I go through this question every now and again. A few points of view to take in:
- Quality -
Most of the time when i'm listening to music, i'm not too fussed about quality. I use cheap headphones on my Portable, i use my MacBook's speakers when surfing. Much of the music i listen to doesn't have much taken from it by being lower quality, in fact some of it can benefit from this :-)
However, when i want to plug my music into a good sound system and play it really loud and forget there's anything but music, i get a bit miffed when there's a loss of quality. Much of the time, i will only notice if i've already heard the track in cd/vinyl version, but it does glare occasionally.
For example, i recently downloaded a performance of Arvo Part's 'Fratres'. The files came in the .flac format - an open-source 'lossless' filetype which compresses the music so you can fit it on your hard drive, but keeps it pretty much cd-quality.
My portable player doesn't play .flac, so i had to convert the track to .mp3 to play it. Nice to listen to when i'm on my way to work. But when i plug it into the main stereo in my lounge, it sounds a bit poor. Plug in my MacBook and play the original .flac, Much better.
With intricate music with a large range of volume and tone, you can really tell the difference between 'lossy' formats (.mp3, .aac, .ogg etc) and 'lossless' (.flac, .wv, .wav etc). This goes for other music too, but that depends more on your ears and your stereo equipment. Which brings us to:
- Equipment -
Most people i know own an ipod or other portable music thingy, but only half of those people own a phono cable. A few of these people don't have a stereo that will accept a line in. The amount of times i've had to connect ipod to cable X, to cable Y which connects to the tape adaptor is more than.. say.. five.
I still think having a bunch of music in one little box is a lot easier when you're on the move than having one little box and X cds, but at there's something to be said for having cds around. There's a pretty good chance there will be a cd player wherever you are going, but less chance there will be the requisite cables.
I suppose this one ties in with - Quality - in that each time you add another part to the route the music takes from your player to the speakers, the more crap gets added to the noise. There's also a problem with low volume on many portables. A pair of headphones needs a lot less oomph than a pair of speakers, so it makes sense to make a portable player less powerful - especially when it's battery-powerful - but it's annoying to have to turn your portable all the way up, then turn the stereo all the way up, just to be able to hear the music at a normal volume. And then someone comes along and puts a cd on... LOUD.
So if you have the whole music collection on one hard drive, how do you have it set up? Is the hard drive external or internal? If it's internal, do you have your pc attatched to the stereo or do you burn cds from it/copy desired tracks to an ipod and play these on the stereo? If external, wouldn't it be annoying to have to connect the drive every time you want to use it?
There's a lot to be said for the immediacy of cds. If you want to listen to a track, you grab the cd, you put it on, you play it. The audio quality is of a high standard and there are few points between the cd and the speakers to add noise. If you want to play that track in the kitchen, you grab the cd and take it there.
I suppose a lot of the - Equipment - argument is reliant on the current state of technology. We are on the turn from cds towards computer-held music, so much of the technology is still in its infacy (the ipod is only six years old - what did we do before then?). There are already solutions to the whole home-stereo system; you can buy high-end equipment that will stream audio from a server and play it at cd quality on your stereo, they just cost a bit at the moment.
As has been said, disk space is getting cheaper by the day. While a terabyte seemed like a fearsome thing a few years ago, it's becoming not-too-uncommon to have a Tb of storage on a pc, so it's quite a viable option to have your whole music collection on one computer.
Though, as Haus says, one quick drop or a spill of beverage is all it takes...
- Legality -
Tricky one, this. Obviously, you are fine if you keep your cds, but once you ditch them, you have no proof that you are legally allowed a digital copy of your music.
Ethically speaking, if you have payed for a cd (and given an artist support), there is no problem with you copying that and ditching the cd. In a way, this is more ethical than buying a cd second hand, where an artist receives no money for the transaction.
I suppose you could retain the receipts for each of your purchased cds, but nobody does that and i'm not sure how valid it would be in the legal sphere.
I actually know sweet fuck-all about copyright law, so i might leave this one to other people.
My mentality tends to consist of 'Well, they have bigger fish to fry, and even if they get me, i can delete the tracks. Even if it gets to court, i'll make such a beautifully-put argument concerning the idiocy of copyright law that the judge will be embarassed and make me Prime Minister of the world.'
So yeah, best left to people who know...
I'm sure i had a few other points, but they've left for now.
But basically
- .mp3s are (noticeably) lower quality than cds, but you can encode in other formats to keep the quality (some ipods can play the 'Apple lossless' format).
- Higher quality means more hard disk, but hard disks are getting cheaper.
- Hard disks break, but you can always backup to dvd (and blu-ray/hd-dvd soon) for when the drive says 'bye'.
- Hardware compatibility issues can often make it a nuisance to play quality music where you want to hear it, but technology is becoming available to change that. Or you can just write cds with the tracks you want.
- The legality of your actions might be up for question, but who cares about that? What are you? One of them?
Oh yeah, cd covers can be real nice when an artist puts the effort in, but usually they don't. So while vinyl = 'lovely, part of the whol experience, man', cds = 'm'eh'. |
