A legal music downloading service that works on Linux

[Brian Burger]

On 5/19/07, Tom Mckay <tom.mckay1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> For those of you who are looking for legal music for the linux
> platform, I would highly recommend all of your to give http://last.fm
> a try. It's not exactly a downloading service (although there are
> thousands of free tracks available), but more of an internet radio
> variety.

For actual downloading, free & legal, there's two sites I've been
exploring a lot in the last couple of moths: Jamendo & Etree.

Jamendo (jamendo.com) is a free downloadable music centre, mostly of
CC-licensed music. Nice website, lots of ways to discover/search for
music. The selection is heavily shifted toward electronica, but
there's rock, pop, classical, folk, world, and lots of mixed-genre
music. Their tracks are also avaible both in mp3 & ogg, which is cool.

The actual downloads from Jamendo are via either BitTorrrent or EMule
- isn't it nice that Ubuntu has built-in torrent handling?

E-Tree (etree.org/bt) is a torrent-tracking site for band-approved
fan-recorded concert recordings. All sorts of artists, major and minor
- Radiohead, Dave Matthews Band & Canada's own Tragically Hip are
among three of my recent downloads.

Be warned these are *huge* torrent downloads - they're uncompressed
CD-quality FLAC files, mostly, and of full-length concerts, so most
downloads are 300+MB - biggest set I pulled down was just over 1GB,
for a Hip concert almost two hours long.

On my Last.fm account (http://www.last.fm/user/wirelizard/ if anyone
really wants to see) I've been using the 'jamendo' and 'etree' tags on
the songs I get from those two sources.

On a related music-on-computers note, the EFF just launched
PlayOGG.org, to encourage people to use non-patent-encumbered format
for their music.

I've got over 60GB of music on my harddrive, and it's all legal -
thanks both to relatively-sane Canadian copyright law & legal
torrents!

Brian
ubuntu.ca
wirelizard.ca