I wrote this email to a friend today who wanted to know more about digital music. It was a pretty good, detailed response, so I thought I’d share it here in expanded form.

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Word on the street is you would like to take the plunge in the world of electronic digital music. Here’s what I have to say on that matter.

Preamble: I don’t condone the illegal downloading of illegal music. And neither do you. Pirates are bad people and should rot in hell.

Music Services

One of the best places to acquire legal music at a reasonable prices is EMusic.com. EMusic.com is the 2nd most popular online music store in the world, second only to ITunes, and bigger than MSN Music, Rhapsody, and Napster combined. It deals only with independent labels, so you won’t find the big popular hits here. Only awesome indie bands like The Arcade Fire, The Decemberists, TV on the Radio, and Yo La Tengo are on EMusic.com (bonus: check out David Cross’ screwball review of the new YLT album), and most downloads come out to about $.25/song. I love EMusic, and subscribe at their highest level.

You can also download legal music from one of the other services mentioned above, but they don’t really let you own the music you buy, so I suggest steering clearn of the ITunes, Rhapsody, MSN, and Napster. Unless you like having to give back your purchases after you’ve used them too many times.

MP3 Blogs

There are tons of great MP3 blogs out there, some of which offer legal MP3 downloads, some of which completely skirt the law. There are far too many blogs to list, but I’ll offer a few tips:

  1. Make Elbo.ws your first top. It’s an MP3 blog aggreagor, and the first place I go when I’m trying to find a specific track on the web.
  2. Often Google search contructed like “‘Name of song’ mp3 download” will turn up decent results.
  3. Subscribe to genre-specific music blogs. I like Stereogum and Villians Always Blink.

File Sharing Networks

Avoid them. They suck and are riddled with viruses and RIAA spies.

BitTorrent

Now, theoretically, one could acquire albums elsewhere on the web using a technology called BitTorrent. BitTorrent breaks a file into a ton of little chunks, and lets you download those different chunks from different peers simultaneously, which means that you can download files very very quickly. The whole process goes like this:

Process

  1. You find a .torrent file hosted on a website. You download that file.
  2. Your BitTorrent software automatically opens that file and connects you back to the website from which you downloaded it. The website uses a “tracker” to connect you with all the other people sharing the same file out on the internets. This happens seamlessly. You just continue sipping coffee and looking at porn.
  3. You download the file from dozens of different people. As soon as you download even a small part of the file, you begin uploading to others out on the web. As long as you keep your BitTorrent software (“client“) open and don’t delete the .torrent file, you will share that file. You will not share any other files on your computer unless you explicitly go through the process of creating a .torrent file and upload it to a website. (That’s another conversation.)
  4. When the file is complete you play it in your music player (Foobar2000 rulez, n00bz!) and rock out hardcore.

Software

Just like email, BitTorrent files are platform-independent. Unlike the closed networks of yore (Napster vs. Gnutella vs. Audio Galaxy vs. eDonkey vs. FastTrack), one BitTorrent client does not lock you into one network. Any .torrent file can be used on any number of trackers. That said, the best BitTorrent client for Windows is µTorrent. Azureus is also good — especially if you’re on a Mac.

Sites

There are many popular trackers on the web. Some of the biggest include:

However, these sites deal mostly in illegal files, so we do not recommend them. There is plenty of legal music located here and here and here that you can download.

Advanced Topics in BitTorrent

  • There are many private web-based forums out there. If you gain access to one of these, keep in mind that these are currency-based systems, meaning that for most you need to upload as much as you download.
  • If you are behind a firewall, you will need to become “clever” in order to share at full capacity. Becoming clever means tunneling through the firewall to your local machine by forwarding all BitTorrent traffic from the port on your router to your private IP address.
  • BitTorrent does not encrypt or obfuscate traffic in any way, so please understand there is risk involved with using it for illegal downloads. That said, don’t download illegally. If you must, use obscuring technologies such as Peer Guardian or Tor to protect yourself. They’re not perfect, but they may help.
  • If your broadband internet connection is not the speediest, consider capping your download and upload speeds. I cap my upload speeds at 20 k/s so I can continue to surf the web comfortably while downloading legal Linux distributions.

Rip it Yourself

And if you do, make sure it’s MP3 format (universally supported) and and a high bit rate (192 VBR minimum, 320 VBR is optimal). (For the true geeks in the house, Flac is your best choice, as it provides high quality lossless compression. However, it isn’t yet supported by all MP3 players, and Flac files will be heavier than MP3s.)

Use good software. The best rips are going to come from EAC using the LAME codec. If you’re a point and shoot kind of music fan, just use whatever you got. More fodder here.

That’s all for now!