amarok and free music

November 1st, 2006

Yeah, very cool new offering from Amarok this week. Amarok, of course, being THE best music player on the planet the last few years and they have new releases very close to each other with a lot of innovation, this is really fast paced open source development at its finest. In the newly released version 1.4.4, Amarok has added integration with the Magnatune music store.

Why do we care? The thing is, Magnatune is a pretty cool, modern music label that signs a lot of musicians and gives them a much better deal than the established music industry (which is known to sponsor certain marketable artists through the roof while leaving the rest in the gutter). They have also taken the new medium that is the internet for what it is and sell mp3s without DRM. And they cut 50% of the price right to the artists, so you know they are not being paid in peanuts. You can buy an album for a price you set yourself (minimum is $5).

But Magnatune only has music that isn't licensed by other labels, which means none of that stuff I've ever even heard, how do I know what's what? This is where Amarok comes in. On Magnatune's site, you can listen to the music before you buy anything (you could even record it if you wanted to bend the rules a little bit), but with Amarok now integrating the collection, you can just drag and drop albums or tracks right onto your playlist, just as you do with files on disk. Hell, you can queue up all of Magnatune if you wanted to. So essentially, you can listen to all that music for free, just as long as you're online. Of course, if you want it on the mp3 player, you'll have to buy it. (Or if you want to support Magnatune and the artist for offering this.) They sell albums in mp3 format and on cds (remember those plastic things?).

So up until this point Magnatune was there, but with Amarok it's going to be a lot more accessible and a lot more people are going to hear about it. Classic example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.

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1 Responses to "amarok and free music"

  1. [...] been a while now since I found out about Magnatune, the record company that doesn’t hate the world (and [...]