Legal CD quality downloads

I stumbled across a new music download store, MusicGiants HD Music Downloads. It's interesting because they sell you albums in WMA Lossless format. So for once it's a download that says it's CD quality and really is. Unfortunately as always the price does not reflect what you care getting. $15.29 is the average price for a single disc album. Now that's reasonably cheap for us given the exchange rate, although I suspect not that cheap for the US. However against that you have to put the fact that the files come with DRM and so will only play on your Windows PC or a portable player.

Strangely apparently you can burn the files to a CD - which means you can then re-rip in a sensible format (eg FLAC) without any loss in quality. Unless WM DRM downgrades the quality when you burn it, which is quite possible.

So in the end it's still just as easy, and probably cheaper, to carry on buying on CD and ripping as before.