Lala.com has:- NO DRM! Use songs on virtually any computer, phone or other music device.
- The lowest prices.
- The best selection.
- High-quality 256 kbps MP3 files.
- The fastest way to find, sample, buy and download pretty much any song or CD.
- Instant sync with iTunes.
- Sample over 6 million FULL songs (not just 30-second clips).
In his blog this week, Robertson is yet again trying to get you to think poorly of Lala in favor of his failing MP3tunes venture. Don't fall for his propaganda. Most people don't even care about a silly "locker" for their music, as they prefer to have their music stored on THEIR hard drive and devices. You can buy a 1 Terabyte drive at Costco for around $100. (In my opinion, anyone who stores their music at MP3tunes and expects that company to be around in the future is kidding themselves. Look at what happened to MP3.com, Linspire, and other Robertson ventures. Where are they today?)
I encourage you to give Lala a try. It doesn't get any easier to find, buy and download high-quality, DRM-free music. I'm happy to finally see a legit site that respects artists and copyright law and that is easier and more convenient to use than piracy.
Thanks Lala!
Kevin
Click image above to see why Lala is the best music service
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10 comments:
Kevin,
don't you think it's enough of MR bashing? I think basically you're right but your blog has no other subject. So, as a reader I'm more and more under the impression that you're frustrated and fight your private vendetta because you currently have no other things to do.
You don't need to post this comment, but maybe it helps you to understand how the whole things looks from an external view.
Pete
256k is not high quality in any format. CD audio stream is what? like 1530k?
You made more of a point for buying the CD and ripping them to FLAC.
My 500 gig hard drive has several dozen CDs in FLAC files, I'm sure it wouldn't bother a 1 TB drive.
Is there a huge perceivable difference, no, but I could spot the MP3 just by listening.
Microsoft had one of their "comparisons" a while back where they tried to make the case that 64k WMA sounded "CD quality" and better than 128k MP#, it was bogus and the samples they picked were fairly easy to compress.
They then went on to release a tool with "Plus for Windows XP" that "saved hard disk space by reencoding all your MP3s to 64k WMA"
I don't think I've ever laughed so hard in my life.
But the point is, if I pay for CD quality, CD quality is what I shall have, by buying the CD and ripping to lossless.
Kevin,
With MR's track record regarding the longevity of the companies he starts or is involved with, of course his particular business models are failing.
Not to be mean, but the reality is that people simply don't seem to trust MR. Myself included. If a business venture has MR's name on it, red flags appear in my mind.
He would probably do much better to be a, 'silent partner,' in these ventures. If the venture is legit, it will have a chance on it's own merits.
With MR's name attached, it's gonna have problems because of his reputation.
Regards,
Larry
Yes, more and more I find that people have gotten to learn what the REAL Michael Robertson is like. Anyone should think long and hard before having ANY involvement with him, in any capacity.
Kevin
Pete,
If you look at the topic cloud, you'll see I have discussed many other things besides Robertson (music, politics, etc.). However, every blogger has their area of expertise, and that's why people follow that blogger.
Many of the people who subscribe to my blog do so specifically because they want to follow what MR is up to. My blog is the once source for the REAL story about Robertson. I think it's good that someone is providing that. So yes, that IS how many readers perceive my blog, and I'm fine with that. That's why I have a seperate blog for Dating DNA (blog.datingdna.com) and am in the process of spinning out a specific "Michael Robertson Watch" blog for those who are interested in following ONLY that blog.
Kevin
A few more points against the music stores:
1. Used CDs are cheap, often half the price of buying the album as downloads, sometimes as cheap as 1/10th the price.
2. When you have the CD, you can rip to any format you want using any encoder you like.
Stores tend to use the Fruenhofer and Coding Technologies reference encoders, and reference encoders suck.
Case in point, look at how many bugs LAME MP3 corrects in the MP3 reference encoder, look at how much better the free/open source gsycho psychoaccoustic model is, and for the love of God, the reference AAC encoder doesn't even have true Variable Bitrate support.
(Closest is iTunes with a much inferior method called ABR/Average Bitrate)
So if you want a good MP3, you have to use LAME, if you want good M4A/AAC, use FAAC/FAAD.
3. Speaking of VBR brings me to my next point.
Why exactly do I want to pay an online store to pretend like it's 1997 and waste about 1/3rd (or more) of my portable's space by using a braindead Constant Bitrate Encoder?
It's actually funny that Fruenhofer makes money selling licenses for LAME when they didn't even create it and nobody wants to use their actual reference MP3 encoder.
Proprietary software and software patents, and patent trolls such as Apple, Microsoft, Thomson, Fruenhofer, Sony, and a bunch of others are why MP3 is still so widespread even though it is technically obsolete, and why people will keep on using it as the patents are fixing to expire over the next few years.
If ever there was a case of software patents causing harm to open and fair competition, this is it, you can find an MP3 player that plays Ogg Vorbis, but you still pay the MP3 patent tax to have the thing.
Enjoy it while you can. CDs will be dead and gone soon. Welcome to the future. (I say, bring it on.)
Kevin
They won't kill off CDs any time soon.
There's plenty of people that either feel like I do about
1. Digital Restrictions Malware, codecs, and pricing.
-or-
2. Don't even have or want a computer.
Paing CD prices for an MP3 is like paying full price to go to the movies to find out that they're using an 8MM projector and a bed sheet.
MP3 and M4A are really only useful for squeezing as many songs onto your portable as possible.
Personally I formatted my player's operating system off and installed RockBox which lets me use FLAC and Ogg Vorbis.
You get additional problems when you go from MP3 to it'a proprietary replacement AAC (M4A) because the sleezy people behind that have several different encoding methods that are supported, and on top of that there's FAAC which unofficially brings in true Variable Bitrate support.
So if you want to use Backwards Prediction, Linear Prediction, Spectral Band Replication, Variable Bitrate, or parametric stereo, or any of the above (which represent over half the improvements over MP3), you're not guaranteed that every AAC decoder will support it.
So we're down to:
MP3: Ancient with some modern features tacked on way after the fact.
AAC/M4A: Good codec if you are willing to use techniques that are FULLY ISO approved and risk having it not work on players that claim support.
Ogg Vorbis: The _ONLY_ modern codec that's guaranteed to work everywhere that claims support.
The industry is reluctantly still backing MP3 cause so many people have so many songs in it, but they want AAC for DRM, and Microsoft doesn't support AAC because they want to put your data in a Windows-dependent jail.
Now you try explaining all that to my mom and tell her you want her to encode a CD with the best results.
Hell, it's almost too much for me sometimes, I was trying to use AAC on my player til I found out it only supported Low Complexity Constant Bitrate.
Thankfully, Free/Open Source Software stepped in and fixed the problem caused by a greedy set of industry factions.
I was reading another Michael Robertson column recently...and again he was talking about LaLa...how they use a form of Network DRM.
http://www.michaelrobertson.com/archive.php?minute_id=292
I'd be interested in hearing your response Kevin.
Glenn
Glen,
Not much more to say beyond what I said here:
http://kevincarmony.blogspot.com/2009/04/michael-robertson-wants-to-fool-you.html
Typical Robertson BS.
Kevin
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