Bleep.com have updated their online digital music store. For those of you that have not visited Bleep.com, you truly have been missing out from one of the best mp3 downloading services in the industry.

Steve Beckett, Managing Director of Warp records set up Bleep.com back in 2004. Being one of the first and most innovative music download stores, Bleep has since gained a Digital Music Award for Best Music Store, had over 1.8 million downloads, and cemented a reputation as the best download boutique store catering for passionate music fans.
 
Bleep offers single track or whole album DRM - free mp3 and FLAC downloads and allows the users to preview tracks before purchase, by streaming 30 second segments at a time, encoded at 90kbps.

All downloads are available as MP3s. Many are encoded in LAME, which is generally believed to be the best mp3 encoding method, offering the best possible quality-to-size ratio available for the standard. Bleep also offers lossless FLAC-encoded versions of some of its downloads, at a premium cost. The first album available as FLAC was Autechre's Untilted album on 18 April 2005. Uncompressed WAV format downloads are also available.

Bleep.com quickly gained enough popularity to receive a nomination for a Webby Award in the music category on 7 May 2004 alongside iTunes, BeatPort, Live365 and musicplasma. In 2006, Bleep passed the million downloads threshold and in October of that year won the UK Digital Music Award for "Best Music Store" beating players such as iTunes, Napster and ThreeMusic.
 
In November 2008, Bleep merged with its sister store Warpmart. This expansion has enabled Bleep to sell the most cutting edge vinyl, CDs, t-shirts, magazines, event tickets, merchandise, DVDs, and books as well as top quality downloads.  As well as Warp, Bleep works closely with over 300 key independent labels such as Domino, XL, Ninja Tune, One Little Indian, k7, Planet Mu, Stones Throw, as well as leaders and distributors of independent film, literature and publishing.

With an extensive selection of added features built with the music lover in mind, the new version of Bleep provides fresh added content, a stronger focus on editorial, an additional catalogue of physical products, a new personal music player and a brand new look & design for 2009. The site will sit on Beta.bleep.com for the next few weeks and you can still access the old Bleep site for a short period of time.

Click here for the new site

Click here for the old site