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

11 points by mprime1 ↗ HN
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.

21 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 55.3 ms ] thread
iwanttocomment
Bandcamp (https://bandcamp.com) provides DRM-free MP3 downloads, as does Amazon Digital Music (https://www.amazon.com/MP3-Music-Download/).
mprime1
Thank you. I didn’t know Amazon made it easy-ish to download mp3 and their catalog is quite extensive.
Minor49er
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/

mprime1
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!

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

jmprspret
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.
dv_dt
For the more commercial tracks, it looks like Apple iTunes store still works. Not sure it meets the "bulk" part of your question.
daggersandscars
Quobuz also sells 24-bit audio files. You can do this without a subscription, but certain subscription tiers provide a discount.
kX4A8o4mVmX8aW
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.

tkiolp4
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)
mirceal
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.

randomluck040
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.
mirceal
I think it's more like you have access to the cinema 24/7 and you pay by watching ads between movies.
cercatrova
If you're going that far, just torrent FLACs or MP3s, you'll get better sound quality.
Yaa101
Don't underestimate the quality of audio tracks in modern video containers.
Yaa101
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...)

voussoir
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`.
UncleEntity
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.