Behold the future of music downloads. While Apple and EMI are notching up the bitrate just a touch, Musicgiants is jumping to full CD transparency (with the promise of 24 bit resolution in the future).

Exlusive full resolution download of Paul McCartney's latest (plus thousands of other releases), with the opportunity to have a long interview with McCartney included in the download.

http://www.musicgiants.com
 

Did you test it ?

WMA only :( Shame, otherwise I'd look at this seriously. If they offered the music as an AIFF in a disk image or something, it would be about the same file size, and work on all systems...

What is taking them so long?. I want to buy a full quality legal download music track, no DRM, no compression at a reasonable price. Whats with this compression nonsense, my hard drive has plenty of spare space on it.

britops:

What is taking them so long?. I want to buy a full quality legal download music track, no DRM, no compression at a reasonable price. Whats with this compression nonsense, my hard drive has plenty of spare space on it.

At a reasonable price you may purchase DRM free tracks @ iTunes; give it a try.

I guess that non-proprietary formats are the choice of excelence, it broadens the future costumers, IMO.
 

WMA, is a lossless compacted (rather than lossy compressed) format -- and it is bit-by-bit true to the original. Unfortunately, the downloads from Musicgiants can't be converted to other formats without workaround.

Yes, I have tried MusicGiants, though they are delivering to the PC platform and I'm a Mac-addict. Wanted to point it out, though. There are other companies offering high-resolution downloads, and pretty soon it's going to dawn on the music companies that they can pick up the slack from their drop in CD sales by offering high-res to customers through broadband.

 

 

Just as a side note, WMA isn't ALWAYS lossless, it can be a lossy format as well, depending on how it's encoded, unlike AAC which is ALWAYS lossy.

You're right. But Musicgiants are adamant that their encoding is lossless.

However, it doesn't matter whether your file is lossless, if your playback setup isn't. I was very surprised when I got my Benchmark DAC and learned that if I don't set the Mac to output music at full volume, the computer will process the music and it won't be digitally transparent.