP3 version when you buy the vinyl.

Metric

There is an interesting article on Metric in the LA Times. They released their new album Fantasies without a record label, instead pushing on digital purchases and a Radiohead-like deluxe boxset. And best of all, it paid off.

Fantasies is available in MP3 and FLAC on their website "I Love Metric" for 8.99$ USD. Even better, get the vinyl with the digital download for 24.99$. You download the album in FLAC right now, the mailman delivers the vinyl a few days later. PERFECT.

The album is also available on Zunior, but it's more expensive (10.88$) with you want the FLAC version.

Record labels should be worried, very worried!

Boomkat

Boomkat is an online store I discovered while reading Gizmodo's excellent How to discover music in 2009. It a British record store specialized in electronic / techno music, but they also have some rock records. They sell CDs and vinyls and lots of their titles are available in FLAC. Unfortunately, with the exchange rate, it can be quite expensive as they charge per tracks.

As one example favorable there's Mokira' Sueismine offered in FLAC for 3.95 British pounds. That's about 7$ CAD or 6$ USD.

A more expensive example would be Monk's Black Monk Time available at 8.95 British pounds. That's over 13$ USD.

With the pricing structure and with all the unknown artists it's a good place to discover new music and buy a few tracks here and there.

I'll give it a try for sure.

Matador records

You can buy music in the FLAC format on the Matador online store. They sell for 0.99$ each songs or 10$ for the album. Their lossy MP3 version sell for 0.80$ each or 8$ for an album.

This is a "good deal" considering this music is selling for the same price on the iTunes Store in a lossy format.

Unfortunately they don't offer the FLAC download with the voucher found in their vinyl records. To be honest, I'm not sure I would have downloaded the latest Yo La Tengo album, a garage record under the name Condo fuck, in a lossless format anyway ;)

Manage An All-Lossless Music Library With iTunes

There's a good article on Gizmodo on how to manage a lossless iTunes library. I learned something new: if you have a Mac, like I do, you can use Fluke to play FLACs directly in iTunes. Currently I convert all the FLACs to the Apple lossless format with XLD. More on this later, I'll give Fluke a try. I'm curious to know if it works with Airtunes.

Update: Fluke crashed the first time I tried to import a FLAC album. Not looking good.

B&W Music Club

This is one of the good reason to start this blog. B&W, the speaker company, has team with Peter Gabriel to create the B&W Music Club. The idea is great: you sign up for 12 months. It costs 60$ USD. Each month you can download a new album. That sums up to 5$ per album, a very good price. There's one downside: you can't choose. There's one album per month and that's the one you download.

You can also sign up for a free trial where you will be able to download a EP, a small selection of the songs available on the entire album. The trial is offered for 3 months.

Obviously Peter Gabriel's involvement caught my attention. He chooses the albums from his RealWorld catalog. This month it's Spiro "Live in Box". Based only on this album only, so I might be wrong, but it would appear that the B&W offers unreleased or digital only releases because I can't find it on Amazon. Since the point is to discover music, it doesn't really matter.

Download

You can download the album in three formats: Apple lossless, FLAC and FLAC 24bit [Apple doesn't support 24bit in its lossless format]. Pick the format you prefer, or download them all.

And 24bit FLACs, this is very interesting, specially for the anonymous audiophiles! It's also nice because suddenly your sound source is better than the CD. I had to do some research on how to take advantage of the 24bit FLACs and I will write on the subject in a subsequent post.

Personally I downloaded the Apple lossless for my iTunes library and iPhone. I also downloaded the 24bit FLAC for the simple fact that it's better and I have the required audio equipment to listen to 24bit music. Does it sounds any different? Probably not but that's not the point ;)

Click here to go to the B&W music club.

The picture used in this post comes from the link above.