Locked music

Since getting the new music setup, I've been wanting to re-download hi-res versions of the old .MP3 files I have.

Bandcamp lets me grab .FLAC files for any album I've bought. Other services, not so much.

eMusic

I hadn't logged into eMusic for quite sometime. I'd been using it since 2016, found some great albums there, but when they pivoted to NFTs I stopped visiting.

Logging in I found 15 albums. When I tried re-downloading them, most failed. The odd few that did work only offered a 44.1kHz MP3 file. Nothing higher than that. So I'm going to have to find them on other platforms to re-purchase at a higher resolution.

Amazon

I used to buy quite a bit of music digitally on Amazon in the 2010's. 50 albums all told. None of which I can now download.

I even reached out and actually spoke to an Amazon help desk-No help.

Every link to download a purchased album in my 'digital orders' failed. When I followed the link to Amazon Music, none of them were in my account!

That's 50 albums I purchased that I can no longer access. Thankfully all of them are in Roon, and backed up. But again if I want higher resolution files I will have to track them down and buy them again.

Google Play Music

Google shut down its Play Music service in 2020, migrating users to YouTube Music.

There's seems no way to download anything from my library in YouTube. So, if I missed downloading purchases when it shut down, I'll have to purchase it again.

Going forward

Thankfully Roon has now introduced Smart Playlists. This has let me tag these albums and create a list showing me 'albums tagged eMusic that are .MP3 files'. That way if ever purchase a higher resolution file it'll automatically drop that album from the list.

But for now it's Bandcamp and going back to buying CDs.