RSSMusicGiants Joins DRM-free Bandwagon
By Ed Oswald | Published June 21, 2007, 5:44 PM
Hoping to one-up Apple with its recent move away from digital rights management, high-quality music site MusicGiants began offering DRM-free music recently with the release of Paul McCartney's newest album, Memory Almost Full. In a recent interview with audio magazine Stereophile, MusicGiants CEO Scott Bahneman said the service plans to release more DRM-free albums later this year. Partners in the offering have not been announced.
MusicGiants specializes in offering high quality “lossless” tracks in Windows Media format, and launched last year. It bills itself as the only service to offer such high-quality tracks, which are the same quality as one would receive from a physical CD. McCartney’s album sells for $15.29 USD on the site, although consumers can purchase a version with a 26-minute interview with the singer on recording the album for $21.93 USD.
MusicGiants does offer music in FLAC. You need to call them and they will take care of you. You should also check out their HD Imagery. Amazing to be looking at HD art while listening to pure, lossless music.
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|MusicGiants is getting better, but I'd still rather have the CD. There charging about the same price as CD's, but without the CD and cover art. I can also nomrally find the CD for cheaper too, be it new or used. MusicGiants music selection isn't all that good though either.
They should lower there price's then it might be more practical.
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|One thing the article failed to mention is that MusicGiants is the only download service on the planet that offers Super HD, as in 5.1 surround sound at sampling rates of up to 11,000 kbps.That's way better than any CD. Another thing to point out is that although WMP may have its share of glitches, it's new Vista operating platform gives customers the control over their music files that they have been yearning for. You can download WMA Lossless and then transocde the file down to any size you want for use on you cell phone and PMP. So, why would you buy anything but the best quality download from the beginning???
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|I applaude MusicGiants for their use of DRM-free audio, but because of personal dislike of Windows Media...lossless or not...I cannot support their service.
When they start using FLAC, then I'll consider them. Until then, I'll remain a relic and continue to buy...gasp...compact discs.
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|Ok let's be honest shall we. most people download there music for free. WHY? Cause it's free and the itunes alternative isn't even perfect cd quality. I should point out that even cd quality is getting long in the tooth now. The best sounding format is dts 5.1, everything else sucks bad. If you don't know the difference then don't even bother telling me I'm wrong. So if these companies wanna aid in sales and make a difference then they all need to reincode the music in dts. It's not like it's a big deal. DVD-Audio failed cause the RIAA never really forced it apon anyone. And they need to offer actual quality product so people will want what they offer. I'm not paying for a watered down version of a CD at full CD prices. But give me hi-def sound, which is what DTS is. And i will shell out 10-15 bucks for the music.
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|Just for clarification, the only flavor of DTS suitable for music is DTS 96/24 audio. The regular DTS commonly found on movie DVD's sounds just as crappy as Dolby Digital encoded music. What is really funny is that DTS thinks their DTS 24/96 audio format sounds better than lossless 24-bit 96 KHz PCM audio (which of course is completely untrue).
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|so how excactly are you going to get that sound out of anything recorded 40 years ago onto s***ty formats?
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|But it's serving Windows Media format, which is crap.
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|Since it's DRM free, couldn't you just convert it to a lossless open format like FLAC? I honestly can't decipher the difference in quality between the lossless formats - but maybe you have better ears than most.
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|Erm, what would the point be in converting a lossy format to a lossless format?
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|The format they're talking about in the article is the lossless version of Windows Media Format, supposedly a perfect copy of the original CD. I was just making the point that if there is no DRM you could convert to whatever format you like - for all the Windows Media haters.
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|I think you missed the word lossless in the article.
They're all practically the same when they're lossless.
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|Ah, I didn't RTFA.
The argument could be made that one shouldn't support the format with money, though.
Also, you'd need software to decode/demux the bought tracks first, which would legally require paying protection/license money in some countries, such as the USA.
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|Except what it can be played on.
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|Why bother. Lossless FLAC and SHN files are converted to WAV before you burn the CDs any way. I have burned WMA lossless files on a CD and used them in an older KENWOOD (15+ years old) machine that doesn't even mention that it reads other formats beside the standard PCM WAVs.
You can get plugins for NERO 6 but converting even DRM free WMA files to other formats does not work at all. "You'll get some message about "Microsoft's license does not... Blah Blah Blah."
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