reggaerecord.com downloads legit?

[nofoo]

Just stumbled upon this site. They have a nice selection of old and new tunes, and most importantly offer lossless downloads.

With the many reggae pirate labels in mind i wondered if they are legit.Do they have the licences? Do the artist get their share?

[ReggaeFire]

I fairly certain they license all their downloads from the labels. Whether the labels in turn pay the artists... who knows.

[Congo Bunny]

their download prices are in line with the same products on Amazon etc so that would tend to suggest that they are more legit than not otherwise why charge full price? no guarantee I know, but what more can you do as a buyer?

[nofoo]

thank you for your replies.

first, found out the site is run by japan´s Dub Store Label. i think that´s a good sign.

yes, they seem to licence from the labels, not the artists directly.
what makes me wonder is that eg vp records only links to itunes on their website..

some kind of confirmation from one of the labels would be nice..

[rudeboi99]

I keep bumping into this website, they have a nice selection. Unfortunately for me the same stuff I can't find on Amazon is also missing here.

[RRDL]

Hello to all the Roots Archives crew,

We were thinking about posting some words about our ReggaeRecord Downloads store to give full information about what we are doing.

We have started the digital store a year ago now, and as mentioned by nofoo, we are also running the Dub Store Records label, as well as the ReggaeRecord and ReggaeCollector physical stores. Our company now counts twenty years of activity and this ReggaeRecord Downloads store is our latest project in order to purpose a specialized store for reggae, roots, ska, rocksteady and dancehall music in digital format. This project came out as we were thinking that a proper digital store dedicated to these music was missing on internet.

About the music we are showcasing: everything is fully contracted with distributors or labels directly, we only sell music we have the right to sell. As mentioned as well, it is very important for us to purpose high quality audio files, WAV and FLAC are available for every song and album, as well as 320 MP3s. Once again we were feeling this kind of place with lossless music was missing for reggae music lovers.

The ReggaeRecord Downloads team.

[Max]

I've ordered from ReggaeRecord a few times. Always been happy with the results and the packing is top notch. Martha Stewart got nothing on these guys!

[lipm77]

Unless my experience is a one-off I just bought a wav of Shy FX Bambaata and while I may have missed that it's not a full track on sale here (It's a portition taken from a mixed CD) t's definetely not a wav quality file. It's a wave of a compressed file and sounds like absolute crap.

So while they might license for permission to sell, these are not full quality files from the labels themselves and for me as a professional DJ are useless.


Buyer beware!

[cvac]

Although I am excited that certain stores - Bandcamp, Junodownload, Pono, HDtracks, Bleep, and now ReggaeRecord.com are offering Lossless downloads in FLAC and WAV, I really wish they would be a bit more detailed and forthcoming about their sources and tell us whether the files are truly lossless.

I do buy lossless files sometimes, especially where the album is OOP or too expensive to have shipped to the U.S. Sometimes it us just easier for me to buy the lossless files, which hopefully support the artist (esp. w/Bandcamp) and then I can just burn my own CD.

My experience with ReggaeRecord.com is limited to two purchases. I bought two FLAC albums, both titles from Wackies. I burned them to a CDR and scanned them with Tau Analyzer. You can google that program for more info, but AFAIK it is one of the more accurate ways to detect whether a file came from a lossy or lossless source.

Anyway, Tau Analyzer is saying that both titles are from lossless sources, NOT compressed mp3s.

lipm77, I hope you can get a refund for your purchase. Part of the problem may be that you bought a track from a mix CD. I have some older techno mix CDs from the days when DJs used vinyl, and those sound pretty rough. The tracks were often played on heavily used records, then feed through a mixer and effects/EQ which would further degrade the sound from the original source. Definitely not something for a digital DJ to be using. Not sure if that's what happened here. I don't know why a store would sell individual tracks from mix CDs anyway...they would contain fade-ins/outs from the previous and subsequent tracks and wouldn't even be useful on their own for strictly listening purposes.

[Jay Money]

cvac and others - thanks for sharing this information. Getting close to maxing out my space for actual music media and have been looking for decent downloads of reggae. The info yall have shared about this site is very good to know. cheers!