New Nine Inch Nails album free online in various formats

The Slip is Nine Inch Nails‘ new album. Nothing special so far. But hey, it is officially offered as a free download! And not in just one file format, so choose what suits you best:

• MP3: nice and space saving for your portable player.
• FLAC lossless: with the right codec, you can play this directly, but do not forget that you can also convert this to WAV files and make a CD with audio quality identical to what will be sold in June.
• Apple M4A lossless: if you want to be limited to a closed format suit yourself.
• HD audio WAV 24bit/96kHz: these files are in the tune of the high definition SACD and DVD-Audio formats. By far the best quality of sound, useless for your computer or MP3 player, to be appreciated only with a proper high quality sound system. Download size is 1.4GB. (continued)

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Amazon MP3 service will be available internationally in 2008

We have already discussed here how well Amazon MP3 develops into a veritable iTunes threat and it was pointed out how nice it would be to have the service available universally. Apparently Amazon has been listening and is planning an international rollout for its well received MP3 service. Launched only in September 2007, Amazon MP3 has managed to quickly secure offerings from all four big labels, not less than 3.3 million songs and 270,000 artists. Now if you are stuck in finding something good to listen to, nobody will believe you any more…

Amazon challenges iTunes

Amazon prefers to keep things quite but has quite canily prepared the ground for a major offensive against the big enemy, who else… Apple’s iTunes. Sony BMG is the latest of the large music labels to join the Amazon camp with sweet DRM-free downloads. This means that now Amazon has access to the vast catalogues of all four major labels! This betters Apple’s iTunes since in the later you won’t find Universal’s DRM-free songs. On the price front Amazon is still cheaper with 89-99 cents per song against iTunes’ standard 99 cents. Recently iTunes reduced the DRM-free price to 99 cents from a previously uncompetitive $1.29.

Fraunhofer HD-AAC codec touted as better than CD, sounds promising

The Fraunhofer Institute brought the world the MP3 revolution so no reason not to listen up carefully to what they propose! Now they come up with a new audio format, the HD-AAC. The deal is lossless compression and 24-bit music content. Given that CDs are 16-bit, Fraunhofer’s promise that it is better than CD is logical. With 24 bits, HD-AAC’s sound quality is more in line with the superb DVD-Audio and SACD formats. File sizes are not yet known, compression will probably make things manageable for easy portability.

The tactic to introduce the new format is two-pronged. Firstly, the Fraunhofer Institute is offering the related software for computers, embedded devices and manufacturers via a certification program. Secondly, backwards compatibility with the older AAC format is built in by a core layer that ensures that HD-AAC can be played by AAC compatible players.

Warner Music downloads via Amazon

Welcome news! Warner Music MP3 files are now available for download from Amazon. Price is 89 cents per song compared to the 99 cents for every DRM-protected song from Apple’s iTunes. Amazon has a standard non-DRM policy for all its music downloads which means that you can enjoy on any platform as you wish. Bravo Amazon! Bravo Warner!

Link: Reuters