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Peter Inglis uses and recommends emusic.com.
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Click here for your 25 free mp3's:
Peter Inglis recommends www.emusic.com as an inexpensive, thorough and reliable source of legal mp3's.
They have the entire NAXOS catalogue and much more.
HAVE A LOOK AROUND THE CATALOGUE:
- click on the banner above
- a new web page will open
- click on the link - "About emusic" - at the bottom of the page and you can browse the entire catalogue with no obligation or fuss
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Each time somebody clicks through the banner link on this page, tries the 25 free mp3s, and then decides to become a subscriber, The Whole Guitarist gets a small commission. No tricks, no catch.
These days one tends to be sceptical of offers which sound "too good to be true" and that was my first impression of www.emusic.com's offer of "50 free .mp3 tracks" (since changed to 25 free tracks).
Anyway I did a bit of research, took the plunge and entered my credit card details.
Several hours later I had added a bag full of albums to my classical - jazz - soundtrack - other lists. Now I had a month to use the 50 free tracks mind you, but that quota went in the first couple of nights as I replaced albums I used to own on vinyl and patched gaps in my collections.
Some years later Ive remained quite happily on the premium subscription, which means I add about
10 CD's to my collection each month for USD $ 19.99. (They have cheaper options as well).
Since then their catalogue has grown enormously (over 2.5 million tracks) and emusic has become the main source for my professional audio
library.
What is so good about www.emusic.com ?
Pros
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The music is in mp3 format which plays on the standard Windows media player on you PC, and on any device which can play mp3 tracks.
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1 track counts as 1 track whether it's 1 minute or 1 hour long.
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High quality mp3s - usually ripped at 192k, some of the older catalogue entries are at 128k, which is still good quality.
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Excellent download manager software is provided. You can decide how you want the tracks to be named.
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As low as 22c per track - compare this to i-tunes and other on-line stores who are near $1.50 per track.
- You can resume download or download again any purchased tracks at any time, and as often as you need to. In effect emusic provides another backup for your collection.
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No copy protection, unlike i-tunes. These tracks will play on any device.
Once you have bought the track it is yours to keep, backup or play on any of your devices.
If you aren't up to speed on how Apple's i-tunes and i-pods are dictating
the way you use those digital media tracks which you thought you owned....
check out this article
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Enormous catalogue of jazz and classical, with hundreds of new albums added monthly.
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Direct to Digital and live concert releases. Lots of artists these days are
releasing material direct-to-digital, with no CD distribution at all. For example Deep Purple's recent Australian tours and a series of Concerts Chick Corea did in New York - all released direct-to-digitial.
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JAZZ catalogue - Lots of great jazz 1950's to the present. McCoy Tyner, Chick Corea, Joe Pass, Barney Kessel.... go and have a browse!
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CLASSICAL catalogue - emusic acquired in October 2005 the rights to sell the well-known
NAXOS label of classical and jazz CD's. That's over 4,000 new classical CDs alone!
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SOUNDTRACKS - composer John Williams's original soundtracks to "Lost in Space" and many other TV classics.
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ROCK and POP doesn't only contain independent bands - I found Deep Purple, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Dio, Rick Wakeman, Jethro Tull...
Cons
- Not many current top 10 acts - but that's one way they keep the price down. You can get those artists at
i-tunes anyway (for $ 1.50 per track... and with all sorts of invasive copy protection...)
- Your emusic track quota expires at the next renewal (monthly). So use them or lose them. In my opinion they should change this and I've told them so. However in practice it's not a problem. I just make a diary at or near the renewal date to grab my tracks sometime in the next month.
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