Audiolunchbox – DRM-free music

Audiolunchbox.com specialises in indie music and amongst many bands we’ve never heard of (All Natural Lemon and Lime Flavors, anyone?), the site provides non-DRM restricted legal downloads of tracks and albums from Moby, Sasha and even The Pretenders.

Some 160 labels have licensed content to Audiolunchbox, and they use a familiar distribution model — US99c allows you to download a track to your PC, and then you are free to store it, or use it on any capable device. Albums are available from US$8.99. Users buy a “Lunch card” in a variety of values, which helps to bring access to kids without credit cards.

There’s an interesting twist – the site also offers Ogg Vorbis encoded downloads, so at last it will be easier for Linux users to play legally purchased music on their distributions. As MP3 is a proprietary format, there are no open source codecs for the OS.

“When you purchase audio from us, do with it as you please, as long as it’s for personal use.” — from the website.

Audiolunchbox

Give Ogg Vorbis a try

Published by

Fraser Lovatt

Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people. Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon. At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC. After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video. These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?