reason808, post: 20894, member: 831 wrote: Well the recent blog post on this said early attempts at VBR were dodgy but are now better. Hard to know when things were encoded. Most likely the old catalog stuff was mass encoded for iTunes and Amazon years ago and probably using older technology. I used to work at big media websites and mass digitizations like this were usually outsourced to a variety of smaller companies.
I’m sure iTunes/Amazon VBR’s are better than the semi-legit Russian mp3 sites, but they may not have the extensive back catalog the Russians ones do. Amazon was definitely missing a lot of old YMO tracks.
If there’s another legit source for 80s/90s dance tracks it’d be good to know. A Beatport for old dance music would be great. And yes, I might be getting a little to anal-retentive here. 🙂
Totally agree, if one of the online retailers really went in to high quality, digital versions of ‘old school’ dance music, they could do very well out of it. I wonder if a lot of the music has been ‘deleted’ at music publishers, and although the masters and copyright are still intact, this may be part of the reason it’s not readily available. Having said that I’ve noticed more and more classic house is appearing on Traxsource. For me, getting hold of old school in a digital format is partly laziness in taking time to rip vinyl and also hoping a digital copy may be have been remastered.
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