Ubuntu One Music Store | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu One Music Store

wiki.ubuntu.com

29 pointsadrianwaj16 comments

World - Songs from independent labels will be available for purchase in EUR. Unfortunately, no major labels license songs on a world-wide basis. Countries not covered by the rest of the regional stores will use this store.

Well, in that case, bittorrent would still be the best distribution channel for me. I hope someone working at music labels realizes soon that there are people like me who are willing to pay a fair price for music but would be forced to download it illegally because no legal channels are available. Not that I download music these days given that I am so sick of these guys and their bullshit.

No ogg or flac. Sigh.

You can get Vorbis and FLAC from Magnatune, which is also integrated into Rythmbox alongside Ubuntu One and Jamendo. Ubuntu One Music Store apparently chose 7digital for its wide selection of music, not the number of formats it supports.

They are also apparently working on more open formats and more formats in general.

I thought the service was provided by 7digital? They do some albums in flac (and wma, yuck).

Try looking for Radiohead - In Rainbows, that's definately available via 7digital directly in flac format.

At least it's not difficult to convert any format out there into ogg or flac.

But what would you gain from converting an MP3 to a FLAC?

Isn't that in the same vein as converting an existing 64kbps MP3 to a 256kbps one?

Well, at least with flac the sound won't change. It will just use a lot more disk space :)

Yeah you really wouldn't want to convert anything but WAV or any other lossless format into FLAC (mp3 and Ogg are lossy formats). Converting a lossy format (mp3 or Ogg) to a lossless format (FLAC or WAV) wouldn't recover any of the lost data and would be rather pointless. Converting WAV to FLAC, however, will reduce the original filesize to about 50-60% of its original size, while still maintaining the exact same audio quality as WAV. Converting FLAC to mp3 or Ogg will reduce the filesize even more but will remove some of the actual audio data (higher bitrates retain more of the original data but still remove some, though typically out of the range of what you'd notice listening to the song). At bitrates like 96kbps or even 128kbps, you'd probably notice a difference in audio quality, whereas with a 256kbps or 320kbps mp3 you probably wouldn't be able to tell much difference between it and the FLAC unless you have excellent hearing or it's being played on high-grade equipment.

So: FLAC -> mp3 OK mp3 -> FLAC Unnecessary

And mp3 <-> ogg vorbis: harmful.

I hope they have gift cards come x-mas

And so begins the commoditization of Ubuntu.

Worked for Apple.

Yes, and so far I don't see downsides to this (aside from the dubious design decisions). The sources are still open, many people make derivatives from this distro to cater to specialists, interest and usage of FOSS grows.

"Ubuntu will always be free of charge, along with its regular enterprise releases and security updates" "Ubuntu core applications are all free and open source. We want you to use free and open source software, improve it and pass it on."

How does a music download service commoditize anything about Ubuntu?

What happens if the 2GB storage on Ubuntu One are used up?

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