If you buy music from Apple’s iTunes media store regularly, there is a cheaper (and still legal) way to buy the same songs. India based eCommerce giant Flipkart.com’s flyte digital store offers a huge collection of MP3 songs for purchase at 1/4th the price of iTunes. The MP3 collection contains songs from all across India and the world. The price of each song varies from INR 6 to INR 15 (which is roughy 11 to 25 cents).
I do understand that the iTunes store offers much more benefits like high quality 256 kbps AAC versions, high quality album artwork and the ability to re-download the song on any device. Here is a way to get all that with a little effort:
- Sign up & activate iTunes Match for $25 a year.
- Purchase songs from flipkart’s flyte store and download them on your computer.
- Find the album for the song in iTunes. Make sure you are at the album level and not the individual song level. Otherwise this trick won’t work.
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Under the album art where the album’s price is display, click on the down arrow as shown in the image below:
- Select copy link. Paste and go to this link in your browser. A web preview of the album will be opened in your browser.
- Right click on the album artwork and select “Open image in new tab”. If you cannot find this option, just copy the image link and open it in a new tab.
- The small thumbnail image will open in a new tab. If you look at the URL, it will be ending with something like 170×170-xx.jpg
- Change 170×170 to 600×600 in the url and press enter. You should now get a high resolution version of the album artwork.
- Copy & apply this artwork to the songs you purchased from flyte in iTunes. Also double check the ID3 info as it is incorrectly formatted in many cases.
- Update iTunes match. This will match your songs to the ones in the iTunes store and they will be as good as the ones you would have purchased. The high resolution album artwork will be uploaded.
- Your devices will always have the 256 kbps AAC versions of the matched songs. If you want the same on your computer, just delete the songs and re-download them. You can also enable the iCloud status column to find out which songs have matched and which ones have been uploaded as MP3s.
The savings will be pretty good if you buy a lot of songs in a year. iTunes match allows you to match up to 25000 songs. Once your songs are matched/uploaded, they are available for download across all your devices or you can stream them directly on the go. I find it much more convenient than just iTunes in the Cloud service which only enables you to re-download previous purchases via the iTunes app. iTunes match shows your complete library songs (irrespective of whether your have downloaded them or not) in the Music app on your iDevices. The ones not yet downloaded can be identified with a cloud icon next to them.
In my experience, the sound quality of the 256 kbps AAC iTunes versions of the same songs was much better on my home theater setup and in my car, compared to the 320 kbps versions of the MP3s downloaded from flyte.
