music library
just curious where people go to get their music.
what sites people use to download music and build up their library, or by whatever means you do to build it up
- various music blogs
- promos
Beatport! and a cool little search engine i use that tends to have alot of house music called “Soulseek”
i am always wondering how people can bare the beatport.com website. then again, i buy most of my music on itunes, which has its share of annoyances, for example they make buying gift cards and allowances a nightmare by rejecting accounts and credit cards with nebulous reasons.
Personally I buy quite a bit off itunes now too. They just seem to have loads of good shit and the genius side bar is just well tempting. I love the genius playlist feature too. I rediscover so many tunes that way. Also itunes is cheaper than beatport and the artwork is embedded when you buy the track, which is pretty key.
I also use stompy.com and junodownload.com. Sometimes beatport…
soulseek is filesharing innit. I just can’t justify filesharing anymore, I like to support people making good music. It’s very affordable to pay to download music so I think it’s impossible to justify filesharing. I’ll admit i’ve used soulseek music but just felt i was stealing from a scene i had an interest in supporting and keeping alive.
I use soulseek but i’m not a dj who plays out for money, or plays out at all to be honest and am not trying to either. Just recently i think ive worked out its my downfall. I totally saturate my hard drive with new music so that i never really learn any of my tunes. Its like when i had a chipped playstation 2, you never really apreciate or hammer a game cus its far to easy to move onto the next game etc etc ..
I think even if it’s a hobby you should still pay for music.
Also it’s true. You do appreciate the music more when you pay for it.
It’s like vinyl days. If there was a rare 12" import double pack i’d pay £12.99 and I only like one mix on it, I’d still get it if the tune was heavy. Even if that was the only thing i bought that week. Buying music makes you more selective no doubt. You’d go to a record shop and spend like 2 hours in there going through stack after and come out with 5-6 bullets.
Once I made the decision to stop all downloads via file sharing i started appreciating my music and collection more again.
Honestly I don’t download a lot of music due to the fact I hate low grade/mp3 quality files, and that I like to have my music in a physical form be it vinyl or CD. I have found some digital record pools that I use though when I want something new and now. Mind you I am mainly a hip hop DJ…
www.gigacrate.com <— Great for newer style hip hop… Some you have to pay, but you get to download a lot for free as long as you rate/comment/post about it and give your 2 cents
ccmixter.com <— Great for all sorts of crazy stuff all under creative commons license so you can use it any way you want as long as you simply credit the original creator.
www.pitchcontrolrecordpool.com
NB when you buy of itunes you still got to convert to mp3 - 320kbps but once you buy a few just highlight em and convert. Then I delete the originals. But the beauty is they got the artwork embedded still.
I hate that you have to manually add artwork on a lot of sites. It’s a real hassle.
@ djmaxone
Why are you converting to mp3? Nearly every DJing software will play AAC’s now, so it’s no longer necessary.
All your doing is throwing away a bit of quality by converting from one lossy format to another.
@ Thisisian
Ummm.. Oh yeah, just tried it and it does indeed.
I just thought it seemed the safest option for all different software - never know what i’m going to end up doing in the future and mp3 seems to be the best default format for ID3 tags and compatibility etc. Technology seems to be moving at a fast pace and mp3 just seems the most common to work with everything and also keeps the file size small. Also I do a lot of video work and find that AAC is not compatible with avid, etc.
I just think it makes sense to keep my entire library in the same format.
320 mp3s are fine for me quality wise too. I’m nerdy but not enough to hear any major difference between 320 mp3s and WAVs (perhaps the slightest) and I’ve got a pretty crisp set of KRK VST4 powered monitors running off an AK1 soundcard.
It’s not like i’m working on the soundtrack for lord of rings…
Maybe i’m wrong though and cheers for pointing it out though. Is digital food for thought