june gloom on 5/2/2012 at 20:18
the topic question was posted by koki though
Muzman on 6/2/2012 at 10:47
Quote Posted by Aerothorn
I generally just buy things on CD, as it's a more flexible format than fix-kps music downloads.
Woh? You mean buying compressed MP3s etc? There's download places that will give you things in pretty high res and FLAC at the same time for no extra money (depends on the place tho)
Aerothorn on 6/2/2012 at 20:38
True, and I'd use that if I only played things on my computer/digital media players; but I still use CDs sometimes, and it's a lot easier for me to use them as a repository for data and compress them into MP3s then it is to have FLACs taking up a bunch of hard drive space and burn those onto CD.
I'm also very much an album guy, so buying individual songs rarely appeals to me.
Muzman on 7/2/2012 at 07:16
I was the same until quite recently. It just resulted in me not buying music altogether for the most part though (I doubt that'd happen for everyone). I couldn't arsed leaning over and turning the thing on, taking out the disk, fiddling with the badly folded inlay that doesn't fit in the case, snapping off the stupid arms on the cover etc. I'm not even sure the player works anymore.
There is a funny thing with the digital transition though; you're at first saying 'Man I could do without this huge stack of crap, and having to change it over all the time and god knows what else' then after a period of digital ness you end up saying "I've got all this shit filling up my drive, now I've got to friggin manage that! More drives, shonky burns that die after a year or two. If only there was some good way to store all these things...."
heywood on 8/2/2012 at 08:41
I have all my music on a HP Windows Home Server NAS box in FLAC and MP3 formats (~2TB worth) and stream it everywhere. But I still buy all my music on CDs, mostly ordered online.
One reason for CDs is that I determined the file organization and metadata handling up front when configuring the ripper (dBPoweramp) so I just throw a new CD in the drive, hit rip, and a few minutes later everything is good to go. I never have to manually organize files and almost never mess with metadata except with some classical CDs. I've tried buying music through online downloads but got frustrated with having to manually edit metadata because nobody seemed to handle it the same way. Consistent metadata is the key to browsing a large collection efficiently.
Another reason why I keep buying CDs is the quality is more consistent than downloads. It seems that even if you stick to ALAC or FLAC downloads, their pedigree isn't always CD quality.
However, for somebody who is primarily interested in singles and not albums, online is the way to go.
Kuuso on 8/2/2012 at 15:18
Digital music marketplaces are still fucking useless compared to a proper music tracker the like of the now-dead Oink. The problem is that they're littered with music from the big four without any proper way of getting good advice on what is good.
Music trackers are good precisely because they're objective in the way that no matter what label an artist comes from, it can be the number one downloaded piece. Also, because people upload the music, it's bound to have a million times more interesting selection than one that needs labels onboard.
Also, every music site should have streaming available pre-buying (you could stream an album once before buying for example), there is no reason why people shouldn't be able to "test" the product before buying.
Just for your notice, I very rarely buy music online, but I buy lots of vinyl LPs.
