Amazon and Apple both sell DRM-free audio files, which is no different than buying and ripping a CD, minus having the superfluous physical disc lying around. They can't be deleted from your device.
I think I've ripped my entire audio collection 3 or 4 times now. Back in the day I was naively convinced M4A would displace MP3. And depending on the disk size of the day, I've ripped with various bit rates (not necessarily VBR). Amazon and Apple seem to give you high quality rips these days, but I like having the flexibility of going back to the source material as needed.
Also, I guess I'm increasingly in the minority, but I really enjoy reading liner notes.
It would be a lot easier to buy more storage and just buy digital lossless copies of all your music. The extra cost would be more than made up for in the time savings from not having to rerip your audio collection so many times.
Sure. I don't recall anyone selling anything over 160 kbps in 2004. Apple introduced their lossless encoding around then, but extra storage for that many discs was prohibitively expensive. I think Amazon is still ~250 kbps and doesn't offer lossless at all.
Fortunately, I haven't had to rerip in a while. And if I really wanted to throw in the towel, services like Murfie exist that will take your collection and rip for you in a variety of formats. But, having physical CDs really doesn't bother me either.
For random songs, I use the amazon store, which I am very happy with - the ability to download a plain old, DRM-free mp3 file is a consumer-friendly environment that I would not have predicted in this day and age.
However, if I want an album, I always buy and rip the CD to WAV/PCM. It's the real, unprocessed, uncompressed (lossy or lossless) bits of the CD, and I know of no other way to get those.
In my opinion, unless you have the PCM of the cd track, you will buy or rip that song again. This way you have it for good.
Why the hell would you rip it to WAV/PCM and not FLAC? You'll save on the order of 80% space without losing any quality; you can always convert the FLAC right back to WAV without anything being different.
However, there are other ways to get those as well. Bandcamp offers downloads in flac, mp3, ogg, and others. If the album isn't on bandcamp, or some other site that offers flac copies, then you can illegally pirate flac content from some-of-a-few audiophile websites.
I'm quite a fan of bandcamp and I'd highly recommend seeing if you can find good music there.
Not every use case involves a system that can play FLAC files, but just about everything can play a WAV file. For instance, one of my desktops is Irix on MIPS which I can play WAV files on, but not fancy things like FLAC.
Again, having the WAV file means I never have to touch that music again. Ever.
I used to play flac files on my Octane (300 MHz,1 CPU). Given how little load it caused, I'd expect it to work well on a O2 180mhz r5k. Perhaps you are using an older still iris machine though?
While just about any device can play .wav, many devices have so little storage that I find myself ripping on flac, the re-encoding to something lossy and lower bit rate to get a reasonable amount onto a mobile device.
> For instance, one of my desktops is Irix on MIPS which I can play WAV files on, but not fancy things like FLAC.
Why would that be? libFLAC has IRIX support since ~2002, and computational power certainly isn't the issue, there used to be (and may still be) devices with <100MHz ARM chips doing real-time FLAC decoding in software (using just libFLAC).
This is one thing that I really dislike about digital music stores - the fact that most of them don't offer a lossless option at all, and in the rare chance that they do, it usually costs extra, even though it really should come by default (because sheesh, it's what we've been getting on CDs for ages). Bandcamp is one of the few exceptions that get at least this thing right by offering a variety of options for a single price with lossless being one of them.
By the way, there's no reason to keep stuff around as WAV/PCM, it'll be just as lossless as FLACs (and thus can be further transcoded with no issue whatsoever) and you can actually tag the stuff like that too.
This is true, but the hard-drive music player seems to be on its way out now as well, with the iPod Classic gone and Apple moving toward the streaming market or "cloud" model, where they have ultimate control over the user's access to the content. While I'm not a CD junkie, I find myself clinging to the model you mention, because I am not eager to hand over control to a company that continually required me to pay. For those are a fan of Spotify: you pay $10/month for access to millions(?) of songs, but what happens when Spotify goes under, or gets bought? You've been paying for, let's say, 3 years - $360 - and what do you have to show for it? I much prefer sinking that amount of money into backing up my music collection.
> You've been paying for, let's say, 3 years - $360 - and what do you have to show for it?
The answer is 3 years of music enjoyment.
Honestly, this seems like a terrible example - I don't think anybody pays for spotify on the basis that they will have the music forever, it's very explicitly a rental service. Instead, people pay because it's the most convenient (including being cheap) way to access the music they want.
> While I'm not a CD junkie, I find myself clinging to the model you mention, because I am not eager to hand over control to a company that continually required me to pay
This doesn't really make sense either. If you don't like rental services, don't pay for them, buy the albums just like you always did - it's easy to buy DRM free mp3s nowadays.
And, too, the collaborative experience that Spotify brings. I neglected to consider that. While very little money goes to the artists, the "sharing" aspect of Spotify is something that many people value and gladly pay for. Personally, I find that aspect too involved (I'm an albums person, not a playlist person) but from a marketing perspective this might be better for artists than physical media. I'm still too possessive for the rent-a-song method. What happened when I sign on and the music I like it out of license? Much better for me to have it as near to me as possible.
Years ago there was a local used record store in my town that offered a "trial" period on any album purchased. If you "didn't like" the album you could return it for a small "restocking" fee. Unsurprisingly this store also had a good business in the sale of blank cassette tapes.
What prevents someone from doing the same thing with Spotify? Play music on one device, record it on another using audio patch cables if needed. Or maybe it isn't even that hard, just record the audio signal right out of the audio card in your PC. Is this prevented somehow?
It's not prevented. You don't even need to go that far -- there are programs that will get the ogg files directly from Spotify. I'm not going to link to them, but I trust you'll find one with sufficient google-fu.
At $120/year, Spotify is much more expensive than most people's annual music budget.[0] It might be convenient, but it certainly isn't cheap. At least with individual album purchases, you are building 'equity' in a music collection $10 at a time.
Then those people probably don't want to pay for spotify. I didn't mean to imply that spotify is automatically a good deal for everyone, obviously it isn't, but I think it's plausibly a good deal for a lot of people.
> but it certainly isn't cheap
I'll admit, I was speaking more from the perspective of listening to a lot of music. For instance, the combined purchase value of all the albums in my spotify playlists far exceeds the total amount I ever spent on spotify, though I haven't used it for a while. I'm sure there are many people for whom this is true, even if they aren't a large proportion of the whole population.
In general you're right of course, 'cheap' is a matter of perspective. Spotify is not cheap for everyone, but it is potentially cheap for plenty of people. I still don't see the problem with this.
Isn't the fall of the hard-drive music player just because phones do that? I buy digital tracks rather than streaming (particularly since the whole point of most of my music is to listen while on the Underground), but my MP3 player sits gathering dust, because my phone can do that and more.
You also miss the booklet and liner notes. Whether this matters is probably genre-specific. Jazz in particular has more meta-data than is ever encoded in an mp3, and if it was encoded, players don't support showing it. Classical has the same issue.
