I'm looking for online store that offer LOSSLESS downloads:

This is what I have found so far:

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http://magnatune.com/ : Works on a donation basis starting from $5 / €5 per album. "You can choose among all the popular formats: WAV, MP3, OGG, FLAC and AAC, so you can play your music on Windows, Mac and Linux." Quiet a small catalogue but it seems to have a variety of genres on offer.

http://www.edmdigital.com : An additional $1.50 per track, so that's $3 per track! A brief glance at the site suggests that they only sell singles. They focus on Electronic Dance Music, hence the domain name.

http://allofmp3.com : A huge catalogue of mainstream releases. Based in Russia. I gather they've found some legal loophole in the law regarding royalties or licencing fees or something, so I'm not sure how much the artists end up getting if anything. Offer direct encoding of the newer items of their catalogue in WMA 9 Lossless, Monkey's Audio, OptimFROG, FLAC or pure WAV. Charge $0.02 per Mb.

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http://audiolunchbox.com/community/discussion?d=15 : They look to be considering FLAC, however no comitments have been made. They currently offer OGG and MP3 purchases and have quiet an extensive catalogue of indie releases. Some excellent labels involved.

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Any others?

If you like live stuff from taper-friendly bands there's lots of legal lossless downloads at these places (shn & flac formats):
http://bt.etree.org/ (bittorrent downloads)
http://www.archive.org/audio/etree.php (direct downloads)

DiscLogic features bands like Umphrey's McGee, moe., Soulive, and Disco Biscuits in your choice of Flac (don't remember whether the compression setting is 5 or 6), MP3 (CBR 256), AAC (VBR 192), or WMA (VBR 192).

The music is mostly rock and mostly live performances although there are some jazz artists and some studio albums as well. Album prices vary but tend to be $9.99. Track downloads, when available, are usually 99 cents. The price is the same regardless of format. Neither the AAC nor WMA files use DRM.

Has anyone heard any of the Metallica soundboard recording they are pushing in the flac format?

The Metallica Live FLACs are superb quality......So are The Primus Live Ones from there site

Somebody may want to check, but I believe I read that allofmp3's "lossless" are transcoded from lossy versions of the songs. Like 320 kbps MP3's or something to that effect. Not worth paying extra for, in other words.

the links section on the FLAC site has most that I know about. I have a list of some others that are not as established yet. if you run across any that are not on there, drop me a note.

http://flac.sourceforge.net/links.html#music

Josh

p.s. I know allofmp3.com is not on there

Wrong: when selecting a lossless codec, tracks are always encoded from a lossless source.
From the website, when selecting "FLAC" as the codec to use:

FLAC is only available along with the "Online Encoding Exclusive" option. When that option is available, you may choose between lossy (standard price) and lossless source (more expensive) if you select a lossy codec.

UPDATE : Looks like AllofMP3 has stopped providing lossless downloads. None of the new additions in the last few days offer lossless. Not sure if this is permanent or temporary, but I've also noticed that they've taken down the advert for this 'new feature' of thiers.

You can buy lossless (wav) or even 5.1 dts (which is lossy but very effective )
http://www.airlock.be/shape/

I don't currently buy music from online stores, but if I did, I'd only get a lossless format. Though it's sneaky what they were doing at allofmp3.com:



Would make people go for the "crappest" format to save money

You mean OptimFROG right? That's one of the great things about LOSSLESS, you can switch formats without a squiggle of a hesitation.

You might be interested in this : http://www.eff.org/share/collective_lic_wp.php

I'd be up for it.

Why do you say that? AllOfMP3.com certainly didn't stop providing lossless encoding. I just checked, it's still there. And they didn't take the advert down, either. Still there.

Yep, I jumped the gun. It was just that when I discovered AllofMP3 all of thier new daily additions ( The ones I checked at least! ) appeared to offer "up to CDDA". Then all of a sudden, for a few days, none of them did. And the advert disappeared.

I emailed them to enquire about this, as I was under the impression that ALL new additions would offer lossless. They have yet to reply. But, as you so correctly point out, I've noticed that the advert came back when they updated their news.

Here's a list of all the lossless albums they offer :
http://stat.allofmp3.com/ratings/charts.sh...&affiliate=nl13

Mindawn - provides lossless and ogg vorbis downloads.

they have almost 1000 Albums as lossless available by now! 980 as of today...Not bad, if you consider that they started this service just 9 month ago! So, they didn't stop their service...they rather encreased their lossless releases...however, I'd still like to see all new albums being released as lossless though...or even better, if they re-rip all their existing albums as lossless