So this might be a dumb question, but where do you buy MP3s from these days?

Google Play is no more. It used to have everything on there, including obscure afrobeats and global beats, but it's moved on to YouTube Music which is stream only.
Bandcamp is great, but doesn't have everything.
iTunes and Amazon are a load of old dingo's kidneys with their low bitrates and frustrating UI.
Soulseek is still a lifeline but favours certain genres.

I'm struggling here. Currently trying to get a download of Isyana Sarasvati's LEXICON album to play on my show tomorrow, but I can't find an MP3 download for shit.

Anyone else had these issues? Am I missing something obvious here?

itunes, bandcamp, and dance music oriented mp3 stores like beatport

i expect apple to like stop selling music within the next five years though given the recent evolution of “itunes” into “apple music”

how do you justify iTunes' low bitrate .m4a nonsense though? it took me about 20 minutes and a whole range of security login woes to buy and download a track from them the other day and when i got it, it was in that weird format and sounded awful

itunes’ standard bitrate of 256kbps has never bugged me
but i’m no lossless junkie

https://www.amazon.com/LEXICON-Isyana-Sarasvati/dp/B081FDTZMX

oh wait you said Amazon sorry

yeah i'm not paying for lousy bitrates. i (used to before lockdown) DJ out a lot and anything under 320kbps sounds terrible on big speakers

Bandcamp often offers choice of mp3, flac, maybe other

bandcamp rules

anything under 320kbps sounds terrible on big speakers

thank you for pointing this out, it is so true

All around for years and years but still now and then go to

7digital
Beatport
Bleep
Juno

qobuz for flacs though it's lacking in a lot of the more obscure distrokid/tunecore tier stuff that is on spotify unfortunately

https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/album/lexicon-isyana-sarasvati/qs2orueqmdj0b

you have to spread out and find shit where you can there is no one stop shop

For flacs there is also this site which I quite like:

https://www.highresaudio.com/en/site/index

7digital is nice for pop artist back catalogues, you can get higher br files there
hardwax for that euro stuff
beatport (a lot of garbage on there)
traxsource (also a lot of garbage on there but it's good for more "soulful" black us dance music legacy artists)

it's my hobby horse but if you care about quality and you're a dj you should be getting at least cd-quality lossless files when you can (flac and aiff are best because they have metadata)

I only buy FLACs these days, so most of the time I use Bandcamp for contemporary independent releases, and Qobuz for everything else. Sometimes I have to go Beatport/Juno/etc for electronic music releases that are not available on the aforementioned two, but those sites tend to be more expensive for FLACs than MP3s, which sucks.

yeah i'm not paying for lousy bitrates. i (used to before lockdown) DJ out a lot and anything under 320kbps sounds terrible on big speakers

if it sounds bad to you that's that, but m4a is supposed to sound better at lower bitrates than mp3s

Been subscribing to Qobuz for hi rez streaming I (mostly) like it

Is there good cheapo or freebie software for ripping to flac? My Win 7 Media Player still rips to high-bit rate mp3 and wav, but would like to compare w homemade flac.

http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/

https://www.foobar2000.org/

oh yeah that requires some setup

https://captainrookie.com/how-to-setup-exact-audio-copy-for-flac-ripping/

don't bother with EAC imo, it's a pita to set up and it's only a ripper

foobar does almost everything playback, tagging and ripping related, including ABX testing

and if you do choose to use eac, for the love of god don't use secure mode like that guide says, unless you like torturing your drive and waiting 3 times as long to rip a CD

wow, thanks for all the recommendations everyone. it's like going back to the days of crate digging in some ways I guess

I love FLAC and it works on Serato and other software I use, but not iTunes or Rekordbox for some reason, which is really frustrating cos I'm forced to use those in certain circumstances

it's certainly frustrating that there's no major store that just sells 320kbps mp3s now that google play is dead. why does amazon's mp3 store have to be so terrible lol with its horrible bitrates. obviously bandcamp is great and so are all the dance-music focused stores but they don't have everything unfortunately, and aren't usually good for the particularly obscure/foreign stuff that no one has on soulseek.

if you really can't find anything better, the 256kbps aac format sold by itunes isn't far off 320kbps mp3 at least and certainly going to be better than the garbage mp3s sold by amazon.

ya know you can use xACT or a similar FLAC program to convert back to WAV and then go to MP3... I know it's a pain but it is a workaround if you are forced to use iTunes

oh i didn't realise 7digital/zdigital had such a good range though, i'm looking at it now and it seems like it will be my new go-to

ya know you can use xACT or a similar FLAC program to convert back to WAV and then go to MP3... I know it's a pain but it is a workaround if you are forced to use iTunes

― howls of non-specificity (sleeve), Friday, November 6, 2020 1:58 AM (fourteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

xact is great i go from flac to aiff and then to itunes and then to traktor

the only issue with aiff is it's huge so i had to go off an external hard drive until ............
.....
..
a few days ago it failed and i very stupidly had not backed it up.

always. back. up.

if you do use EAC to rip, someone/me can send you a config file that should almost* set it up perfectly

Thanks yall! Think I might start with foobar. Simple enough for noobs, I hope?

I actually miss using foobar, it’s very nice imo

i only buy organic mp3s from my local farm-to-table

aww, you tried

in seriousness though uhh, Bandcamp, Amazon, or daddy kool records (which weirdly seems to have stuff that doesn't seem to be available digitally elsewhere)

GA down to 1479

kbps?

hahahaha goddammit

#onethread

Just wanted to say how much I love MP3s. And FLACs. Just all the audio files, great stuff. No money to streaming services, no bulky storage, can put them on my phone, don't need a signal, nobody can remove them apart from me. Shame Bandcamp is owned by cunts now but you can't have it all.

Yes shout out to FLACs and high download speeds and the blue phoenix

Indeed.

Anyone tried Ampwall or Subvert?

flacs and aiffs all day long. pry em from my cold dead hands etc.

one more reason: i can edit out fuckin "doo doo" from the end of welcome to sky valley

trying out re:amp at the moment, a faithful old-school Winamp clone for macos (get it from mac informer- the developer's own site isn't hosting anymore).
you can skin it with any of the old winamp skins, archive.org has a file with 5000+ different ones. they're hilarious.
surprisingly plays .dsf files, even VLC won't do that out of the box. sadly won't play .it files though.

Winamp does not seem to agree with new versions of Windows, I had to do a complete reinstall earlier this year when it got stuck on a playlist that kept making it freeze every time it opened. I use Samsung Music on my phone, it doesn't seem to come with Samsung phones any more for some reason, but it's still available in the app store. It does everything I need and none of the annoying things, apart from asking me twice if I want to delete a file.

good to know about samsung music. i need to switch phones from apple to android, and samsung still makes some with headphone jacks.

It’s so much better now that we can get digital music files legally, when i used to pirate mp3’s i would get ear fatigue all the time. Now i know exactly what i’m getting and can choose the optimal file format and resolution for my personal player and storage capacity, it’s just a way better experience overall.

one more reason: i can edit out fuckin "doo doo" from the end of welcome to sky valley

― brimstead, Friday, July 4, 2025 8:57 PM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

being able to edit out spoken word intros/outros and all other kinds of lingering impediments to the flow of your mix: so classic

does anyone still make mix cds, that's what i wanna know

meeee

having all these newer Bandcamp files default to 24/96 is making that a lot harder though

ugh sleeve one of these days we gotta trade a mix cd!!! except you'll probably have everything that i put on it already lol

ha no way I would, let's do it

like there is SO MUCH music I do not know shit about, whole realms of electronic/dance/techno/house/whatever, most chart-pop after the 90's, vaporwave etc

the music league has been good for this (though I don't really have time for it now sadly)