I’m confused - what’s the promise in perpetuity that you are concerned these companies won’t honor? That the purchase won’t always be available for redownload? I don’t think any store makes that promise.
Of course I did. I’m not being disingenuous at all. I really want to know how you can find an MP3 file better than a PCM/WAV/AIFF, which is what’s on a CD. If it’s the storage aspect, i.e. they take up about 1/10 of the space, that’s a perfectly valid opinion. Especially if you want to store a gazillion songs on your phone and hook it up with bluetooth in your car.
But do you really think the sound quality is actually better with an MP3, as played through the exact same setup of amp, speakers, as compared to the full format? I’d love to know your reasoning. I don’t get it. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen that claim before. So I’m curious. It’s not that I think we’ll agree, It’s just - to me - a strange statement.
I don’t understand why it matters if they “make a comeback”, unless you are hoping to sell them in the future. If you are just thinking you might enjoy listening to them at home, you can do that or not, regardless of the current popularity of the format.
I’ve kept mine as a backup for the MP3s I ripped, and also for copyright reasons. It’s legal to make an MP3 and then throw away your hardcopy, but it’s not legal to give away the hardcopy, and just trashing them feels vaguely wasteful. And they don’t take up a lot of space, and they are a backup. But you are certain you never want to use them again, sure, throw them away.
Depending on how many you have to rip:
I will admit that is a good question. If I get rid of them now they would either be donated or sold to a 2nd hand record store. I have several close to me and they both sell used CDs as well as vinyl so I assume they buy as well. If I sold them I wouldn’t expect to make much and I won’t keep them banking on seeing an increase in value.
I guess what I meant was, since I am back to playing vinyl and buying some on occasion what is the likelihood CDs would be something I would want to bother with in the future. Having read all the replies in this thread I think it is likely I will keep most of them for now. I still have a player and just checked that it is something I can hook up to my current music system without too much trouble. I don’t have a separate amp anymore but invested in a pair of Kanto YU-6 powered speakers. I’m able to hook up the turntable to that with RCA plugs and they also have Bluetooth so I can stream to them from my phone or other devices. Looks like the CD player and the speakers have optical cable connections. Just need to get a cable if I decide to set that up.
Pretty much. If your account is terminated for some reason, can you download existing purchases onto a new computer / other device? What if the company goes out of business?
Making backups of your data is one way to insure against this - easy to do with music (as long as you have the DRM-free versions). If you’ve bought the music in CD form, you’ve got a backup right there - in that situation, I guess the electronic version is actually the backup. I can enjoy that music forever as long as I own that CD. I do know people who’ll buy a CD, rip it to their computer, and give away / resell the physical media - questionable, legally; ethically as well.
It’s NOT as easy with ebooks, if they have DRM on them as most do, without taking steps of questionable legality. The closest parallel to the “rip CD, give it away” situation would be giving away copies of your ebook - which you shouldn’t do whether it had DRM or not.
I do NOT know if it’s possible to make local copies of movies you’ve purchased electronically. But the same situation as with music CDs would apply: if your account goes away for whatever reason, can you still use things you have already purchased? We’ve never actually bought an electronic version of a movie, so it’s nothing I’ve looked into; we rarely even buy DVD / Blu-Rays any more.
Do I honestly think Apple or Amazon are going to shut their doors any time soon? No - but you never know. Back when Palm Pilots were really hot stuff, I had a large amount of ebooks bought from a store that specialized in the Palm device; luckily, Barnes and Noble bought them out versus the place simply closing. If I buy (versus rent) a movie from Verizon’s storefront, then later jump ship to Comcast, can I still watch my Verizon movies? If Amazon fires me as a customer, in theory I could still read my Kindle books… but if my existing Kindle goes toes-up, I might be out of luck.
A lot of them do, which is why i mostly haven’t bought ebooks. It’s too bad, because i like reading ebooks, and there are great tools for organizing them and stuff. But I’m just not willing to pay to “buy” a thing that’s likely to die when some third party upgrades their system, or kisses interest in the book market, or…
I’ve been reading a lot of ebooks from the library recently, though. The local libraries have very good collections. I generally need to wait to get a popular book, and there’s no way to share with others (no sub-lending) but they have a lot, and it’s all free, and i don’t mind DRM on a file i only plan to use for two or three weeks.
It’s nice that most music can buy purchased DRM-free these days.
But none of them makes the promise you’re talking about, so I don’t understand why you hold that up as a reason to not buy from an online store, especially considering, as you acknowledge, you can simply make your own backup.
Do some googling. There ARE ways around this. But, as I said, of questionable legality - certainly the ebook vendors would rather you not do so.
Yes, MP3s take up a tenth of the digital storage space of a CD. But they actually take up about a millionth of the physical space of a CD. And they can be shipped anywhere instantly wherever you are for so little money you will forget you spent it ten minutes later. If that’s too much, they are also basically free. And if you have a streaming service, essentially any MP3s-quality song is everywhere at once instantly. If you drove a semi-truck full of CDs everywhere you went and carried them up and down every staircase of every building you went in, you would spend hours every time you went anywhere to approximate the access to access you would have with digital music and you would fail miserably at this Sisyphean task while looking ridiculous to anyone you met and dying lonely having missed out on many great events because you were schlepping boxes.
When your mom calls you to wish you a happy birthday, do you also lecture her about how she lost 90% of the information ny calling you on a cell phone and tell her she should have sent you an audio recording in a lossless format by messenger? Or do you get the information she was trying to convey notwithstanding the technical limitations of the medium? Because that’s what an MP3 does. It conveys substantially all of the information a person would have otherwise received using only 10% of the data.
To answer your crabbed question, the sound quality of a CD is better. With my middle aged ears, under perfect listening conditions, I might sometimes be able to tell the difference. When music is the soundtrack to my life as I walk, make breakfast, talk with friends and loved ones, or drive, there is approximately zero perceptible difference in sound quality. Nearly everyone who chooses to listen to music today chooses to listen to either MP3s or LPs. MP3s are good enough to enjoy. Ironically, LPs have basically the worst sound quality of any medium in regular use with mono sound, hissing, popping, skips, occasional distortion from bends, and different levels of quality from the first track to the last and yet millions of people think it’s good enough. In fact, in some cases, they delude themselves into thinking they are getting a superior product.
I’ve made my point. Did I tell you one thing you didn’t already know? I doubt it.
The goal of a (properly-encoded!) MP3 file is to sound “the same” as the original CD (which has CD-quality sound— you would not produce the sound at that quality level, but for distribution it also counts as OK). However, since it is digital audio you can just “rip” it without trans-coding it and it will still take up a millionth of the physical space. (If you wanted to do something with the audio, like take samples, rather than just listen to it, then the original audio may be important in that case,)
The only important question is, do you want to keep all the CDs on your shelf, or not.
They need not be kept on the shelf. They can be tucked away, tightly packed, out of sight, out of mind, yet available.
(Editing out the typo in the quote of me)
I’ve done that. But it’s a nuisance. So mostly i just don’t buy ebooks.
When MP3s first came out, i played with that. I ripped some CDs to varying qualities of MP3, and listened.
At the very lowest quality (which no one uses) i could maybe possibly hear the difference. The MP3 sounded maybe slightly cleaner. At the others i couldn’t hear the difference.
I know that other people are more sensitive to slight nuances in sound than i am. I don’t disagree with anyone who tells me they can hear the difference. (I can taste lots of things other people don’t taste, fwiw.) But I can’t hear the difference. So i don’t keep big lossless music files lying around on my computer.
That is what I meant—think of MP3s as a write-only format: suitable for listening, but not for further processing (of course a CD is also the final product provided to consumers, it’s not the original unmixed tracks). If you use the “extreme”, or even “standard”, preset to encode them, they should sound fine.
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Maybe it’s illegal, but there’s nothing ‘free’ about buying a CD for $12 new, and being able to sell it for only a buck or two now (or just giving it away) after having made an electronic copy.
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And wouldn’t the same thing apply to selling your vinyl LPs if you’d made recordings of them? I don’t think copyright law makes any sort of distinction between formats. Either way, you’ve got an additional person in possession of the music without paying a penny to the copyright owner.
If you give it away, of course there’s something free about it: it’s free to the person you give it to.
If you re-sell it while keeping a copy of the music it contained, two people are getting that music for the price of one, regardless of how that price is divided up between the two people. So in one sense, one of those copies might be considered “free.”
Another analogy (that you might like better?): suppose you buy a ticket to a show (or an amusement park or a sporting event or a concert or whatever), use the ticket to get in, and then decide that, now that you’re in, you don’t need the ticket any more, so you arrange to sell or give it to someone else still on the outside so they can use that same ticket to get in. The end result is not much different than if one of you had just snuck in without a ticket.
So what?
When you buy from a digital platform, one of the things you are paying for is the convenience of cloud storage for those files. That storage and access is part of the product’s value. Whether or not the platform is promising eternal access to those files, it would be foolish not to consider the long-term viability of the platform. The more stable the platform, the better. That’s sensible.
The ability to make backups is also value, but it’s irrelevant here. The point of a backup (whether of a CD or a download) is hedging against the failure of the original purchase. If a digital distributor shuts down, I lose value even if I’ve backed everything up.
By your logic, we should never think about a product’s value beyond the explicit promises of the manufacturer. But of course that’s not a good way to make smart decisions as a consumer.
Keep them.
If I had a five dollar bill for every streamed movie on my watch list(s) that I could no longer watch because “this movie is no longer available”…
I have a 50 disc programmable player I won over 20 years ago we keep in our rec room. So I hold on to CD’s.
I was at the WILL last night and noticed that CD’s are 2 bucks and DVD’s are 3 except on half price days. So right now they really aren’t worth much.