I’ve been listening to a few music podcasts, mainly TATW and ASOT, and am really enjoying some tracks (were have you been all my life Bart Classen? Oh. In the Netherlands…). And I really want to have some in my iPod Cowon iAudio 9.

This was not easy.

I really do wish to support artists, I really do. I purchased a ton of CDs (400+ songs, and yeah it cost me >$400) because I can’t always go to their concerts. I want to avoid having to illegally acquire this stuff. But it feels that I can only do it on their terms, for crappy technical boner-inducing-big-brother reasons, and I have to sacrifice my requirements.

What are my requirements? High bitrate MP3/WAV/FLAC. No DRM. I vote with my wallet a lot, and this is something I can get behind.

Really, I want to pay you. I was even willing to pay trackitdown.net a premiuum of $2.50USD for a WAV (for something I probably can’t hear the difference between). Oh, until I found this little gem :

All of the tracks downloaded through our website are ‘watermarked’ with a special form of copy protection that uniquely identifies the owner of each track.

– trackitdown.net HowTo (How to suck apparently)

I know I’m a little bit of a niche. Forgive me for going against the status quo and not buying on iTunes and wanting it under a free (as in speech) lossless codec. But honestly, anyone who wants your music for free gets it for free. I’m going out of my way to try to pay you and be fair to both of us about it.

Luckily, I have found BeatPort, which almost fits my needs. I dislike their flash-only website, having manually to convert wav to flac and fill in metadata, and the unfortunate restricted tracks for some songs. But they seem to be the most fair – to me at least.

I came home about a week ago with Toolroom Knights mixed by Mark Knight, instead of my intended target of Mark Oliver. It was OK because I have, and still enjoy, Toolroom Knights mixed by Gabriel and Dresden. Both CD describe themselves as a “journey through the world’s finest house music”. But their styles are so different. I already found it difficult to describe the genre. Now it’s just impossible.