Mark Steyn penned a polemic this week that rails against the coarsening of our cutlure and in the process, he mentioned some old songs that I love, but don't own. One thing led to another and I ended up listening to Nat King Cole on YouTube.
Almost all of the music I own comes from my old collection of CDs. It was easy to rip them onto my PC and then transfer them here and there. I'm not sure I want to be buying CDs any more, though.
How do you buy music? Do you get it off Amazon? Do you use iTunes? I don't have any Apple products, so iTunes concerns me - every time I've ever loaded it onto my PC it turns out to be a annoying, insistent, bloated toad of a program, trying to take over every aspect of my multimedia, trying to convert all of my files and constantly update itself.
So how do you buy music?
I still buy CDs. There are a couple of reasons why.
ReplyDelete1. Typically I want the whole album, and I can pick up used albums on amazon for much less than downloading individual songs.
2. Since I own the original CD I don't need to worry about backing up my music.
3. I don't like Apple's AAC music format, which would require me converting everything. If I need to do that I might as well rid a CD.
On the plus side, if you buy on iTunes, you should be able re-download everything in the event of data loss.
If I were to buy Digital downloads, I'd suggest considering amazon. It works for me because I buy so much from there anyway.
Kelly, that's kind of the way I'm leaning, too. CDs give me so much more freedom.
ReplyDeleteI just wish that when I had ripped my CDs, I had known to do so as MP3s. Windows Media Player defaults to WMA files which do not have the ability to hold artist, track and album information. Gaaahhhh!
You can set it to rip them as MP3s, but by the time I did this, my whole music collection was ripped.
I do have apple, Macs. The boys have ipods.
ReplyDeleteI'm not a fan of the direction Apple's moving. I'm hoping with Jobs leaving, they'll move more consumer friendly. Fewer products with planned obsolescence. And where design doesn't trump technical function.
Apple is all about controlling the consumer. That said, I get much longer out of a Mac than a PC. It better it costs twice as much.
The reason I have Macs though is that the OS is light years better than Windows.
I don't buy CDs anymore, some old ones occasionally, but good new music is so few and far between, that wasting money on a whole CD is huge. Greg Allman put out a really cool CD of bluegrass covers in the past year, and when I found that, I also found Joann Shaw Taylor that is worth the whole album. But other than those, I have bought a whole album in a long time.
I've found iTunes to be much less satisfying on Windows. It just doesn't seems to work right. iTunes will rip in different formats and can convert stuff as well.
I have a few songs on my android phone, but really never use that.
MN, when I buy on my Droid from Amazon, I buy a single song in an impulse buy and then I wonder why I did it. Like Kelly, I think I'm going to stick with CDs. Since I'm buying really old music, I think I'm safe finding whole CDs that I like.
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