There are some really great places online to buy music. The small independents are getting the right idea. The store I was on today was the best yet, full length previews, all formats the same price just a great experience.

It’s pretty simple, listen to the album you want to buy, click BUY, select your format (MP3, AAC, ALAC, FLAC etc…) enter you Paypal details and boom your downloading your stuff. No signing up, no messing about.

It was easy, simple, and overall a good way to buy music. I still prefer CD’s but as they offer ALAC and FLAC it’s fine and reduces wear on my CD drive.

Bought an album and an EP for £8, all FLAC so I can convert to any format I want, just good stuff.

I have just got back from seeing U2 in 3D and all I can really say is it’s amazing! If you’re not a U2 fan you should go and see it all the same. The whole concert if filmed using a modern form of 3D and not the old nasty kind with the red and green filter glasses, you still need to use glasses but they are more like sunglasses and they don’t distract from the performance. Being a U2 fan I was a bit disapointed by the lack of Achtung Baby content in the encore at the end, that said the visuals of The Fly are awesome! It would have been even better if they included Mysterious Ways, Even Better Than The Real Thing, saying that Elevation would have been nice but again this film is limited to one and half hours.

On the whole the 3D is amazing the sound quality was better than I expected, there are better U2 performances like the mighty U2 ZooTV Live From Sydney performance or the Chicago concert for that matter (shame about the poor sound quality on chicago)

It’s not in the cinema long so get down there. If you haven’t got anyone to go with let me know, I would love to watch it again. If you are not in to U2 you should go and watch it!

It’s a bargain at £9!

This is an interesting post from Moby’s Journal that I happen to agree with, I won’t go on about my views on it all here as it will take me far too long to type it all out. Something does need to be done and pretty soon!

http://www.moby.com/journal/2007-11-19/i_was_bar_tonight_3rd_street.html

Not too sure about all this stuff, DRM Free is a good move, and also seeing the quality increase to 256K AAC is pretty good. Now the downside, the price hike from 79p to 99p for what they are calling premium versions. To start with they will be offering an upgrade option for the EMI tracks you already own, of course your gonna have to pay extra for that also.

The whole way through they kept mentioning that they are not offering anything that is not available already on CD. So lets look at the case for CD, you can get a CD cheaper from Amazon than buying the download, you get whatever quality you want to encode the tracks at, all the tracks are DRM free, you get a nice CD and case and art work. You can play your CD on your Hi-Fi car stereo etc… if your iPod or other player or computer gets stolen you can just re-encode from the CD.

CD is the clear winner, downloads only represent a small percentage of the market and the CD offers better quality and all the options you want. So why are they all going mad about advertising downloads? Well the record companies can make more money by getting rid of the overhead of physical media and distribution costs and keeping them for themselves, they can sell you a compressed format and a few years later offer you a better quality for a new price. The only store that had the right idea for downloads is Warp Records that have been offering all bitrate qualities including Lossless formats and all DRM free for the same price and a few pence more for the CD. They have been doing this for years and seems like the best thing to be doing. With the huge amounts of storage and large amounts of bandwidth we have lossless shouldn’t be a problem.

Buy the CD in the first place and you can have it anyway you want it for less!

Don’t get me wrong this is a great new step but CD is still king!

It’s very rare that you get two great albums released in the same month, even rarer two albums in the same week, but two on the same day!. Ok the two albums I’m talking about are Depeche Mode – Playing The Angel and The Prodigy – The Singles 1990-2005.

The Prodigy : Singles 1990-2005
The singles comes in two versions the normal 16 Track version and the Limited Edition version CD1 @ 15 tracks and CD2 @ 16 Tracks. The first disc is the same on both except the last track off the normal version has been carried off to the second disc on the 2CD version. Firstly I would say for the ultimate Prodigy remixes album would be the CD2 from this and the CD2 from the Prodigy Experience Expanded 2CD version. The first disc is pretty good there are some nice “05 mixes of older tunes but to be honest they aren’t really that much different from the originals. With disc 1 we get possibly the two best prodigy mixes ever “Charly (Alley Cat Remix)” and “Everybody In Place (Fairground Remix)”, this remix version of Everybody in the place is the only version I have ever listened to as I can’t stand the normal version, check out the wickedness at 3:05 > 3:19 now thats the nuts!. It’s a shame to see Wind It Up (Rewound Remix) and Smack My Bitch Up (Sub Focus Mix) missing instead we get that Audio Bully’s remix of out of space which it probably one of the biggest lumps of shit I have ever heard and should not be on this compilation!. Ok lets get down to it, is this album worth getting? yep 100% as long as you get the 2CD limited edition version it has all the Prodigy goodness you could need and if at present you are listening to some RnB soft shit you really need to buy this (It might change your life!). It’s odd cause I remember the tracks on The Experience Expanded sounding better than these versions, will check it out when I get my system running for those interested (Let me know).

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Somebody has done a nice KLF mix called The Sound of Mu(sic). It’s pretty good as it’s really just the Chill out album and the Space project albums mixed nicely with some extra KLF samples. You can get it here!!!!