[vox] Mp3 Music For Linux?

[Micah Cowan]

On Tue, 2006-12-26 at 11:32 -0800, Bob Scofield wrote:

> I'm trying to learn how to use mp3's legally.  But it doesn't seem possible.  
> All I'm trying to do is to download mp3's to play with and learn from.  I'm 
> willing to pay for the files.  But I can't do it.  When I go to a legal 
> website it seems like I cannot access music without a commercial software 
> program, and these programs do not run on Linux.  Is there some place where 
> someone can legally download mp3 music files straight onto a hard disk 
> without using some program for Napster or Itunes?

Bob, this continues to be a serious problem.

At the moment, I am still purchasing CDs and using grip to generate my
MP3s.

There /are/ some legal digital music purchasing sites, but they all seem
to suffer from one or more of the following problems:

  - no mainstream, popular label music
  - overpriced
  - DRM-only (which also typically implies Windows- or other proprietary
OS-dependant).

Given all of this, it's no wonder that music piracy continues to be a
widespread practice. The practical options for legally obtaining
DRM-free digital music are few indeed.

BTW, have you looked into encoding to Ogg instead of MP3? I use MP3s for
two reasons: by the time I realized Ogg was a better idea in general, I
already had a large library of MP3s, and chose consistency; and my
digital music player doesn't support Ogg.

Ogg has better-quality encoding, and is patent-unencumbered. Every Linux
distro I'm aware of has support for Ogg, whereas these days, more and
more official distros are not including MP3 support by default, for
legal reasons. By going and downloading the MP3 support, you may well be
violating IP laws (though, my personal reasoning is that I've already
paid my royalties through the purchase of other MP3-capable devices--but
I've no clue if that'd hold up in a court: I'm doubtful).

-- 
Micah J. Cowan
Programmer, musician, typesetting enthusiast, gamer...
http://micah.cowan.name/