In the latest installment of a growing series of reviews of legal online music stores, Breakdown takes a look at the high-end offerings of Audio Lunchbox. Launched in 2003, this site shares the same philosophy as Breakdown -- that quality music need not be co-opted by major labels nor encumbered by restrictive digital rights management schemes. Offering both high quality sound files and a focus on independent record labels, Audio Lunchbox stands out among the online stores. Read on to see how Audio Lunchbox rates in various areas.
Sound Quality: Every track on Audio Lunchbox is available as either high-quality 192 kbps VBR MP3, or high-quality VBR OGG. Both formats are almost CD quality, and one would need to put the recordings to a side-by-side comparison with the originals to tell the difference in fidelity. This encoding quality should be the minimum standard for online music stores. Unfortunately, only a few stores today carry such high quality encodings. Score: 8
Fair-Use Rights: Similar to the Bleep online store, each downloadable MP3s has exactly the same rights as an MP3 one would rip directly from a CD. You can copy them to your other computers, burn them to audio CDs, burn them to MP3 CDs, copy them to portable players, etc. They are, of course, still governed by standard copyright laws, and thus can not be legally shared with other people. Score: 8
Cross-Platform Compatibility: Shopping and purchasing requires only a modern web browser, including Netscape, Mozilla, Internet Explorer, or Opera. The downloaded music files are in industry standard, unencumbered MP3 format, which will play in just about any computer or portable device on the market. Each track is also available in the open-source OGG format, which some people prefer for their own personal encodings. Score: 9
Usability: The Audio Lunchbox online store is well designed, clear, and easy to use. Shopping and browsing for albums is intuitive and perfunctory, though perhaps at the expense of innovative functionality. Songs can be previewed up to 30 seconds, though this involves downloading an M3U playlist, which in turn must be launched and streamed by an MP3 player such as Winamp or iTunes. The checkout process is equally streamlined, with a straight-forward shopping cart system, a standard account creation screen, and a simple download management screen. One drawback to the download process is that while tracks can be downloaded as group in a ZIP file, there is no way to automatically group albums together. Another drawback is that once a download has been started, it must be completed within 6 hours. This is reasonable if the user remains close to their computer to check up on the download, but unfortunately precludes starting a large download and then leaving for an evening or letting it run overnight. This minor shortcoming could easily be addressed by giving users up to 24 hours to complete their download. Score: 7
Price: At the expensive end of online pricing, individual tracks can be purchased for $0.99, and full albums can be purchased for $9.99. Though these prices will undoubtedly drop as a result of inevitable price competition, they are still among the most expensive available. However, the purchase price includes not only high quality encodings, but also high-quality cover art and, for many albums, HTML files containing each song's lyrics. Audio Lunchbox also offers "Lunch Cards" in various denominations that can be used as credit on the store and include a roughly 10% additional credit toward purchasing individual tracks. Score: 6
Independent Selection: While Audio Lunchbox currently carries only two of the ten representative independent selections, their stated goal is to carry as much independent music as possible. Currently stocking albums by such influential independent labels as Epitaph, Barsuk, Artemis, and KOCH, the selection will undoubtedly grow as other independent labels are brought on board. Score: 5
Overall Score: Offering high quality recordings, freedom from DRM restrictions, and an entirely independent catalog, Audio Lunchbox is among the leading services for legal downloadable independent music. The service could be improved with relatively small enhancements to the browsing and downloading pages, by signing more independent labels, and by lowering the price on each album, but otherwise Audio Lunchbox is a very worthy offering for legal music. Score: 7
Read the EMusic Review.
Read the Bleep Review.
Read the Wal-Mart Online Music Store Review.
Read the Napster 2.0 Review.
Read the Apple iTunes Music Store Review.
Read the Breakdown guidelines for this review.