Hit me with the hot beats!

May 3, 2008 2:10 PM

Where to find digital hip-hop EP's? I want the backing tracks and vocals split up, but ripping to Ableton Live from my turntables is a pain (and I am having trouble sourcing the records I want).

Is there anywhere that does digital downloads of hip-hop vocal and backing tracks?

It's such a pain (and expensive) to source vinyl. Now that everyone seems to be switching over to this digital vinyl control stuff, where the hell are they downloading their tracks from?

posted by jstef to Media & Arts (4 answers total)

Are you talking about acapellas? acapellas4u is the best source I've found. (and if you have a good copy of the pella and the full version, you can always make your own instrumental from that)

As for full tracks, Amazon and Itunes and the usual places have the major releases...MP3 blogs sometimes have interesting things as well, but it's good to use 320s for playing out on big systems as you can often tell a big difference from 128s and etc. I find for the smaller/more underground labels, it's good to check their Myspace. A lot of folks are putting the digital shopping carts for their tunes directly on their Myspace page now.
posted by First Post at 7:50 PM on May 3, 2008

(Or record pool type things. I haven't used this, but it looks really promising.)
posted by First Post at 7:52 PM on May 3, 2008

beatsource does this (relative of beatport, which is dance music). Not a huge selection, but look for releases that are singles and you'll see the explicit, clean, instrumental, acapella, etc. available as separate downloads.
posted by alb at 12:20 PM on May 5, 2008

I find the best thing you can do is get good with search engines. There's a plethora of free-register mix sites where amateurs upload mixes/acapellas and instrumentals that they themselves have sourced or did on their own. They're not always perfect, but it's the best you can do. An MP3 blog search is probably your best bet for the cutting edge releases. Torrents only seem to turn up shit like The Black Album and the same old compilations. From what I understand, copyright has made it tough the past few years.
posted by ageispolis at 7:46 AM on June 13, 2008