So, a few posts back, I mentioned I was looking for free, legal music to listen to.
The guys over at OverClocked Remix haven’t released a torrent for 1250-1500 yet, which would make for tedious work, finding where the last torrent left off, and picking up from there, downloading each song manually.
Magnatune has nice music, but to get a download that doesn’t have a bunch of junk appended to it requires money.
Weed is defintely not an option - not only does it cost me something, it’s also DRM’ed, AND Windows Media. That means I’d have hell playing it where I’d like. I think my Lyra’s too old to even support WMA DRM, which really rules it out.
So, that left me something to ponder as I was surfing around on BlogExplosion. I regret not blogmarking the blog that had the link, but one blog I was reading through had a link to a service named Jamendo.
Jamendo is a service that uses liberal amounts of Creative Commons licensing (in fact, the same license I use here on Eau Salée Lunaire) to protect their artists. The music is freely distributed, while keeping the artist protected. Of course, one can donate to an artist, or perhaps head to that artist’s personal website to pick up some merchandise there.
Rather than offering direct downloads, Jamendo is more focused on offering P2P methods of downloading - namely, BitTorrent and eDonkey download links.
Interestingly enough, a lot of the music on Jamendo seems to come out of France, but I’m quite fine with that. 
Although, the artist that’s caught the majority of my attention at the moment hails from the USA. His name is Rob Costlow, and he’s just flat out magnificent on the piano.
If this damn thing does what I tell it to do, you’ll be able to listen to his album, “Woods of Chaos” at the bottom of this post.
“Woods of Chaos” is freely available from the aforementioned link. I can’t seem to get the player to work yet…
I should let the music speak for itself at this point. If you enjoy solo piano works, you should enjoy this, though.
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30 March, 2006 at 12:40
Vlčice
Well, it ate my post. -.-; It looks like it hates the open > symbols, which cause part of my post to disappear. I’ll try again with no HTML.
Mm, it definitely would be nice if more sites offered non-DRMed music… I’m unable to play DRM WMA files, too. There aren’t that many sources for anything decent I’ve found, either free or for-pay. The one legal music store I know of that sells non-DRMed MP3s, eMusic, annoys me in their insistance on monthly subscriptions; plus I’ve had some bad experiences with them, too. I had a free trial once, and cancelled it - but they renewed it without asking me. If I hadn’t noticed that they had done that, I would have ended up paying at least the first month’s subscription after the trial ran out.
At least some artists seem to have nice non-DRMed sample offerings; the most surprising I’ve seen is one of my favourite singers, Jana Kirschner (http://www.janakirschner.com), who has about three full albums as MP3s on her site.
30 March, 2006 at 13:31
Xial Lunashine
Yep. WordPress comments use real XHTML, so you’ll have to escape your > and < as > and < to have them displayed.
As mentioned, Magnatune does sell non-DRMed music, but yeah… that’s just not in the budget at the moment.
That’s where Jamendo came in to play. 
30 March, 2006 at 16:05
Vlčice
It was treating my *actual* HTML oddly too, though, which is the problem; the code was fine (or should have been, since I used the “link” button above the comment form), but it ate part of my message around the link anyway.