Alex Hixon’s Blog

Now, I’ll be honest. I haven’t bought much legitimate music lately, except for a couple albums I bought a few years back. I *would* buy LPs if I had a player that worked… But yes, shock, horror. I am a freeloader, to be fair.

Well, seeing as there was a multitude of songs that weren’t available on most P2P networks, I decided, hell, let’s at least have a look around and see if I could get songs elsewhere. Amazon’s MP3 downloads aren’t available in Australia, and iTunes is, well.. evil in so many different ways.

So, after looking around, I discovered Beatport (no, this isn’t one of those paid plugs, they’re just pretty cool). They provide a really large range of electronic music (incl. house, club, electro). The user interface is really nice, but it’s a bit annoying that they only provide Flash. But you can quickly go from song to song, artist to artist, finding songs you wouldn’t normally otherwise hear. It also provides 2-3 minute previews of songs (low quality of course). You can pay using PayPal or via credit card directly. What I did find annoying was that the songs are reasonably high priced to what I was expecting (something like from $1.49 for most tracks to $2.49 for newer ones), and that some tracks aren’t always available even though they’re in the catalogue, and some popular tracks they just don’t seem to have. Otherwise, I’ve been reasonably happy.

You can choose output formats of 320 Kbps CBR MP3, 192 Kbps VBR MP4 and 1141 Kbps WAV. They charge a WAV handling fee so that’s semi-lame, though, I can understand why.

If anybody has suggestions as to other similar websites, please comment and point me there. Also, anybody else used Beatport? What did you think of it?

I just noticed that the song Do It 2 Nite’s chorus is a sample from SOS Band’s Take Your Time (Do It Right).
However, there’s literally no attempt to make the sample any different from the other. All they did was speed it up a bit, increase the bass and add a highhat, and add some effects. Lame!

The fact that they got the credit for coming with a bouncy house track is even worse - the sample is basically the entire chorus. Appalling.
Almost like Daft Punk’s Digital Love, though, I’d have to admit, at least they only used a few seconds of audio, rather than the whole damn chorus. Their Harder Better Faster Stronger use of Coca Cola Baby was pretty darn hard to beat, though; I think they’ve redeemed themselves.

Sorry, none for you, Rockefeller.

Why has nobody told me about this movie?

It’s probably the coolest thing on the planet! Daft Punk’s best album IMHO (Discovery; however, Homework is still up there) as the soundtrack for a beautiful retro-looking anime. No speech, just awesome music and limited sound effects. Go on, watch it!