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How to purchase download albums from us.
What is a download album? If you purchase a CD, we have to manufacture, warehouse and post it, and you have to wait for it to arrive. This all costs you more and adds delays. A download album is a set of digital audio files, downloaded directly from our website onto your computer. Most customers will choose regular mp3 format, as mp3 files are encoded ready to be played on your computer or transfered directly to your iPod or music player. FLAC format offers CD-quality audio for those who prefer it. Once you have completed checkout on our shop, your payment will be automatically processed. Once it has been approved, you will be sent an email containing the links to download your purchases. Normally this process may take around 15 minutes, depending upon how long payment approval takes to come through (Paypal funds are approved quickly, but replies from credit card funds may take a little longer).
How do I purchase download albums from Listening Earth? 1. Your internet connection: You will need a decent internet connection to download digital albums. They are each around 100mB in size. Your internet account may limit your speed or data/month allocation. If you have an account of say 500mB, which is fine for just email, then you may run into problems, and need to upgrade your account with your provider. Speed is less crucial, we have had customers on dialup who have successfully downloaded - it may have taken them a few hours to download an album, but they got there eventually! (Note that dialup may lead to file corruption problems. If this occurs, try again, and contact us if you need your download link(s) re-activated)
Browse our catalogue of nature recordings. You will need to decide which download format you prefer; regular (mp3 files, for iPod/iTunes) or FLAC (CD-quality, read more about FLAC here). (Note that if you choose regular format, you can upgrade albums to FLAC later if you wish. On our shop, go to the FLAC listings page, and find the 'upgrade mp3 to FLAC' product and add it to your cart, including the album title(s) in the 'Your comments' box during checkout. ) When you're ready, proceed to our shop by either;
3. Register or Login Before you can use our shop for the first time, you will need to 'Register' as a customer. Enter your personal details and a password. This profile will enable to you to return to our shop anytime, and simply 'Login' as a returning customer.
4. Finding your way around The 'Shop by Category' menu will take you to a listings of our albums by format; CDs, Dowload albums (mp3) or FLAC (uncompressed files). You can continue browsing and listening to sound samples. The 'Home Page' will return you to our website, and 'Shop Home Page' to the shopfront information page - please have a quick read through of this, it may clarify some questions. There are also FAQ pages linked at the bottom of all our shop pages.
Click on the Link for 'Downolads - Albums', which will take you a complete listing of all our albums. Select the albums you'd like and click 'Buy' to add them to your 'Shopping Basket'. They will appear in your 'Shopping Basket' on the left margin. You can 'View Basket' to add or delete at any time.
When you're ready, proceed to checkout by clicking 'View Basket'. Check your purchases and click 'Continue'. Confirm your postal address and other personal details, and click 'Continue'. (Note: If you are a macintosh user, we have identified a problem with placing successive orders on our shop - whilst your first order should process perfectly, there is a likelihood that a second order may not process at all. This seems to be due to the way cookies are handled on mac browsers (both Safari and Firefox have this problem), and despite much discussion with our software partners, we have been unable to find a fix for this issue. However - it is easy to work around. To make multiple successive orders, simply quit your browser and launch again, which should clear the problem. This bug does not appear to affect Windows users.)
You will arrive at a page with a pre-selected button: 'Credit Card with Paypal'. This screen is also where you may enter any comments (eg; telling us titles you are purchasing as 'custom CD')
Paypal is our secure online payment gateway. Note: You DO NOT have to have a Paypal account to purchase from us! With Paypal you can use either your credit card (many available, including Visa, Mastercard, Discovery, Switch), or funds from your Paypal account if you have one.
You will now be taken to the Paypal site to complete payment. You may have to 'log in', but this does not mean you need to have a Paypal account to complete your transaction. Your invoice will appear. Choose how you'd like to pay. If you do not have a Paypal account, and wish to pay by credit card, click the link that says something like: 'click here to pay by any credit card'.
Once you finish, Paypal will process your payment automatically and advise our online shop of the status of the transaction. As soon as it is complete (which usually happens within about 15 minutes), you will be sent an email from our shop with links to download your digital album(s). The links stay active for 6 days, and 6 attempts. If for some reason, you are unable to download within that time, please email us and we can reset your links. Click on the links, and you should be prompted that you are downloading a single file such as: '04MornAustBush.zip' or '17RainInTheForest.zip', depending on the album. If you are prompted with the option to 'decompress', 'unzip' or 'expand' the file, do that, otherwise save the file to your desktop.
Note the .zip suffix! This indicates that the file is a compressed single archive file that requires expanding, sometimes also called 'unzipping' or 'decompressing'. This task may be done automatically by your computer, or you may need to do it manually after download. There are several simple utility programs to achieve this, such as 'BetterZip' or 'Stuffit'. If you are having problems at this point, it may be that you do not have such a program on your computer already. If so, you may need to go to a software website such as tucows.com or download.com (try entering 'zip' in the search box), and download a program suitable for your operating system. However decompressing archive files is a fairly common proceedure these days, so hopefully your computer will do it automatically.
You should now have a folder with a collection of mp3 tracks, some artwork and notes. Drag the mp3 files into iTunes (or import them into iTunes). They will appear in your music library. Artwork is preloaded, but we include the artwork graphic with your download anyway, and sometimes an alternate graphic. All albums are encoded as 'gapless albums' so they should play as continuous audio, without any micro-gaps across track boundaries (iPod certainly supports this feature, not sure about other players). We've set the genre to 'nature', but you can change it to suit your library organisation. (Andrew's tip: creating custom genres is a poweful way of organising your music library) Your album is now ready to be copied onto your iPod or Mp3 player of choice. Note that our files have no copy restrictions on them, you can transfer them to several iPods if you wish.
Congratulations, you have now purchased your first digital audio album. Now you know how easy it is, and after enjoying your natural sounds, you'll want to pop back to our website and purchase a few more :-)
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