CDs I bought in the early 90s are there, in a box. I'd like to see people's iTunes collections in 30 years...
Yes, I know that CDs have a shelf-life and that real long term storage would involve backing them up. But CDs still seem a better option than the current alternatives.
Edit:
The issue even with a DRM-free local iTunes library is: how are people going to keep that over 30 years?
If you have a CD you only need to have a CD/DVD/Bluray player, which are still ubiquitous, and to push a button.
But for a local iTunes library you need IT admin skills to manage it, to back it up, to transfer it from one machine to the next, perhaps to understand that you can access the music without iTunes, etc. The vast majority of the public don't know how to do that.
I bought my first album from iTunes 10 years ago and it is right there in my external HDD since iTunes does not have any sort of DRM anymore (it was removed years ago). Unless computers in 20 years do not allow people to have local data and force them to use The Cloud (at which point i'd probably stop using computers altogether outside of necessity), i do not see them disappear.
If fact i rebought several albums i had in CD format because i lost some of the CDs after moving and a bunch of M4A files in a folder are more convenient than a bunch of CDs in a box (although TBH i do get the nice feeling of having something to look at that is physical... but only for things i really like and for me that is usually games not music).
There is an awful lot of music simply not streamed, if you live near a college town or in any city of say 80,000 people then there probably some local bands, chances are good they’ve recorded some stuff and outside of that run of CDs, the music is nowhere else. It’s not like we’re losing part of the Beatles catalog exactly but if you’ve bonded and heard that band a few times it might be meaningful.
I just pulled mine out of the attic after they had been sitting there for more than a decade. It's dry up there, but not cool at all. I'm in central Texas and in the summer you can only be up there for a few minutes at a time because it's so hot.
I bought dbPowerAmp and ripped them all to ALAC. Only a couple of them couldn't be accurately ripped and that's because of scratches on them (some of them are from the mid-80's and have had rough lives).
I guess what I'm trying to say is that they are remarkably durable.
Well, you can buy a new 3.5" floppy disk drive for $15 right now. The problem are proprietary formats, like Zip disks - just avoid those.
Parts of my MP3 library are 20 years old. Why do you think keeping them spinning a few more decades will be any harder?
>But for a local iTunes library you need IT admin skills to manage it, to back it up, to transfer it from one machine to the next, perhaps to understand that you can access the music without iTunes, etc. The vast majority of the public don't know how to do that.
Honestly, I think that's why streaming is taking over. Apple's approach to solving the sync problem was to rethink the whole paradigm, and so we got Apple Music instead of smarter iPhone/iPod sync. Sure, they get service revenue in the bargain, but to me it seems like an easy play.
Only real problem is that I ripped them at 128Kbps. For some tracks I've gone back and re-done them at a higher bitrate.
MDISC are supposed to last for 100 years or so.
The same place and way you keep all your other digitally purchased music. Just like the music I buy from bleep, Bandcamp or directly from artists.
What’s the problem here?
Ways to enjoy music: stream it on Spotify or insert a CD. Pick one.
?????
I mean, DRMless, local media doesn't obviate streaming which has its own valuable niche, from discovery to the fact that my 200 GB music library cannot fit on my phone, but that library is on Dropbox.
In 30 years, the format might be unrecognizable, but... I don't get the problem either.
>But for a local iTunes library you need IT admin skills to manage it, to back it up, to transfer it from one machine to the next, perhaps to understand that you can access the music without iTunes, etc. The vast majority of the public don't know how to do that.
Oh, we're operating from an assumption of pre-Internet tech literacy. Then, yeah, I don't know. The computer-as-radio/physical-media dichotomy might be the way to go. Enjoy those CDs. uwu Put thing in thing and hear sound. Zug zug
If we're talking actual files, it's just basic file management skills, and maybe some simple knowledge of ripping (assuming we're not taking the EAC lossless route). Almost everyone in my office (which are mainly non-tech people) have the former.
>...how are people going to keep that over 30 years?
It's way more likely someone's going to burgle my remaining CDs than they are to destroy every instance of my virtual collection.
Might look different and be called different, but I bet there is some service offering most music in existence in 2050.
If you get deep into any small/independent music scene you’ll find CDs are still king.
My father was so ethical and bought a lot of music from some service of his ISP (Planet music or something), it is all lost. I'd never pay for DRMed music. At least with Spotify you know you don't own anything and just pay for access to a lot of stuff as long as you pay.
iTunes does not have DRM and is the only reason i buy albums through them: after i download the album, i have a bunch of m4a files i can play with any player i want, in any device i want and store on my own external drive.
I have googled it a bit and it seems that DRM is not used any more on iTunes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairPlay#iTunes_Store_DRM_chan...
In fact, as far as major services (e.g. major distributor and not some niche music market with "indie" artists only) iTunes was the one that spearheaded the un-DRM of music (with Steve Jobs' call to end music DRM: https://betanews.com/2007/02/06/apple-s-steve-jobs-calls-for... ).
of which at that time there were only 2 or 3.
Why did Jobs do this?
Countries in the EU were demanding that he do so if he wanted to sell product there. Jobs was not interested in dropping DRM until the countries started bitching. Norway banned the iPod due to the iTunes walled garden creating captive audiences without opportunity for choice in media vendor (due to incompatibilities with competition services) and France started slinging similar threats.
It all seems so altruistic in hind-sight, but really he (Jobs) was being pressured by the nation-states, and he had the opportunity to look like a pioneer by dropping DRM (an endeavor that Apple felt pretty keen about with FairPlay) -- making the competition look petty and selfish for having DRM, while simultaneously satisfying the desires of the nations with markets that he wanted to compete within.
The whole story is in that link you included. I got a different vibe from the article than you did, I think.
However m4a files are lossy and thus not desirable for me. If I purchase music I want it in flac/alac format because I can transcode it to say, m4a if I need to in the future, or any other format. You can't do that with m4a without a degradation in quality.
At the moment I can’t enjoy anything that’s not on Spotify simply because I wouldn’t be able to listen to them really. I have hours of music on Spotify playlists and I would only need maybe a dozen of songs that aren’t on there, so manually switching apps for those few times would be annoying.
https://www.clementine-player.org/ Hm, but the last version is from 2016.
Not sure about the mobile app, I assume it will skip the missing tracks in a playlist as normal but it might be possible that it picks them up if they're present on the device somewhere.
[1] https://support.spotify.com/us/using_spotify/features/listen...
...but it's a background service with a web UI, so how easy you'll find it to set up depends on your technical expertise.
Spotify can play and sync your own files. You add them in a list of folders it checks.
Its recommendations, daily mix and automatic playlist generated after listening to a full album are getting VERY predictable though. That is, same bands and often the same song. I'm not saying Spotify needs to improve their algorithm per se, it just needs to add a bit more variety - switch up algorithms from time to time, shuffle, start way down on the list of matched songs, something like that. It's getting annoying to the point where I'm considering switching to Apple Music for a while.
Anyway, for physical music I buy vinyl nowadays. I don't even have a vinyl player (yet), just a box of collectables / memorable albums. I don't like CDs, the boxes feel far too flimsy; I've never owned any.
I dislike renting in general, especially something so important like access to music, but the only reason I do it in this case is indeed the availability of some hard to find rarities.
I do understand the sentiment though.
Double blind tests show that 320kbp/s mp3s are indistinguishable from flacs, barring very poor masters or some extreme edge cases. For a lot of music you could get away with 256kbp/s probably, but it doesn't cost you anything to just go with 320kbp/s.
For most of my needs, spotify works out. I don't mind paying $10/mo since I use the offline listening so much. I only buy and rip CDs for my own collection if I -really- like that album or a song on it, and a web download isn't available. Occasionally spotify doesn't have a very specific version of a song–Legend of a Mind by the Moody Blues from the 1967? BBC recording sessions comes to mind. Or artists like King Crimson.
I don't buy through itunes because of drm and the lack flac/alac options–why would I buy an mp3/m4a/aac file that I'm stuck with and can't transcode if needed? Bandcamp is a great alternative if the band you want happens to be on there. The app isn't too bad either if you forgot to download and sync an album.
Other benefits of ripping a CD or downloading a flac/alac file include having a perfect lossless copy. I can then transcode to any format that I want, whenever I want, however I want, from now until forever (or at least until the storage goes bad/breaks), without losing any quality.
With spotify pro + ublock origin, I never see ads on spotify or youtube anyway.