CDs or Downloads?

[Zaxgod]

Just wondering what everyone thinks about this subject. Sadly I used to download all my music in 'unethical' ways however for some reason something hit me and I decided it was wrong and that I wanted to start a CD collection. So far i have 19 over about 6 months and I am hoping to have a healthy collection to look back on in the future. I considered usin itunes at one point however it never really appealed greatly to me, personally I prefer having the physical CD, not a digital item you cannot see. Thoughts?

[DayC]

Well I usually get quite a bit of music from downloads but yeah it is nice to have the original album of your favourite artists, for me mainly because the music on CD's is always very good quality compared to a lot of downloads I have. So for me yes the CD's are nice to have but when it comes down to it downloads are easier and can be cheaper if you know what I mean.

[Zaxgod]

Yer I know what you're getting at, but if your hard drive completely busted and you had no way of recovering it then you be pretty buggered eh?

[Pirate Balloon]

I have alot of albums on CD, and easy 2 times as much downloaded. Because i listen to so much music it'd be pretty expnesive to buy every album, not to mention some are hard to find. Playing my cd's in my hi-fi, through my amp and out of my Mission speakers is the greatest experience ever.
Most of the music available for download is 128kbps quality on p2p and 192kbps quality in torrents. How anyone can listen to anything below 192 is beyond me, it's absolutly terrible.

But yeah, i download a lot because at the time i dont know the band very well so i dont wanna waste my money on a cd which i only like one song on. For my favourite bands though i'll get the CD.

Like i recently aquired a leak on the new Machine Head album. It's 192kbps, but quiet and horrible. I'm gonna buy the CD as soon as it comes out because the leak was a sort of hype for me, i feel that my money will be well spent :)

[DayC]

Yer I know what you're getting at, but if your hard drive completely busted and you had no way of recovering it then you be pretty buggered eh?

Exactly, a good thing to do would be what Pirate Balloon is doing, find high quality music that you wish to download then burn it to CD at a high quality then you won't have the trouble of a broken hard drive and you can go out and buy some plastic wallets or something for them, but then the manufacturer's CD's are made a better standard usually too lol.

[Retro]

Downloads, the last CD i brought was about 2 years ago.

[Chet Webley]

i only listen to DJ mixes, so i only own about 3 albums. i have 300+ mixes on CD, about 75 on mini-disc, 100 odd Old Skool tapes and about 4 Gb of downloads. I only started downloading them because it's almost impossible to buy good quality electro mixes in the shops. so i suppose i'm 'both'

[Cackhandedchimp]

Downloads.

http://www.albumbase.com

End of thread.

[Azure]

Listen, do NOT EVER say "Thread closed" because you think you found the best thing on the internet as usual.

For what it's worth, the site is garbage. Link to link to link to link to "You have exceeded your daily allowance of bandwidth" :rolleyes:

I stream http://www.radioblogclub.com/

[Backflip]

I don't buy CD's because I can't be arsed with swapping and changing CD's every time I want to change what I'm listening to and worrying about them getting scratched/lost etc. And I don't pay for my downloads either. If I do pay for them however, they're from sites like AllOfMp3.com (http://www.allofmp3.com), and I only ever do that if it's an obscure album I can't manage to get hold of through other means, or it's an album I need immediately.

I'd actually prefer to pay legitimately for my downloads to support the artists etc, but there isn't a single legitimate way of downloading music that I've found to be acceptable. There's always ridiculous restrictions like only being able to play the music on certain mp3 players and only being able to transfer/burn it a certain number of times, and they're always in formats that are highly incompatible and prevent you doing anything else you might want to do with the music. Sometimes you aren't even allowed to backup your music in case of hard drive failure. And so until the music industry (same with films etc) learns that DRM [DRM = Digital Rights Management?? More like Digital Restrictions Management] isn't the way forward I'll be downloading my music (and films/tv programs) illegally.

Now, imagine I had been using the contradiction that is Microsoft's "Plays for Sure" (http://www.playsforsure.com/) system to download all my music legally, investing many hundreds of pounds downloading all my albums (I listen to a rather large amount of music), and then got a Zune (http://www.zune.net) for Christmas? Oh well, apparently it should be called "Plays for Maybe" or "Plays for Sure (Sometimes!)", because Microsoft's very own Zune does not support Plays for Sure, and they will soon be closing down the Plays for Sure online store in favour of the Zune's marketplace. I wonder if the Zune will get a sticker that says "Plays for Sure (honest!)" or "Dis time for shooure!".

Thankfully I'm not in such a situation, and examples like that are exactly why I don't care that I'm ripping off the artists by downloading my music for free - if they want to complain then they can go to the people that are really screwing them over, the one's like Apple and M$.

[Pirate Balloon]

Downloads.

http://www.albumbase.com

End of thread.I have known of that site for a while and used it quite a lot. It is really terrible though, most links are dead and people upload bad quality, badly tagged albums mostly. You'll click on 5 mirrors only to find they all link to the same url. If the people who submitted the links weren't such idiots it would be pretty good.

[Enraged Wang 07]

Cd's are my choice, there is something you get out of having it in front of you in its case that feels 100x better than a download.

Plus it feels good showing off your collection.

[Xg Corkin]

Listen, do NOT EVER say "Thread closed" because you think you found the best thing on the internet as usual.

For what it's worth, the site is garbage. Link to link to link to link to "You have exceeded your daily allowance of bandwidth"

I stream http://www.radioblogclub.com/

I use that site also during school, very good site.

www.danceage.com is good also.;)

[Zaxgod]

I agree with Enraged Wang (Y) :). Having a collection to show off was one of the primary reasons i started getting cds.

I also agree with Azure though. Radioblogclub.com is an extremely good site that i've only recently been introduced too. It's great for college :D

[danitfc]

downloads
for me