I’ve been listening to a large amount of ambient music lately and these guys are clued-up when it comes to making digital and CD versions of their music available on the old interweb. If you just want to find out more about Ambient Music, look no further than the aptly-named Ambient Music Guide. This gives you a good intro and a ton of links to artists own websites and online download stores. If you can find the artist your interested in on bandcamp.com, Ultimae Records digital store for example is here; you can stream the whole digital album before buying – remember when music stores supplied headphones for you to listen to CD’s? Remember CD’s? Remember music stores!!! I’ve bought a bit of new music this way in the past.

Having cast the Google net I sorta sttled on FLAC as the best all-round format for digital music. It’s Compressed and yet Lossless and is probably as close as you’ll get quality-wise to a carbon-copy of a CD.

Listen to FLAC on your PC

You can listen to FLAC files in Windows Media Player by downloading from XIPH.ORG and installing the Windows 32/64 bit OpenCodecs. This’ll allow you to buy FLAC format albums and play them right away at max quality on your PC (or MAC). Assuming you have a decent sound-card, speakers and probably a sub-woofer attached.

Listen to FLAC on your Hi-Fi

Is a quick 3-step process if you to follow the destructions here but to summarise

1. Download and install WinAmp with FLAC with library support Plug-in

2. Decode your .FLAC files with WinAmp

3. Create your Audio CD (.WAV format) with CDBurner XP Pro

And you’re done … enjoy 🙂

Update: Or if you have NERO (even the free version) you can cut FLAC files directly to CD … wish I’d tried that first!

Update (26/09/17). The full process to decode FLAC files to CD is here