What would you do if?

[Viz]

It did indeed fizzle out, if you look carefully at the graph :-)

[Skipped]

In the Dave Grohl movie (Sound City) Neil Young talks about the creation of the CD format. He says that the algorithm that converts music into the digital realm was created "with a mistake in it". I think he is probably correct!
When SACD came out I got very interested. But - at exactly the same time Linn, Meridian, and others brought out updated CD players and the hi-fi press reported that these new players were extracting every last drop from the red book cd standard, and as a result the listening experience was very close to - and in some cases better - than the new SACD format. I had a listen. And I agreed.

I don't think it is old fashioned to say that you like physical discs. I think we are now in a period where most of us will want the old and the new at the same time. In other words - a hard disc player/streamer is going to sell a lot more units if it has a CD drive built in. There are some aspects of digital media which trouble me. If you have a Kindle you just know that one day Amazon are going to tell you that they have just deleted a book from your Kindle because they decided you were misusing it. They refund your £7.99 (less a £7 handling charge). Now - How do you feel?

[musophilr]

physical media for me every time, preferably an EllPee failing that a CD

[ICBM]

Im not 100% sure but i think if you sell the cds you own then your ripped copies are illegal.

You are correct. That's another - but minor - reason why I do keep them. I will be honest and admit that I do sometimes download music illegally or rip copies from mates' CDs. *But* I do make the effort to eventually replace these with legitimate CDs if I like the music. If I don't like it I delete it.

I may be something of a poster boy for the "illegal downloaders buy more legal music than those who don't" claim - I spend more on music than almost anyone I know and have one of the largest CD collections - but it is also true that second-hand sales don't benefit the artist, and the majority of my "download replacements" were bought used.

Was that SACD? I never bothered with it because it would have meant a new CD player, so I waited to see if it took off, but it seemed to fizzle out.

Read this and find out why it's a flawed concept in the first place.

http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

44.1KHz/16-bit is all that's necessary for music playback, and increasing the "quality" can actually make things *worse* - really.

(This is not the same as recording, mixing and mastering at higher resolution, which is worthwhile - just not for final distribution.)

CDs sound great if you play them on good equipment.

[Rocker]

Im not 100% sure but i think if you sell the cds you own then your ripped copies are illegal.

That it exactly the situation my friend. Uncomfortable but true.

Anyone who rips CDs to a hard drive really ought to have a second hard drive [or a third] that has a copy of your music files. With hard drives it is not a question of if but when it will fail. Ripping files losslessly is a very good idea, you can rip MP3s from these files afterwards. [Quite why anyone would do this is another question as storage is so cheap these days]. Files ripped as WAV do not have any cover art tags. Files ripped to FLAC [free lossless audio codec] do have cover art tags. These things are important if you have several hundred CDs ripped to your system.

[BlindLemonAde]

from the first time you ever heard music it was through your phone, ipod, internet etc.
This all came first. Then one day someone came along and said. Ive just invented this, its a disc with music on it. You can put it in this thing here and it will play your music when you want to. Its not cheap but it works really well. You also get a little booklet with lyrics and piccys. I predict in a few years it will be made even bigger. Then someone comes along and says look what ive just invented . Its vinyl and bigger, you get a bigger booklet and piccys and you can play it on this thing here.These are called things!.
Just think, we could give a gold one to any band who sells 1 million of them or platinum etc. What do they have on their walls now?
If you could afford to, do you think you would buy any of these. ?

And then, someone invents Minstrels (not the chocolate kind), where a troupe of players with sackbutts and crumhorns follows you about, playing catchy madrigals and popular tunes like "Sumer is icumen in, lude singge Cuckoo". Just think, live music wherever you go, like your own personal Festival! Gadzooks! Bugger all this "Cloud" nonsense, personal performers are the future...

[bertie]

. MP3 is simply not good enough for proper listening, in my opinion.

.

it is if you have normal ears

TBH I only ever listen to music these days as background noise, or on holiday by the pool - and when I didnt I thought vinyl was all hiss or snake oil, much preferred the "crispness" of CDs

and these days MP3 is perfectly good, its the content thats more important............

[SeriousCat]

it is if you have normal ears

if mp3 is good enough for you then you arent listening properly enough

personally i cant believe that people can listen to music on cd or vinyl - the only real method is a secret one that only proper proper listeners know about - since none of you have given "the sign" i assume you are all inferior listeners

[fatherjack]

if mp3 is good enough for you then you arent listening properly enough

personally i cant believe that people can listen to music on cd or vinyl - the only real method is a secret one that only proper proper listeners know about - since none of you have given "the sign" i assume you are all inferior listeners

There's no mystery - you just listen in a room with the air molecules aligned so as to ensure optimal sound transmission. I believe there is a company that makes an ioniser that will do it for you - a bargain at£1500 (£2K with the proper power cable).

[digitalscream]

DRM is less of an issue now as a lot of places offer DRM free downloads (I often use Amazon). I think even iTunes is DRM free these days.

Not so - for music, maybe. Buy a digital video, be it on a physical disc or as a file, and it's pretty much guaranteed to be encrypted with DRM.

Sure some cloud services might fail (potentially causing massive problems like you're theorising about), but I think as a concept they're only going to grow from here and eventually become the norm. People want convenience - it is the main reason mp3 beat CDs so quickly, even though most people in the early days were listening to really low quality mp3s due to physical space limitations on early iPods.

I'm not just theorising, because it's already happened - look at what happened with MegaUpload. Every single user lost all of their files, whether they were legal or not, based on an illegal seizure...and none of them will get their data back because the service went bust as a result of the seizure. There was a cloud-based photo storage site which also went titsup (financially) a while back and was shut down, and people lost all their photos. We haven't even hit the real wave of shutdowns yet because it's still a very young market.

The simple fact is that if the physical medium your data is stored on is somewhere else and you don't have direct physical access to it, you don't have control over it and it's at the mercy of whoever owns the storage. That will never change, and it's the single greatest flaw in the way the cloud paradigm is being sold because it makes it inherently unreliable. It will only take a few high-profile shutdowns to kill the concept off.

However, if they started to market cloud services as temporary storage for convenience...that's something I could get behind. By the time that happens, though, consumer internet connections will generally be fast enough that you can stream data from your own home regardless of where you are...thus having your own private cloud, and making the concept more or less redundant.