Hi, I used to use zdigital to buy stuff online but that gives me problems these days (when I try to sign in I get a "technical error" which seems to have taken root). A look around the net isn't very helpful:

• I would like a site where I can download music (reggae, soul, rock & roll, jazz, funk and punk) in a variety of formats. zdigital was perfect and may be again.
• I don't want to stream music online - I want my own copy
• I don't want a cute little "wallet" which ties me to a platform

Most of the stores I came across fell into one of the latter 2 categories. Any ideas? bandcamp would do the trick but my interests really hark back to the 60's so not a solution.

TIA

Look up the copyright laws in your country. In some, the libraries pay an annual fee in exchange for giving you the permission to rip from their CDs. You cannot sell, transfer, or trade what you ripped but in such arrangements you can listen to it as much as you want on any of your own equipment using any software which will get the job done. That will allow you to keep your own archive.

Ask one of the senior librarians at your local major library's music department, not any of the young ones, to be sure or look up the law on your own.

If your country has such an agreement, then rip to FLAC using sound-juicer so that if you need to work with a worse codec, you can still use that as a base. I haven't seen any new computers with optical drives for a year or two and the external, USB optical drives seem not to be moving from the shelves, so I expect that the clock has started ticking for optical media and that politicians in charge of the library budgeting are starting to chomp at the bit to send it all off to the incinerator.

CDBaby.

Also, HDTracks absolutely intends for you to immediately download your purchases and take responsibility for archiving them. You need to use their stupid proprietary downloader app, but the downloads permanently expire very quickly, you don't get re-download privileges, and the music is DRM-free.

Not sure if this is what you are looking for: http://magnatune.com. Haven't been to that site in years but you can apparently buy their entire library for life and share it. Different genres of music available.

bandcamp.com is a good place to find new music of all kinds where you can often buy digital and/or physical copies, sometimes the music is free to download or pay what you want.

https://bandcamp.com/

I love bandcamp. I used to buy individual tracks which were downloaded to my local from Amazon, but I guess that has gone the way of the dodo else someone would have mentioned it.

Thanks for the suggestions everyone. At this point HDTracks is looking the best bet but I'll keep on looking.

Cheers