Nupha on Wednesday announced the release of its international, cross-platform music store. It’s a commercial online download service for many independent music labels, available in both English and French, and with support for Windows and Mac users alike.
Genres covered by the service include blues, electronica, folk and traditional music, jazz, latin, pop and rock, reggae, soundtracks and world music. Labels providing content to Nupha include Active Suspension, Andromeda World, Bathyscape, Brume Records, Chocoflash, Cip/Audio, Clapping Music, Club News International, Créon Music, Cristal Records, Disques Tricatel, Dora Dorovitch, Drunk Dog, Gimini Music, H D P Music, Iris Music, Le Bison, Microbe Records, Shaoline Music and Tot-Al Records.
The service supports iTunes 4 or higher running on Mac OS X v10.3, as well as Windows PCs running Windows Media Player 9 software. The company requires Mac users to install the “nupha kit,” which allows iTunes to play Nupha-encrypted songs. All Mac media are encoded using Dolby Advanced Audio Codec (AAC) at 128K, according to Nupha.
Nupha provides users with the ability to play downloaded media on up to three computers simultaneously and burn them to CD-R an unlimited amount of times, similar to how iTunes works. Unfortunately, Nupha’s MP3 device support is not the same — for now, it’s limited to the Windows version only, and works only with SDMI-compliant MP3 players.
Nupha provides prices as low as €0.99 a song and €8.99 an album.
Please be advised that when MacCentral accessed the site earlier today, the site appeared to be very slow, so some patience may be required.