I recently purchased an album from Amazon's mp3 store. It is Dir En Grey's "Uroboros" album. All of the files are encoded at --abr 256 using Lame 3.98.2 and they all appear to have a cutoff at 16KHz (ie a lowpass filter below the normal value). I have other Amazon mp3 store purchases encoded at the same settings and they all have a cutoff at the normal 18-19KHz value. Has anyone else experienced this issue? It is not that I can hear the extra frequencies but I worry that my files were lossy-to-lossy transcoded.

I e-mailed Amazon's customer support but I doubt they can help me as their customer support service isn't always run by the smartest people. I had a previous issue where Amazon sent me the DVD copy of a movie when I ordered and paid for the Blu-ray edition. The customer support agent insisted that I was wrong and it was impossible for them to make that mistake. It took 3 months before I talked to someone from their U.S. department and everything was cleared up.

So is this a common issue with Amazon's mp3 store or does the album itself have a low cutoff point. I have some albums with cutoff points for some points in songs at 18KHz (my guess is that they use lossy material in the studio), I just can't image an entire lossless album encoded at 16KHz.

Edit: changed what the songs were encoded at/with.

Edit 2: if anyone is interested they can download a free track from the album located here. You must have an Amazon.com account but the song is 100% free. This single track is encoded with the exact same encoder/settings as the entire album.

Edit 3: please disregard my dumb post. GoldWave isn't properly displaying the frequencies of the songs. I also just encoded a song using Lame 3.98.2 at abr 256kbps and observed the same results. It appears that GoldWave is displaying a cutoff of 16KHz when in fact the songs have a lowpass of about 17.5KHz. I still thought that Lame's 256kbps ABR setting would have the same lowpass at -V 0 but I guess not.

Aside from encoding (the possibility of lossy to lossy encodes), another worry I have with online music stores is how they rip if they rip CDs at all. Has anyone encountered a click or a skip with an online music store purchase?

I only had a blip once from an emusic purchase (and it was some obscure instrumental album, nothing exceedingly popular). I've not had a single issue with anything from amazon.

I purchased one album from the iTunes Store back when their plus service launched and it was riddled with encoding errors. The tracks would make audible bleeps, bloops, and have sections of static. I notified Apple's customer support, they rectified the issue and let me download the album again for free.

It is my understanding that most download services don't actually rip the CDs. They instead send software to the band/record company so that they simply import the digital masters into the application and export a store compatible file. That is how the iTunes Store operates. Apple's software gives them the option of exporting to standard 128kbps (Apple adds the DRM later) or to Apple lossless (if the band is to offer both 128kbps and 256kbps content). I don't know if Amazon's mp3 store operates this way but I am guessing that it does as I downloaded one song for free about 4 months ago and it was encoded at 256kbps CBR using the FhG encoder. I downloaded the same song today (still for free) and it was encoded at -V 0 using Lame 3.97. So my guess is that Amazon has lossless files made from the master tracks so that they can re-encode over time keeping up with the newest mp3 encoders.

I just wish that Amazon would use -V 0 instead of --abr 256 for their newer releases. I like it that they upgraded to Lame 3.98.2 but I prefer to use VBR settings over ABR. I highly doubt I could properly ABX --abr 256 but still.

A lot of it gets on to these sites via TuneCore which is a web based system

http://www.tunecore.com/

You can also deal with them directly as an artist cutting out the record companies completely, oh and they'll make physical CDs for you if you want as well.