A NEW music download service will offer discerning audiophiles legit, ultra-high-quality tunes from popular Singapore and regional artistes like Electrico, JJ Lin and Fish Leong.

The 'lossless' digital music service was launched by digital music store Soundbuzz and Exploit Technologies on Tuesday.

Exploit is the commercial arm of the government's Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star).

Audiophiles have complained that music 'compressed' into digital music formats like MP3 do not sound as good as the CD originals, said Ms Yen Ong, Soundbuzz Asia's general manager.

When music files are compressed, the compression software strips out what it believes are unimportant sounds, so that the eventual compressed file takes up less space than the original.

This allows for easy downloading and for more songs to be stored onto music players like the Creative Zen or Apple iPod.

Soundbuzz's new 'lossless' digital music songs, using technology developed by A*Star, will offer 'CD or better' quality that will satisfy 'even the fussiest audiophiles', said Ms Ong.

Soundbuzz currently has a catalogue of 'several thousand' songs online, and will continue to add more over time, she said.

The high-quality songs are encoded at 'sampling' rate of 1,100 kbps, at $3 each and take up 20-30 megabytes of storage space per song. The files are in Microsoft's Windows Media format, and work best with computers and music players that support this format.

Digital music files sold by online stores like SoundBuzz, or found on download systems like BitTorrent, are typically encoded at a lower 256kbps sampling rate, which take up about 8-10 megabytes per song.

One feature of the new service is that the buyer can transfer the song onto the mobile phone for free. When the user copies the song to his mobile phone, the A*Star technology will automatically scale down the song's quality, and its file size to just 2-3 megabytes, to accommodate the lower storage capacity of mobile phones.

Undergraduate and self-proclaimed music-lover A. Chan said he welcomes the new service but is unlikely to pay for it.

'The songs I can already download from the Internet may not be that high quality, but they are good enough for me - and best of all they are free,' he said.