Amazon mp3 store

[Portia]

I know people love to hate on the iTunes store because of DRM, but Amazon has lately given me much more grief than iTunes ever has. It's some "temp file" nonsense, that requires you to convert it to "real" music IMMEDIATELY--too bad if your internet goes out, or you want to go to bed, or whatever!

And don't even get me started on the 1-click ordering that remains on for music even if you turn it off elsewhere. I say dissociate your debit card from their server, so you don't end up randomly buying entire albums like I just did, that you don't even get to listen to!

/vows to only buy music in tangible, CD form from now on/

[Giovanni Schwartz]

iTunes has got rid of DRM, for the most part, FYI.

[bismark]

i never had much of an issue with amazon's store when i was buying there... now that itunes has no drm though amazon has become much less interesting.

[Laser Jock]

/vows to only buy music in tangible, CD form from now on/

The other advantage to this, and the main reason why I stick to buying CDs rather than downloading music, is that you can rip them to meet arbitrarily high quality standards. My preference is to rip to the ÃœberStandard, and keep the original WAV files on an external hard drive so that I can reencode my music if I later decide that the ÃœberStandard isn't good enough.

The quality of most downloadable music is getting better (I think pretty much everyone has moved away from 128 kbps MP3s [shudder]), but they'd need to be in something like FLAC for me to consider purchasing music for download. (I really should encode my WAV files using FLAC, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.)

[Portia]

/vows to only buy music in tangible, CD form from now on/

The other advantage to this, and the main reason why I stick to buying CDs rather than downloading music, is that you can rip them to meet arbitrarily high quality standards. My preference is to rip to the ÃœberStandard, and keep the original WAV files on an external hard drive so that I can reencode my music if I later decide that the ÃœberStandard isn't good enough.

The quality of most downloadable music is getting better (I think pretty much everyone has moved away from 128 kbps MP3s [shudder]), but they'd need to be in something like FLAC for me to consider purchasing music for download. (I really should encode my WAV files using FLAC, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.)

I was discussing the difference in encoding with a friend. Can you actually hear a difference, Laser Jock? Is FLAC the new vinyl? Do you prefer to go to an actual store like Graywhale, or do you ever purchase CDs online?

(For the record, Amazon refunded my money, which I appreciated, but I still think their little Dowloader is bunk. Also, it is impossible to remove WMP from your computer (even after following "How to remove WLM" articles), and when I downloaded the latest version of Quicktime, iTunes decided not to work. Boo.)

[Laser Jock]

I was discussing the difference in encoding with a friend. Can you actually hear a difference, Laser Jock? Is FLAC the new vinyl? Do you prefer to go to an actual store like Graywhale, or do you ever purchase CDs online?

I can certainly hear the difference between 128 kbps MP3s and the MP3s I rip (192 kbps VBR). It helps to have some good audio equipment—you're unlikely to hear the difference on iPod earbuds, for instance. (I really like my Sennheiser HD580 headphones.) Most downloads online use better encoding than the early days of music downloads; iTunes uses AAC files encoded at 256 kbps, and Amazon uses MP3s encoded at 256 kbps. Could I hear a difference between those and the ÜberStandard? Probably not. It's possible, though, especially in the future when I will (hopefully, eventually) be able to afford some really high-end sound gear.

This is really an extension of my overall philosophy toward media (music, photos, etc.): I want the highest quality, closest-to-original version possible. That way, I won't have to worry down the road that I might be missing out on something. WAV files (uncompressed audio) are around 1400 kbps. Using a format like FLAC (lossless compression), you can get that down to about half without throwing any of the sound away. What that means is that to get down to even 256 kbps, you're having to figure out what to throw away so that you can compress it by another factor of three. (Note: this doesn't mean that you're throwing out 2/3. Getting rid of certain things will make your compression algorithm much more effective.) Hopefully you pick stuff that no one will notice—but you are still tossing stuff out, and I don't like that. I do compress my audio for convenience's sake, using a method I believe is very, very good—but I can always go back to the originals if I discover that the quality isn't quite up to snuff.

Side note: the reason I mentioned FLAC is because it has all the same quality as WAV, but takes up only half the space. The space savings is the reason I should probably switch at some point. It would still probably be used as my archival format, and not as my day-to-day format. (My WAV files currently take up 50 GB, which isn't huge, but it's big enough to consider switching so that I can save a bit of space.)

I honestly have never heard of Graywhale before now. I have occasionally bought music from an actual store, but I'm afraid my main exposure to music stores is places like Hastings, which don't engender any particular loyalty from me. Lately I've mostly bought my CDs online, through various small companies on Amazon. They tend to carry the type of music I'm looking for (which is often not mainstream), and they have good prices besides.

[Whistler]

I agree with LJ... and I think that the easiest way to improve your listening experience is to buy a good set of headphones.

[Katya]

/vows to only buy music in tangible, CD form from now on/

The other advantage to this, and the main reason why I stick to buying CDs rather than downloading music, is that you can rip them to meet arbitrarily high quality standards. My preference is to rip to the ÃœberStandard, and keep the original WAV files on an external hard drive so that I can reencode my music if I later decide that the ÃœberStandard isn't good enough.

Whatever. My standard of digital encoding is so high that I can reverse engineer actual musicians out of it.

[vorpal blade]

My standard of digital encoding is so high that I can reverse engineer actual musicians out of it.

Right! Down with recordings!