Ask HN: Where to legally bulk purchase MP3 in 2022? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where to legally bulk purchase MP3 in 2022?

11 pointsmprime121 comments

Is there a place online where I can legally and conveniently purchase mp3 for personal use?

I know most services have an offline listening option, but It doesn’t always work great.

If I'm understanding your question correctly, I think you're looking for something like Bandcamp which lets you pay to add music or other audio items to your collection which you can stream or download in high quality formats

https://bandcamp.com/

Bandcamp is fantastic and my preferred music platform. However it's sad more commercial popular albums can't be found on there, I'm sure due to record labels not wanting them on there.

For the more commercial tracks, it looks like Apple iTunes store still works. Not sure it meets the "bulk" part of your question.

Thank you. I thought band camp was good for indie music.

For example looked up ‘Nirvana’ and I only see their debut album, Bleach, available.

Still a great suggestion! Maybe I can’t get everything from there, but I can get some!

Yes, that's because Bleach, released by Sub Pop, is the only Nirvana album that's indie. The others were released by DGC Records.

I think if you get Deezer (has a better selection of more "popular" albums) you can use a Python script to get the music files in lossless or MP3 format.

Requires some setup iirc. It's not ideal at all. It's kind of sad that it's so difficult to get music files these days.

That one time in band camp ...

Bandcamp (https://bandcamp.com) provides DRM-free MP3 downloads, as does Amazon Digital Music (https://www.amazon.com/MP3-Music-Download/).

That link seems to 404, this works: https://www.amazon.com/MP3-Music-Download/b?node=163856011

Edit: If you want to follow what's advocated by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31386108, you can go here too: http://www.5z8.info/ninjastaroutlet_z8a6ci_toosexyfortv.mov :)

Thank you. I didn’t know Amazon made it easy-ish to download mp3 and their catalog is quite extensive.

I download them from YouTube. I don’t think that’s illegal (The YouTube video has to be downloaded to my computer in order for my browser to play it. I just go one step ahead and extract the audio as mp3)

A video container (file) is essentially a collection of video, audio and subtitle tracks and a register where to find what in the container, so that one can extract any of them.

You can download a youtube video with youtube-dl and one of the GUI projects that use it, once it's on your drive then you can use Audacity with the ffmpeg plugin to open that video and automatically get only the audio track(s) from it.

In Audacity you can label gaps and after that multi export each song as a batch from that track. In audacity one can resample, edit, export as many different audio containers (mp2, mp3, flac, ogg, etc...)

If you're using youtube-dl, you can tell it to download only the audio track in the first place. Try `youtube-dl -F video_id` to learn what formats are available, then `youtube-dl -f format_number video_id`.

hmm... i'm not sure that's how it works.

if i watch a movie in a cinema I will see it, right? I just take one more step and record my movie in the cinema so i can see it later.

also, just because you can see/hear/taste/etc something in a given set of conditions does not mean that you have the right to re-experience it in perpetuity for free.

I think the comparison is not accurate. According to you, the person you are answering to would only have to listen to the song somewhere. In reality, the movie you are mentioning isn’t being shown to him in the cinema (when watching something on YouTube) but instead he is given a CD (or USB stick, …) to put into a CD-drive (or port) in the cinema to start the movie. After the movie is finished, the person watching the movie leaves and the movie stays at the cinema but OP has „infinite“ access to it unless the cinema decides not to show it anymore. However, that’s still not how it works because I’m sure YouTube has some licensing going on.

I think it's more like you have access to the cinema 24/7 and you pay by watching ads between movies.

If you're going that far, just torrent FLACs or MP3s, you'll get better sound quality.

Don't underestimate the quality of audio tracks in modern video containers.

Most music services that sell music sell it DRM-free, so even if it's not MP3 to begin with, you can buy it, download it, and then convert it to MP3 or any other format with something like ffmpeg.

Also, the vast majority of physical music CDs have no DRM and can be ripped to whatever format you want. This is more inconvenient but can be much cheaper than buying digitally especially if you are looking for popular music.

For the longest time I just got all my music off of the archive.org live music archive.

Not a super huge selection but I could always find something interesting to listen to. Also found a bunch of bands I would have never otherwise from “so and so from $band_i_like did a set with $other_band” and checking out some shows from $other_band.

Quobuz also sells 24-bit audio files. You can do this without a subscription, but certain subscription tiers provide a discount.

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