A few months ago, I moved out of my parents' house. As with any move, I took most of my personal belongings, but left a few behind to dig through later. Well, that "later" came today and I had to stop on by the house and go through the remaining knick-knacks to figure out what I should keep and what I should forever leave behind. When I put it that way, it sounds dire, doesn't it?Sorting through the small collection of random gadgetry wasn't that difficult. Old computer mice? Leave. Licensed copies of Windows XP and Vista? Let's take those with me. One random glove? No thanks. However, towards the end of the chore, I came across my collection of compact discs. I completely forgot that I left them behind. I picked up the CD's in small groups and brought them over to the small portable table I was using to mark the items that would live to see another day. On my second trip to the table, a thought crossed my mind: Do I really need these anymore? It may seem like an odd question to ask for a guy who likes his music as much as I do, but let's face the facts: I have an iPod and a computer, all my music is ripped digitally, and I back it up for good measure. What need do I have for the physical media?
I've always been a staunch supporter of buying the physical media as opposed to downloading music digitally. Maybe it's the most basic part of human nature where I feel more comfortable having something tangible in my hand after spending any amount of money on it or perhaps I just held on to ideals that formed during the early days of legal digital music. During the first few years of legal music, namely iTunes, everything was low quality and smothered in DRM that made it impossible to even legally hum a song without the RIAA wanting to collect royalties. Buying the CD just made more sense.
It's different, nowadays. Digital media is of much higher quality and DRM seems to be fading off into the sunset, at least in the music industry. The major deciding factor, though, was probably my first experience purchasing a song digitally. Early last year, my favorite band Staind released the first single from their new album on iTunes and Amazon's MP3 Store. I'd heard good things about Amazon's service, so I plunked down the $0.99 and in a few seconds had the file on my PC. This wasn't a dinky 128kbps file. No, not at all. This was a much more acceptable 256kbps MP3 file complete with embedded high quality album art and entirely void of any DRM. It sounded good, it was almost too easy to buy, and it worked on every device I wanted it to work on. I was a very happy camper.
As I write this and, in the back of my mind, try to figure out where I'm going to put all those CD's, I think it's time for me to move on. Sorry, CD's, you were so nice to me and we had a great run, but I've found a skinnier, easier replacement that gives me just as much enjoyment and, often times, at a lower price. How can I go wrong? I know, I know, you can't accidentally be erased when my entire system decides it's time to kick the bucket, but that's why I have backups. I'm done. We're done.
"Bang On" is a regularly occurring column written by Christopher Vendemio. The views and opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of Neowin.net
CDs are digital.
Or Windows 7 WMP eats them
Unless you install the update patch that prevents that from occuring. Guess something went awry with the new MP3 codec that they included with WMP 12.
I always keep my MP3 files as read only. It has saved me in the past from corruption. Does the Windows 7 bug effect read only files as well?
So you can rip and encode to any format that you wish? I prefer the highest bitrate for anything that's not a lossless format.
No the music on a CD is recorded at about 1400kbps.
Agreed. In fact, that's pretty much the only pirated music I have is of CDs I have that either no longer play or too lazy to re-rip. You try ripping all the Nine Inch Nail albums, then having to find which songs didn't come through properly because of minor wear of the CD.
I still keep the CDs though, simply for the art and that I can say,"I have them."
If you use Exact Audio Copy it securely extracts the files and tells you the quality of the ripping. There's no guess work - you know whether each track will work or not.
If they switched to DVD or Blu-ray they could increase the quality even further. Instead, they are pushing low-quality, over-compressed junk with zero value in the real world.
Very true! The record industry now wants to brainwash us into accepting lower quality for the same or more price. Just like the TV manufacturers and LCD. If you think LCD has a better picture than CRT then you are an idiot, much the same as the people on here saying MP3 is acceptable. Ya, it's acceptable to you because you have no idea what quality audio should sound like.
99.9999999% of people can't hear a difference between a 24bit 96KHz recording and a 16bit 44.1KHz recording. That's why things products like SACD and DVD-A have never taken off.
99.9999999% of people can't hear a difference between a 24bit 96KHz recording and a 16bit 44.1KHz recording. That's why things products like SACD and DVD-A have never taken off.
9.9999999? More like 85%, maybe. You can definitely tell the difference with some recordings, and it doesn't have to be classical music. It's an irrelevant point anyway. Improving technology should mean improving audio quality, period.
This specific technology is already as good as it needs to get.
It's the tailing-end parts (loudspeakers) of the consumer sound-reproduction chain that can benefit from better tech, and actually improve the overall experience for people.
SACD is ten years old, and has 64 times the sampling rate used in CDs. DVD-A is nine years old, and does up to 24-bit, 192 kHz. Both formats do 5.1 surround, either lossless or uncompressed.
You're demanding way too little, far too late.
To truly save music, a cd is really not an acceptable method. Especially burned ones! Most of the first homemade cds i have made are all deteriorating which are about 15 years old. They say 5-10 years is their shelf life. Store bought cds seem to be fine. So i guess the point is that you pretty much have to backup the backup even your cds every once in awhile so to me, compact discs are obsolete.
Had to say it :/
You can't sell MP3s, period. How does that make CDs worse?
That being said, I do buy off of iTunes, simply because it's cheaper and because I can't drive. But when I get a real album, it just feels so much more "real".
Lossless might be lossless, but that doesn't mean you can always hear the difference, or that you should feel "better" than those who are happy with reasonable quality music.
Ya, there isn't many of these people around!
So you'd rather have CDs than go "all digital"? Interesting. Again, as other have pointed out, CDs are digital. Did you think they were analog or something?
/thread
CDs are the past, and file formats are the mainstream now (has been for a while).
The last time I used a CD (not inc mp3 cd) or bought one has been over 10 years now.
Same can be said for DVDs. only really useful if you want to play movies on a DVD player - Blu Ray or standard - attached to your TV. And we're approaching the era of direct streaming anyway, so that situation will also become a rarity in time. Purchased software DVDs are another story, in that you don't have much choice with those, although in some cases you can rip the contents to much smaller physical media.
Small footprint, high capacity hard drives and SD cards all the way.
I think for myself, I'll never want to totally step away from discs. Purely because i think it's good to have an original source to rip from, and i can take it with me and it works anywhere.
Plus, for me i feel like an mp3 song/album cost essentially the same as a CD, and why would i pay for an already compressed (which 256kb still is) mp3 file, which isn't safe and secure in any way.
I guess the same could be said for a physical cd (breaking/cracking/house fire) but i still like the warm fuzzy feeling of holding that new CD in my hands!
The issue isn't being entirely digital. I already buy all my games through Steam and simply avoid those that aren't on it. But I need to be able to download them again should I need to in order to feel confident in it. I also want quality to be at least that of CDs (lossless, 16bit 44.1KHz or greater). Until that time comes I will stick with CDs.
However, any lossy file, regardless of the bitrate, means that that is what it is, lossy.
And you don't want to transcode (switch to a different filetype) from a lossy source.
We need a place that offers DRM free lossless downloads. When lossless becomes routinely available (and there's no good reason it won't), then we won't need CDs anymore. But that's not the case yet, today.
But anyone half-intelligent is using VBR.
And, as a lot of testers found out in a recent listening test, ~128kbps vbr MP3s can be very difficult (although not impossible on problem samples) to ABX from their sources.
I understand why you are saying what you are saying, but encoders are better and you're out of date.
I play lame -v5 (~128 vbr) tracks on my 30B ipod 5.5G all the time and don't have any problems...
Remember to rip to lossless for your archive and then convert for your portable from there.
EDIT: you know, if you used iTunes to make those VBR files, iTunes' encoder might have broken them since the VBR encoder was borked for about 4 years before just recently, when using a multi-core processor.
Last edited by shakey_snake on 14 Jan 2009 - 04:40
But, damn. You use LAME w/ CBR?!?
LAME "sucks" at CBR, it's psycho-acoustic model is tuned specifically for VBR using the -V switches.
The future really is hardware such as the Macbook Air (and similar netbooks without CD/DVD drives), for example, which is a little ahead of its time.
/stick-in-the-mud
I couldn't agree more bangbang023! This was a very nice read and actually made me consider whether I need my physical CDs...
It was a nice light-hearted read and I am looking forward to more 'Bang-on' columns
I really like the direction Neowin is going in!
Fair enough.
Considering the level of traffic we get, especially after moving to writing our own stories instead of C&P, I think we're doing pretty well.
I rarely use the actual CD (apart from the initial rip), but sometimes when I am going for a drive, and I can't be bothered making a MP3 CD to take, I'll just grab a few for the road.
But most importantly, a good CD player with a non-commercial over-compressed CD beats the living **** out of anything a computer can produce. I enjoy listening to my good music in the best possible quality, and it's *not* hard to hear difference (providing you have sufficient equipment, which is also not very expensive).
And lossless is not much of a replacement either. Unless you have a studio interface to connect your amplifier through, your sound card will ruin the audio anyway.
Ah well...
Most current soundcards have a digital output that can pass the sound through to the amplifier without touching it, so no problem there.
Also, most current soundcards don't have to hide regarding soundprocessing.
mp3 dont have anything to do compared to cds, even in 320kbps they are crap compared to cd quality providing you have good equipment as you said.
if anyone wants to toss away his cds FLAC is the way to go, that way you can burn a cd again from FLAC and it will be the same as the orignal CD.
and it isnt hard to tell the difference, with good speakers and stereo amp (not 5.1) you WILL hear the difference.
i suggest to the guy that made the note, use good equipment not your ipod to hear to cds and mp3s and hear the reality
For everyone else digital is definitely preferred.
No. Analog is preferred when it comes to analog music. You want to keep the same format as long as possible. Since information on a CD is digital, a digital interface to the amplifier makes sense.
@ shakey_snake,
Sorry for not having English as my native tongue.
I highly doubt you could either.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/jan/0...es-digital-only
I love having all my music available to all devices but I also love having my CD collection lined up on the shelf.
I suppose I will have to get a digital shelf that represents my music in a cover-flow style instead ;-)
All files are heirarchically organised, correctly tagged and with the correct album art (I bought a scanner for some of the moer rare stuff).
The cases and disks now live in a number of boxes in my loft, so should I need them, they are available to me. Also, as I DJ with this music, I still legally own the right to use it.
Now, data can become corrupted. So the music lives:
1) On my internal hard drive
2) On my media server
3) On my media server's backup drive
4) On my USB backup drive
5) On my iPod
It's a personal thing!!
Don't have a need or use for an ipod (Yuck) or mp3 player. Would never consider using an ipod or that crap itunes either.
I'll be generous and assume that "cd" actually meant "album"
CDs and DVDs will be around for a long time.
CDs and DVDs will be around for a long time.
I died laughing when I read "Discman." How many discman lasted more then about about a year? If you have one that still works, you need to write an article on preservation of antique electronics.
So DJ specs, you are wrong, CDs are a perfectly good enough standard. There's absolutely no need for anything "far superior" on the consumer end.
Now, I'd also have to disagree and say that most people probably have good enough sound systems to project "higher quality" sound than even 320kbps CBR MP3.
MP3 sound (like all lossy sound) is purposely crippled. The thing is that we humans can't hear a difference. The are perceptually identical.
Last edited by shakey_snake on 14 Jan 2009 - 21:27
with the p!ss poor mp3's being the alternative ?
lol.
if someone offered flac with (at least) 500x500 album art i'd think about 'moving on' ...
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