Most likely, the band had no say in the decision to release it this way. Even big, well-known bands often can’t stop the record company from doing this. It ain’t the band who are dumbasses!
By the way, if you decide to return the CD, here’s how.
Go back to the original store, tell them the CD is defective (won’t play on your machine) and ask for a replacement copy.
Take the replacement copy, unopened, to another store from that company, and ask for your money back.
Most chain stores won’t give money back on opened CD’s, even if they won’t play for you. So you have to go thru this two-step nuisance to get a refund. (Maybe some day the industry will notice that they have made it harder to legally purchase music than to pirate it online. But I’m not holding my breath.)
[QUOTE=t-bonham@scc.netMaybe some day the industry will notice that they have made it harder to legally purchase music than to pirate it online. But I’m not holding my breath.[/QUOTE]
You hit the nail on the head. How many other industries make it so difficult to purchase products. Its as if they don’t WANT to sale them. On the few occasions when I find music I like enough to buy the CD, I have to go to several stores all over town to find it often.
I see. I assumed he was referring to the music that isn’t sold “at a reasonable price in formats that people want”, since downloading garbage you don’t want is pointless, as you said.
If it’s garbage, you wouldn’t have paid for it anyway, right? So it’s not taking money away from anyone.
Or do you mean encouraging your friends who listen to garbage to download it instead of paying? Or downloading garbage for the sole purpose of sharing it, thus making it easier for others not to pay?
Not that I agree with it in any case. Crappy music should be ignored, not spread around. Jessica Simpson? Jay-Z? Modest Mouse? Never heard of 'em.
So long as speakers are analog devices, it will always be possible to convert any playable cd into whatever format you want with a cd player and a sound card with a line in jack. They can encrypt it up the wazoo, but it’s gotta be unencrypted and converted to analog if you want to make speaker cones move back and forth. You’ll lose a tiny smidgen of quality, but nothing compared to .mp3 compression.
Not that I’m suggesting you do anything illegal, mind you. :rolleyes:
I have to disagree with you on this one. I assume you are suggesting playing the music from the sound card into another recording device. IMHO, I think that a mp3 recorded at 256kbps or higher from the direct source would be better than switching to analog and back to digital.
:dubious: Just how shoddy do you think digital-analog and analog-digital conversions are? Your cd player does digital-analog every time you play the damn disc. Have you noticed how crappy that sounds? :rolleyes:
Digital compression, on the other hand, is orders of magnitude worse. You’re actually losing information (well, cept for some of these new-fangled lossless compression formats, but .mp3 ain’t one of those).
The ADC isn’t necessarily all that great, especially if you’re just using the sound device built into your motherboard. I’ve used a lot of computers where I could hear noise through the speakers when the CPU was working hard (interference through the PCI bus or the power supply or something) and I’m sure that would mess with recording too.
Ah, but you’re losing information that only dogs and golden-eared audiophiles can hear. Psychoacoustic compression has stood up to plenty of testing… most people just can’t tell the difference between an uncompressed original and a properly compressed MP3, even when they’re trying to hear it.
It’s just like JPEG or MPEG (e.g. DVD video). Those throw out a ton of information, but most people can’t tell unless the compression rate is really high, and even then it’s usually less noticable than dirty VCR heads, dust or hair on a film, etc.
Okay, I will grant that if you run your signal into a crappy audio card on unshielded lines, yadda yadda, the signal is apt to pick up all manner of noise, and the technique I alluded to is unlikely to result in a high quality recording. However, that’s not because you’ve taken a digital signal, converted it to analog, and converted it back to digital. It’s because you’ve got a lot of noise in your devices. The simplest way to avoid this would be to run the signal into an external audio device connected to the computer via firewire or usb so that the signal in the noisy RFI-laden environment inside your computer is already digital. This, however, is all mere details.
No, I am not someone who thinks that LPs sound better than CDs. I was being sarcastic. My point was, if you think that the digital>analog conversion that your cd player doesn’t result in any meaningful loss of quality, the reverse conversion which uses essentially the same technique isn’t going to either.
Yes, this is true. The inside of a computer has got a lot of electromagnetic radiation buzzing around, and many sound cards aren’t shielded at all. See caveats in above post. The point is just that encryption is ultimately meaningless so long as a player is converting the signal to analog as it must do in order to drive a speaker. At that point it becomes trivial to pick the signal back up, change it back to digital with equipment of a quality acceptable to your tastes, and do whatever the hell you like with it. Technically speaking, of course, not legally.
You’ve gotta understand that I used to work in ‘the industry’.
I worked for both One Ton Records (an indie label in Dallas). at BMG, and finally at a management company that managed, among others, Drowning Pool and Flickerstick.
I saw what the labels do, I see how they screw over everyone. I see how the band doesn’t make crap off of record CDs-they make their cash touring. Furthermore, I saw how overpriced CDs are to ensure a fat profit for the labels.
Since leaving those jobs, I’ve bought maybe a dozen CDs, and almost all were independent labels. If I want, say Modest Mouse, I’ll pirate it now.
All right, I can agree with that. The “analog hole” will always be there (as long as people are unwilling to get brain implants just to listen to music), and even if digital copy protection becomes perfect someday (which is about as likely as breaking the speed of light), people still could and would make analog copies, redigitize them, and distribute them. And if the popularity of FM radio is any indication, most people wouldn’t care if the copies are imperfect anyway.
Several people have suggested I download the mp3s for this album, but the only way I can find them is through a site that will make me pay for them (again).
I like paying an artist for their efforts. I don’t want to rip anyone off. But I also don’t want to pay twice for the same product, just because it’s in a different format. I should be able to dub my DVD to a VCR tape, and I should be able to “dub” an audio cd to mp3 format.
I really don’t want to have to go out and buy another device to do this, tho. I don’t have a regular CD player, and I’m not gonna disconnect my DVD player from my living room setup, haul it into the computer room, and reconnect and reconfigure things to do this.
I also don’t do file-sharing anymore, not since the original Napster was shut down years ago (although I used to find that was a great way to hear music before I bought a whole CD). Is there some option I’m not aware of when y’all say “just download the mp3s”?
