The semantics around the first sale doctrine don't override the underlying copyright. You are selling a piece of plastic and transferring the license to the new owner. If you had ripped digital files from that plastic while you were the owner, legally you must delete them as you no longer have the rights to the music contained on that plastic once sold. From a practical perspective of course this is next-to-impossible to police, but still…you DO NOT own the music. You own plastic and a license. That is all.
It's also the way I feel....
But I can understand the people who don't want to deal with tons of album, books, DVD or VHS ....This is a relative handicap for someone who moves around a lot, beit for family or professional reasons...
There is a certain temptation to indeed digitalize everything possible (even comics are being sold dematerialized) to be able to do a "Fripp small unit thing", but external disc can become encumbrant when you start accumulating them (of course nowadays, they're getting smaller than ever)...
my insignificant 0.2
my music collection increased tenfolds when I switched from drug-addicts to complete nutcases.
I prefer a physical cd, dont want a download. With the cd I can convert to mp3 and put on a player , copy it for a duplicate, and keep the original in case of loss of the copy.
I tried a dl once from Amazon. While downloading the software for the Amazon Cloud my XP computor was infected with a virus that was difficult to remove and once removed ( by Norton personel remotly after 4 tries at 3 hours plus per try) the computor was never the same. That was a major player, Amazon. Im out on digital downloads. I do bit-torrent, but only boots, I have never stolen an official release via torrent. If and when physical cds are unavailable I shall grieve. Wailing too.
From the artist side of things, I frankly have no intention of ever releasing another CD. Releasing on BandCamp is so much easier and cheaper.
I think there's still a "prestige" factor at work. I know I felt pretty darned 'special' when I held a copy of my shrink-wrapped first CD in my hands. Of course, all it really meant was that I'd parted with a bunch of money for the privilege.
I'm tech-savvy enough to pretty much find whatever I'm looking for and pay nothing. I'm also someone who prefers digital everything rather than hard copies. Being OCD, I simply hate what I perceive as clutter. Even though I could steal until I was satisfied, I desire to spend my money. Yes, I could buy a CD but I'd much rather buy a lower cost download and use the savings to perhaps buy one or two more albums. I also love the idea that the artist is getting the lion's share of the money I spend rather than crumbs.
Last edited by Splicer; 04-18-2014 at 10:01 PM.
Yeah, well try to play your mp3 files on a home theater system. There just isn't enough information in that file to run five speakers. Mp3's may be fine for headphones and laptop listening but I need a .wav file or 5.1. to fully enjoy the sound quality of pristine speakers. It's an easy process to rip a CD on my laptop (and then put it in the closet as backup as laptops can get lost and digital files get corrupted no matter what the format). I hook my laptop up to the TV and I have my entire CD collection at my disposal.
To answer your question, it is possible to "play" a hi res audio file on any IOS or Android device, just not at full quality. The files get down sampled to 16/44 quality. The problem is the hardware is only capable of playing at 16/44 or 16/48. In order to play at full quality, one would have to purchase an external audio interface and software to go with it. The Pono player will be fully hardware capable of playing at full quality.
As far as speakers or headphones, any halfway decent quality pair will do. Nothing particularly fancy is needed to listen to a vinyl record or open reel tape for the better quality to shine through.
"Well my son, life is like a beanstalk, isn't it?"--Dalai Lama
I'm a little OCD as well. I can't stand digital clutter on a hard drive. Those bits go onto that thing and they may look like they're organized in nice neat folders but they're scattered all over in there. Drives me nuts. I stay up late at night, defragging over and over hoping to bring order to my little data microcosm...never quite knowing when it's truly done.
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Well, in theory, as far as I know with Windows if you create a separate data partition and write to it your data will write to the drive contiguously and as long as you never ever delete anything you will have all your songs in contiguous data chinks. It's when you delete and the OS goes back to fill in those holes with new data that it gets all fragged and wonky.
Wont mention our name but we have seen a huge uptick in digital downloads of our music... Not to sound like its all about money but the cd to dl ratio for the band is about 50 to 1... That is for ever 50 bucks we could have made on a cd sales we make a dollar on digital sales. Still have music to release but looking for better options so as to make releasing our music affordabe... For us.
I wonder if PONO stands for "Play On Neil's Own" system. How hard would it be if every band had its own exclusive player for sale.
Still alive and well...
Love my albums, books, DVDs, VHS, and LaserDiscs...until I had to move. Was in pain for a week and when I have to move again, they're gone. I've just picked up a hard drive to start digitizing everything. No I haven't downloaded an album yet, just the odd track. But the train is coming and it's time to get on or be run over.
^^ I'm getting that way too but until I can buy everything I want in lossless formats, I'm not going to give up physical media. I'd rather know that my ears probably aren't good enough to tell the difference any more but I'd rather have a higher quality format. (I do have all my music digitally stored!)
I've digitized my entire music library. I boxed most of my standard CDs. The CDs I didn't store away are boxed sets, my top 5 bands, and autographed pieces.
I'm certainly in the minority these days, as my CD collection continues to grow and expand. In fact I've just ordered another shelving unit! But my wife and I don't have kids and I get my own space for these kinds of things (pales in comparison to the space she gets, but that's another story). I love physical media and I buy it weekly, sometimes twice weekly. I like special boxed sets, I like CD booklets (including the smell of new ones), I like artwork that I don't have to call up on a screen to look at. I love my iPod too, when I'm out walking or at work, but I'm no fan of buying music files I'm afraid. If it does get to the point where that becomes the only option, I suspect the amount of music I purchase will drastically decline. I'll have such a mass of physical media anyway that I can stay happy and occupied for the rest of my life.
Interviewer of reprobate ne'er-do-well musicians of the long-haired rock n' roll persuasion at: www.velvetthunder.co.uk and former scribe at Classic Rock Society. Only vaguely aware of anything other than music.
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Ian Beabout
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https://cuneiformrecords.bandcamp.co...m/bakers-dozen
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I still prefer buying the physical CD rather than the downloads. I think downloaded music is more prone to getting lost, missplaced, deleted, etc. I'll buy digital downloads in certain circumstances.
I have a couple of examples: Amazon was offering a special download offer for the Rush album "Clockwork Angels" a while back for 99 cents. I hadn't planned on buying the CD but I thought for a dollar it was worth DLing. So the files are burnt onto a CDr, sitting, collecting dust now.
Recently I was given an iTunes gift card. I would've perferred an Amazon gift card because I could've ordered the physical CDs. With iTunes card I had to download the albums. It's okay, the downloads sound fine but I still would've preferred the CDs.
I downloaded the EP "Beyond Magnetic" by Metallica because I sort of looked at that as a bonus disk, and I probably wasn't going to find it at a brick & mortar store. Later on I actually found the CD and bought it anyway (and it sounds better than the downloads).
A few years ago when I was a member at emusic I downloaded a lot of music. I had the music on my hard drive and I also made some backups on DVDs. All the music was burnt to CDrs as well. Those CDrs are scattered all over the place now and I don't remember the last time I backed up all those music files, and to top it off, my computer took a shit and I had to reimage the hard drive and reinstall everything, so the original files are all gone.
Naaaahhh!!!... You're on PE, so you're part of the majority...
Mine (collection) may not grow nearly as quck as yours does, but I've bought some 20 albums (new or used, mostly CDs) so far this year (which is probably almost as much as I did last year), though I'd say the vast majority is still 60's & 70's stuff. .... though I'm not all that prone tyo buy boxsets and the umpteenth remasters with bogus bonuses...
But I have indeed bought less and less in recent years (this winter-spring spree is relatively unrepresentative of my recent consumption) and like you, no kids, but then again, but since I spruce my stacks and shelves from the deadwood, it doesn't get out of hand.
BTW, I've never bought a download, neither have I one illegal file on my computer
my music collection increased tenfolds when I switched from drug-addicts to complete nutcases.
I wish most artists I like would put more downloads of live shows for sale. Marillion has obviously put a ton of shows for sale as downloads, but for some reason Fish has been very slow to follow suit (ha-ha). Fortunately he finally does have a few shows for download, but if he added a lot more I'd buy a lot more. The same goes for many bands I like. Some might think it takes a lot of work or money, but Fish isn't usually one to invest a lot in this kind of thing so I don't think it has to be that difficult or expensive.
This mostly sums up my view. Sometimes the download is the only possible way and if I want it badly enough I'll give in and get the download, but it's not the preferred way for me. I hate the thought of having to fire up a computer to look at liner notes...so much so that I just don't do it. So, as far as I'm concerned, that experience is effectively lost forever once things go to digital download only. And I'm already bad enough at knowing song titles as it is. I just don't trust that my downloaded files aren't going to get lost or deleted. Sure, I'll lose a CD or two once in a great while, but I don't trust some external hard drive not to lose umpteen terabytes of data. Backing that stuff up onto discs? I've done so much of that sort of thing over the years and I've concluded...life is WAY to f-ing short!
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