Sunday, June 29, 2014

Download free full fidelity lossless FLACs at CDBaby

I heard a song (Dancing on the Water) by Michael Stribling on XM Radio 68 that I kind of liked and did an internet search when I got home which led me to CDBaby.com. Interestingly, the album (Love, Light, and Water) with the song in question was offered as a free download. CDBaby has in recent months started to offer FLAC files as a download option similar to the way Bandcamp.com has always done. FLAC of course is lossless compression so it is in theory the equivalent to the original CD. I prefer full fidelity downloads to the more compressed variety such as MP3.

CDBaby doesn't offer a way to search for these free download goodies so I used Google's SITE: modifier like this: site:www.cdbaby.com "download $0.00". The results were quite good and one of the first things that showed up in the search results was this excellent fingerstyle Guitar album by Roger Hudson.

Roger Hudson - Delta

I am quite a fan of acoustic fingerstyle guitar and know most of the practitioners from John Fahey on but Roger Hudson is a new name for me.

I will continue to review the search results for more audio gems.

Update: To further refine your search you can append a keyword such as "Classical" or "Jazz" for instance to the original search. I used the keyword "ECM" and turned up two very nice jazz albums for free download. site:www.cdbaby.com "download $0.00" ECM