BLEEP, BLEEP

2006.04.17 @ 13:10

(6)

The other day I used the Bleep paid music download site for the first time. I’d heard about it quite some time ago, but at that stage it had quite a small selection of music, mostly stuff from the Warp catalog (of which Bleep is a subsidary thing, or vice versa.. can’t remember but they’re connected in some way).

Now they seem to have much, much more available, from all sorts of labels. You won’t find any top 40 trash in there, and it’s mostly geared to the Warp audience, a bit more electronica, experimental, avant-garde, blah blah, which is fine by me. The albums I picked up this time were Aluminium Tunes by Stereolab and 28 by Aoki Takamasa and Tujiko Noriko.

Anyway, after a bit of browsing they sold me, since the music they have is completely without any kind of copy restriction - just MP3s, encoded with LAME at some setting (alt-preset-standed or something) which provides very good quality. I’ve been wary of other offerings like the iTunes store, not only because of the restrictions, which in the iTunes case are actually pretty lenient, but that the audio quality provided is usually not great. These MP3s however sound very nice. Here’s a screenshot of the info window in iTunes.

One other thing I’d lamented about the rise of the music download industry is the decline in importance of cover art, which has historically been a great breeding ground for interesting artwork and illustration, and great source of work for designers to have fun making great stuff without the heavy requirements and restrictions of other media. To my surprise and delight, when I brought the MP3s into iTunes, the cover art showed up in the little window instantly, I don’t know how, and don’t really care either. So long as it works with the most excellent CoverFlow, which it does, I’m happy! But yeah, I guess this blog post is somewhat of a recommendation for the service. Out of the various download sites I think it’s good to support those without copy restrictions, and I’ll be using it again.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 17th, 2006 at 1:10 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous Debris. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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Reader Comments

Yaduhh / 2006.04.17 @ 22:35

Amarok on linux handles also covers. :)
http://www.geocities.com/yaduhhh/amarok.jpg
For Itunes, cover is embedded into the file.

I agree with you about the sad decline of covert art.
Bill / 2006.04.21 @ 06:57

Sounds interesting, though in theory AAC / mpeg4 audio as used by the iTunes Music Store should give you better sound quality at the same bitrates than mp3s.

The iTunes DRM is annoying though, can’t disagree there!
Matt / 2006.04.21 @ 12:45

Hey Bill, good to hear from you :)

I use nice high bitrate AAC for all my own ripped CDs, but as far as I know though the iTunes store AACs are only encoded at 128k - the MP3s from Bleep are higher bitrate, and LAME is the best MP3 encoder out there, it’s been tweaked for years. At least it sounds better to me than the 30s samples I hear through the iTunes store, so I’m happy :)
Yaduhh / 2006.04.22 @ 10:28

i’m jalous, cause you know Bill, you reply to him. :/

well,maybe my answer wasn’t useful…
Matt / 2006.04.22 @ 10:35

Yaduhh: argh! Don’t be jealous, I found your comment interesting, I just didn’t really have anything in particular to say in response :) I mostly don’t say anything if I have nothing to say.

cheers and thanks for taking the time to comment anyway!
Hatlxle / 2006.10.11 @ 04:09

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