MAQAM® MP3 offers thousands of titles in digital format. Arabic and Middle Eastern music is our culture, our history, and our heritage, so preserving the music and providing it to music lovers worldwide at the highest quality possible is both a mission and a duty.

Many of our titles are also available in physical (CD) format and may be purchased directly at www.MAQAM.com. Physical and digital products may not be purchased in the same shopping cart.

Many of our recordings are historical records and may have what today might be termed as minor sound "imperfections". However, these variations are part of the history of the music and the golden era of achievements in art, music, and performance.

To learn more about MAQAM® MP3, our Arabic Music quality, how to purchase songs, payment options, download instructions, technical specifications and much, much more, please visit the MAQAM® Information Center. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to Contact Us.

The songs on MAQAM® MP3 are studio-mastered and encoded using a constant bit rate for the highest sound quality possible. This allows us to preserve the original sound quality while providing the highest standard in digital music.

Most commercial digital music services use computer encoding that eliminates pieces of the music that the software decides are not important in favor of pre-determined smaller file sizes. For example, the software may determine that the violin track layer of the song is unimportant and thus remove it. Other services use variable encoding in which, again, software decides which pieces of the music are important and which are not (based on programmed specifications) to provide songs with a pre-determined file size. For example, the software may determine that the beginning of the song is more "important" and thus keep more of the sound layers at the start and sacrifice the sound layers in the middle or at the end of the song. In both cases, the end result is nothing like the original music or what the artists intended when recording their songs.

MAQAM® MP3 songs are studio-mastered and encoded using a constant bit rate, meaning the songs you buy retain all of their original components (all instruments, arrangements, vocals, etc.) and are exactly how the music was originally recorded. This does mean that the songs do not adhere to a pre-determined file size and are in general larger files, however our goal is to preserve and provide the original music, not a computer-generated facsimile.

MAQAM® MP3 songs are also DRM-free so you are free to use the music any way you want (within the acceptable uses as defined by the Terms of Use - Please see USE OF MUSIC FROM MAQAM® MP3 for more details). Digital Rights Management (DRM) software is a technology that is designed to restrict how the music can be downloaded, played, accessed, etc. DRM-free means that songs from MAQAM® MP3 do not have any such restrictive software.