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I will never buy a download. I just come from a different time (I'm 57 now and was buying vinyl since I was a kid...then CDs from around 1987). While the labels continue to go to the effort of pressing CDs and giving us nice packaging, I will continue to support them with my quids (provided it's a score I like, that is). I still get a child-like buzz when a package or parcel arrives with some new CDs. My collection is too big and needs pruning, but that hasn't stopped me from still buying more and more. It's an obsession, I guess. I'm 46 and for me it's basically a case of 'what Kev said' ! That is interesting. I know there are some people who are attached to the physical aspect of CDs, but I am not. After all, CDs just take up space, are a lot of hassle to move (I have moved with all my CDs several times... and over the years, the collection has only become larger). It's just a piece of plastic that serves little purpose after I have ripped it. Though I admit I enjoy the collection in my shelf and would not part with it. However, when I buy new recordings, and I see Lisa Batiashvili's "Secret Love Letters" costs me €7.91 as 24bit/96kHz download on Qobuz vs €17.99 (current Amazon price) for 16bit/96kHz CD, which I have to then put in my shelf... nope, I am definitely buying the download. This is an example where, at least for me, I see only advantages purchasing this album as download, and only disadvantages purchasing it as CD.
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I thank you, Rameau, for my first real laugh today!
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"Imagine no possessions... I wonder if you can.." (John Lennon) 1971 Ha, I remember the promo, him walking into his lovely big country house & playing his grand piano in that big white room. Imagine no possessions...yes I can, which is why I lock up the house when I go out. LOL! Yes, made me laugh as well. :-)
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For my music, I'm in the "own it, control it, safeguard it for life" camp. No multinational corporation is going to delete an album from my catalog. Not my most obscure score, not a cue I might never play again. If I ever want it, it's going to be there, on redundant, detached external drives.
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For my music, I'm in the "own it, control it, safeguard it for life" camp. No multinational corporation is going to delete an album from my catalog. Not my most obscure score, not a cue I might never play again. If I ever want it, it's going to be there, on redundant, detached external drives. That's how I have it. My CDs are mostly in a shelf in my living room, but they are all ripped, and all the music I ever bought is lossless/high-res, DRM free and on my own hard drives. I have it on my NAS and of course backed up. (I would never, ever want to start over ripping and tagging and downloading all that stuff.) I have bought music as downloads from Qobuz, or even from labels themselves, such as Hyperion or the Berlin Philharmonics own labels. But I guess for the vast majority of people, and almost all the younger ones, buying music is a thing of the past. They have streaming services (and let's face it: not necessarily Spotify, but streaming services such as Qobuz, Tidal, Deezer, etc. deliver high-quality (CD and up) streams into your home stereo setup. So most folks today, even if they are audiophiles, just buy a high-quality streamer and are ready and set. You don't need the extra overhead for a NAS setup or anything like that to curate your own music collection. It's not for me and for many here on FSM, as we all have lots of music we call "our own", and my own collection is certainly at the "core" of what I listen to, but I do use streaming to check out new and interesting artists I might otherwise have never found.
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I'm 61 and I love the brave new world of streaming. Yes, I worry about my personal cloud library going away one day. But I think of it as renting a storage space ... so don't think of it as permanent. I don't care enough to follow Nicolai's example and have my own system, just not worth my time and trouble. The convenience of cloud-based music and streaming services outweighs all other considerations for me. And honestly, I have loaded probably thousands of albums onto Apple Music that I have never listened to since. Because I am always enjoying new finds and favorites. At this stage of my life as a collector, I still enjoy the hobby. But I look forward to the day that it becomes little enough important to me that I can divest ... and rely on what will be available one way or another in the future.
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I will never buy a download. I just come from a different time (I'm 57 now and was buying vinyl since I was a kid...then CDs from around 1987). We come from the same time (I'm 55). It's less to do with era and more to do with preference. I buy CDs, I buy downloads, I buy LPS (I draw the line at cassettes). Whatever gets the music to me in a form that I own in lossless quality is fine by me. And if a digital download is the only way to have a score I like, I'll purchase the digital download. And if one of our lovely labels puts out CDs I want, I'll buy them too.
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Posted: |
Sep 20, 2022 - 7:46 AM
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By: |
MusicMad
(Member)
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Yes, yes, yes ... no matter how often I tell myself we already own enough music to last us our days. Whilst I still love OSTs my music passion is more classical now (using that generic term loosely) but the principle still holds. Last evening I choose several pieces to play, one of which was a first play for a recording I bought less than a month ago. It* was wonderful and I'm so pleased I didn't stop buying at the end of 2021 (as I promised myself ). I still have many CDs which have yet to be played - I'm nuts! - and can't afford to keep buying but that's the problem with addictions. * Arnold Schoenberg: Verklärte Nacht, Op.4 -for piano trio (Fidelio Trio/2011) Like Nicolai, I rip my CDs to a NAS (I have 20+ on the shelf waiting ...) but if I was starting afresh then I'd probably go for streaming. Neither of my adult children or their spouses are bothered with CDs (though my son-in-law did buy a record deck a few years ago ... not sure how much use it gets). I'm happy spending hours - most days - researching / reviewing / amending~updating the metadata so that my music library is referenced the way I want ... not some online streaming service's idea of cataloguing. And this would be the major problem if I were to switch to online streaming. My use (limited to a few months) of TIDAL revealed just how poor it is. Perhaps Spotify, Qubuz, whatever are better and maybe there will be improvements. Obviously all the metadata I have is taken from the CD sleeves and/or online services but I love being able to source a particular piece of music by various routes: Album name, Album Artist, Performing Artist, Composer, Genre, Year ... are the obvious ways. Or be able to find all the recordings I have for a particular year ... ... the most popular year appears to be 1960 - 2,364 recordings; the earlist year ... 1910 The most popular composer by time is Ennio Morricone ... also by number of tracks. But when it comes to performing artist EM didn't conduct many of his scores and he is beaten by Herbert von Karajan. etc. So, yes, buying music is still my thing ... but putting that silver disc on the player and sitting back? No, not these days (I sold my CD player a few months ago!)
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As MusicMad demonstrates, some collectors are very much into the library aspects of collecting. I'm allergic to that side of things. So much so that I've let far too much of my physical collection become a chaos - things organized by genre, but for most that's it. And when I upload I just put the composer in every field because that's what I search by in my cloud collection for my own music. But I do find the searches, especially Google and Spotify, help me find most everything I'm looking for online. I just want the music at a touch, and I'm good enough at searches that I usually find whatever quickly online. Probably a bigger part of why I embrace digital streaming more than others in this collecting cul de sac.
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I use both streaming (Qobuz) and my own NAS, though I'd say 90% of my music listening is on my own NAS. Yes, I enjoy to have an actual curated library, because personally, I find music tagging - especially music tagging on streaming - terribly inconsistent and not very useful. I don't listen to music from Youtube or just random Internet sites, as I'm not really set up to do that. Unless I want to quickly check or sample something, but beyond that it's of no use, my laptop speakers are not really very good. They are okay for working and online conferences, but not music. My own music collection is actually what I turn most to.... it's "the core" of what I listen to. And I could cancel my streaming subscription any time and I still have enough music. A large part of the music I listen to is not available on streaming anyway (or not in a quality I find acceptable). Stuff like DAMNATION ALLEY is just not available. Music was always important to me, and so my CD collection was always fairly well sorted (by composer). And I enjoy that I have all the music I ever bought (except for LPs) available at my fingertips. And consistently tagged. No "Rachmaninov/Rachmaninoff" or "Berlin Philharmonic" and "Berliner Philharmoniker" tags etc. I find especially for classical music, where I have multiple recordings of many pieces, consistent tagging a necessity.
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Yes, yes, yes ... no matter how often I tell myself we already own enough music to last us our days. Whilst I still love OSTs my music passion is more classical now (using that generic term loosely) but the principle still holds. Indeed, just today I bought 2 new recordings with music by composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg, conducted by Mirga Gražinyte-Tyla. Uncharted territory for me, but these recordings seem wonderful.
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...Indeed, just today I bought 2 new recordings with music by composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg, conducted by Mirga Gražinyte-Tyla. Uncharted territory for me, but these recordings seem wonderful. TG pointed me towards Weinberg a few years ago and I now have a small collection of his works. I recently bought recordings of several of his symphonies but neither of the two albums released by Mirga Gražinyte-Tyla. Incidentally she was the resident conductor/music director of my local symphony orchestra until earlier this year but we attended only one of her concerts ... our last visit, a little over 3 years ago (Mahler's 4th, etc.) Back on Weinberg, we particularly like his violin and cello sonatas. I shall look to add the Gražinyte-Tyla/CBSO recordings to my collection ... (or at least, add to them my wishlist!) Qobuz suggested the Weinberg recordings by Gražinyte-Tyla to me, and I bought them (without listening first) as they seemed interesting. Listened to his symphonies 2 & 21 tonight and found them deeply gripping, very happy I made the plunge. (https://www.deutschegrammophon.com/en/catalogue/products/weinberg-symphonies-nos-2-21-grazinyte-tyla-6522) Didn't really know anything about Weinberg, his escape from Poland to Russia, his friendship with Shostakovich etc. before now... but I think it's wonderful that there is still so much music out there to discover. Obviously, I cannot compare these to any other Weinberg recordings of these works, but this album is already a winner in my book.
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I love Weinberg! Have ever since he was called Vainberg in English thanks to some old Olympia recordings from mother Russia. I love his big symphonies and chamber music and especially his Chamber Symphonies. And another composer more recent for me from roughly the same period, mid-20th C in Poland, is Grazyna Bacewicz. Very much in the same idiom, her music is very appealing to me - love recordings on Chandos and elsewhere. But that's not why I intended to post! Just wanted to make the point that audio quality is certainly a legitimate limiting factor for embracing streaming beyond HD. And one I can very much understand. I do not care nearly so much how high the quality of the music reproduction is - I've been just as happy with a single JBL flip speaker as a Bose for music listening. I've always wondered if this is in part because I played the violin starting at age 5, and was in several student and community orchestras and choirs for many years. For me, recorded music doesn't approximate the experience of live music, so I don't care nearly so much about audiophile concerns. In fact, when I have listened with top of the line speakers in an ideal room, it just didn't make a difference for me. I'm happiest with earbuds or my Beat headphones, and decent streaming quality is good enough for me. But to be clear, only sharing this as a counterpoint or further explanation why the streaming world works for me, and another reason it's not so appealing for some of you lot. But that's only because I have some of my own collection up in the cloud, like DAMNATION ALLEY!
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There is no question that live music is a different experience from recorded music (which is why I would like recorded music to sound as much as possible like live performed music). That there are limitations (in equipment, money, reproduction, etc., that is perfectly clear, which is why listening to recordings of music is always a sort of limitation, no matter what). I don't see an acoustic limitation in streaming though. I just listened to some Bach performed by Pinnock that Qobuz delivers in perfect 24bit/192kHzs, so the streaming "sky is already the limit" or "how much do you want/need"? We're only in the infancy of "streaming" technology and already we are at a sound quality level I could have only dreamed of when I started to listen to music as a child with a small mono cassette tape recorder. I have certain objections (at this point) about just relying on streaming (currently mostly because I don't see it as a viable business model the way it's done right now, it has to become either much more expensive or be otherwise greatly reformed... or some music that is not all that mainstream will just "fade"), but sound quality is certainly not one of them. Sound quality used to be an issue when "streaming" meant "Spotify" and "Youtube", but in the days of glass fibre Internet and Qobuz and Tidal etc, it is no longer an issue.
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And another composer more recent for me from roughly the same period, mid-20th C in Poland, is Grazyna Bacewicz. Very much in the same idiom, her music is very appealing to me - love recordings on Chandos and elsewhere. But that's not why I intended to post! Regardless if that was your intent, I will check her out. Sounds interesting.
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