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Comment by lmg643 | Hacker News Reader

I've been buying Mp3s from amazon for years - and the amazon downloader loads them to itunes seamlessly.

i started using amazon when itunes had a problem downloading MP3s properly - i keep my mp3 library on a NAS drive and amazon would write the file to C: before moving to the network, never seemed to have a problem. Itunes had a problem with this for a year or so before it seemed to resolve. itunes support was not helpful with this.

Plus - amazon has no conversion issues. i sometimes speed up songs for running using audacity, and you need to convert mp4s to mp3s before you can do this. with amazon - no conversion required.

not to mention that it is cheaper, sometimes 5.49 vs 9.99 for an album.

and now you can use the amazon cloudplayer from any computer. and they were giving away a special on cloud storage so i uploaded a copy of my old MP3s to amazon.

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If you open an MP3, speed it up in Audacity, and save it as an MP3, you are still re-encoding it and decreasing quality, which is what I assume you mean by "conversion".

After any processing step, you should save to a lossless format to avoid this. You can start with whatever format you want (AAC from iTunes and MP3 from Amazon are pretty indistinguishable in subjective quality.)

Better yet, use a portable player that can change playback speed on the fly while decoding. (many "DJ" apps, a hardware player than can run Rockbox, etc.)

Realistically, he's not going to notice the marginal quality loss when he's jogging.

That's a great solution. I run into an issue with Linux -- Itunes support is slipshod with WINE. Beyond moving to Windows or OSX, any suggestions?

I don't use it anymore, but back when I did, I believe Emusic would work well on Linux, particularly because it was all DRM-free.

This was several years ago, though.

I run into the issue of only being able to read from the device (so I can copy music with obfuscated filenames). But with writing to the device I've run into an issue. If I had the time (dissertating now) I'd figure it out, but until then a pre-packaged solution would be fantastic!

I too prefer buying from Amazon, for mostly the same reasons. I had assumed that it was saving me money too, so I checked the last 8 albums I bought:

   Amazon | iTunes
    6.99  | 6.99
    9.49  | 9.99
    7.99  | 7.99
    5.00* | 7.99
    5.00* | 7.99
    7.99  | 7.99
    5.99  | 7.99
    7.99  | 7.99

* Part of their X albums for $5 promotion.

So it seems that iTunes is a lot more price competitive than I thought.

Why are you trying to judge them based on 8 data points when a better comparison is the article you're commenting on?

Also, he saved 8 dollars by using Amazon. That's enough for another CD.

Mentioning CDs reminds me that the price of physical CDs on Amazon in some cases has dipped below $0. For some CDs, Amazon throws in the MP3 download (with the usual cloud storage) for "free". The funny thing is, the price of the CD+MP3 is sometimes less than the MP3 alone, even with shipping. Check the Velvet Underground's back catalog for some examples.

That is an awesome tip.

Now, if you pirated that mp3 track (with negative sale price), would that be "stealing"? :-)

But seriously: if you sell the CD, should you delete your MP3s?

My data is better than their data. There may be less of it, but it's mine, so it's better.

Your data shows you saved with amazon, what is your point?

That's all he's trying to show, he's not trying to show that it would save you money.

Because these 8 points are albums he actually bought. It could be that the albums that Amazon sell for cheaper are albums no one buys. By using his own purchases, he gets data that avoids this issue.

It improves it for music that he buys, not for music that people in general buy.

There was no attempt in the article to weight by volume, so his sample of albums is a good test of the claim.

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