Now that I have the audiophile gear, and now that I have been made aware that MP3s and WAVs simply are not audiophile quality, is there a service that provides CD lossless purchasing, ripping, duplicating like iTunes? For example, is there any service where you can order several different individual songs from different artists and then have them grouped together (or not) and burned onto one or more CDs in lossless format and shipped to you? I would like the option to purchase CD quality songs rather than whole albums, especially for those "must have" classic or timeless or "one-hit-wonder" songs. But, I would prefer not to have to rely on my consumer computer equipment to do the lossless downloading (which I assume is voluminous and time consuming) and then do the ripping/duplicating (which I would not be confident would result in an accurate reproduction and would again be time consuming).

Any thoughts you have would be appreciated.

Edward P. Christian.

I am pretty sure that what you are asking for would ruffle some legal feathers from the record distributors.

There are various sites that would let you download lossless tracks and even entire albums (i.e. http://www.hdtracks.com/ , http://www.musicgiants.com/ , among others), for a price, of course.

I haven't seen one that will "repackage" a CD with your choice of songs and ship it to you.

I don't know that it would ruffle feathers any more than iTunes does - after all, they are basically the same thing only without the lossy compression in the final product. The two sites you link are doing something very close to what Ed is asking for. Granted, they are offering lossless file downloads rather than physical CD's, but I suspect the costs involved in burning custom CD's make offering lossless downloads a lot more competitive (and profitable).

The time and effort involved in downloading lossless music in a format like FLAC and burning to a audio CD is probably not all that big a deal these days. Certainly the download process is easy enough if you have broadband (dial-up would be bad...), and there is software out there that should allow you to largely automate the process of turning files into audio CD's.

I am a little more cynical. There are several legal pieces involved in delivering a music CD. Not only are there intellectual property (the artist) rights, but there are distribution rights to consider. It's the same reason why your cable company can't mail you a DVD with the same pay per view event you just paid $50 to watch. Or the same reason NetFlix cannot just let you keep that DVD they probably duplicated themselves, even though that would really cost about the same as the return postage to get their DVD back.

There are also many reasons why something like that will either never happen or be just a niche product. One of those reasons is expressed in one of my favorite theories from database experts Doctors Percy and Cushman, which they termed the "distributed data paradox". I searched for their 1998 paper online but couldn't find it. It basically says that, by the time data infrastructure is good enough to support distributing large amounts of data reliably (i.e. FLAC, movies, etc.) to support a process, the infrastructure is good enough to leave the data right where it is. So, my fearless prediction is that, someday before we know it, we won't be downloading anything and just playing the music, watching the movie, reading the book, etc. right from the online store's server. The lawyers are lining up already. DVD players and CD players will be a thing of the past and we'll all just have some type of content delivery device that all it does is manage our "rights" and sucks money out of our bank account.
People don't realize that they are doing this already, or do you really feel the need to download every video you watch in youtube? I am being funny but I really do think someday there will be an audiophile, youtube-like service.

I already have something close to that at home with MythWeb Music which even allows "users" of my home network to create their own playlists.

Sorry for being long-winded, but data distribution and centralization of data are emotional subjects for me. Back to the original topic. You may find a place that will do what you want, but be ready to pay. Did you check the prices at musicgiants.com?

Does anybody know what the download formats are from HDTracks and MusicGiants? Both sites were pretty vague. I did a quick Google search and I can't find any sites with mainstream music to download in either WAV or AIFF formats. Like edcrash1 I'd like to find a site that does this. Any suggestions?

I was curious about that as well, and it looked to me like HDTracks was offering FLAC and AIFF, with high-bitrate MP3 as an option.

HDtracks offers various formats. Their 24bit/96KHz stuff is all FLAC (I think).

I believe MusicGiants is all WMA (?).

Here's another one I forgot to include yesterday: linnrecords.com . Their site has tips on how to burn their music onto DVD-A discs.

Thanks everyone for the insights and the confirmation (as to what I thought based on my research so far) that there is not such a service in existence. I still welcome any further insights that people may have.

In any event, I very much appreciate all of you weighing in on sites and formats to help me bridge the gap by doing personal downloads and ripping. Of course, I have to do some background reading first to figure out which formats and ripping software are the lossless ones--I am still pretty new to this audiophile game.

So, garcianc2003, as you may have guessed from the above response, I really have not looked into any actual sites/services yet, including musicgiants.com. But I will do so once I fugure out the appropriate lossless formats and software as noted above.

In the meantime, I believe garcianc2003's prediction is right on that in the future we will likely be dispensing with owning disc products and will only access our audiophile rights on third party servers; although I still think that is a few years off. And, although what I am looking for may not be currently available and may only be a niche product, perhaps there is a market among audiophiles for such a product. The audiophile market is itself a niche, yet a lot of companies have staked out successful businesses within this niche. Therefore, perhaps I should start a company to see if I can fill such a niche with a desireable price point!

Edward P. Christian

Update: I have researched the sites listed above and, sadly, the artist and song selections are extremely limited. Therefore, I do not believe as of now that these sites are much use to my music tastes. It seems like a lossless market with a deep artist/song list (through strong agreements with labels and artists with the aim to sell more product) could have a place if an attractive price-point could be worked out.