My take on this whole "MP3 vs CD" thing.
When it comes down to it, I often prefer to have the actual CD of the bands that I actually enjoy listening to. In fact, I still pull and listen to the CDs in m trusty'ol Denon 5-CD changer.
That being said, I also have an eMusic account and I've found and downloaded a TON of stuff on there. For example, I've found Sonata Arctica's latest on eMusic! I do have an 160 gig iPod Classic (typically used in the car with my Alpine deck, with a direct iPod connection), a 32-gig 2nd gen iPod Touch (mostly play games on it), an 8 gig Creative Zen (use it for working out at the gym) and an ancient Create MuVo Slim with a whopping 512 megs of capacity, (Do still use on occasion, mostly at the pool, since if that one accidentally ended up in the drink, I would not be crying to much).
In addition, I also have an Elan Via!DJ music server, which I use to feed the main rig in the living room, my brand-new outdoor rig on this deck that was JUST completed on Friday, and an old two-channel rig down in the basement (yes, I also still have a record player on that thing as well).
However, the only sources thus far that I've bought digital downloaded music was eMusic, Amazon, and LaLa. I have not bought a single track from iTunes, and most likely never will (although have gotten plenty of games off of iTunes for my Touch).
I love the convenience and portability of the MP3 format,not to mention the direct satisfaction of being able to find, then buy, and then play, an album with just a few mouse clicks. No having to drive out to the "record store", nor having to wait for something to arrive in the mail (in an idea world, I would be able to order a CD, which would open access to download it directly, so I can listen to it while waiting for the actual CD to arrive, not to mention saving the step to rip it into the Elan music server). Didn't the old MP3.com try to do something like this, only to have the RIAA pitch a major fit and pretty much shut them down?
There you have it. I like CDs because I like to have the booklet with the lyric and better sound quality, but I also like MP3s purely for the convenience, especially if I want to take a lot of music for me and more especially on long trips (such as when I drove the 11+ hours to Indy last summer). Also, searching is much easier with MP3s. Kinda annoying to look at my wall of CDs, when I am trying to find the one that I want to play. This is an real issue, especially in large collections which many of us on here seem to have (in my case, dealing with some 10,000 tracks across a couple thousand albums, representing many hundreds of artists).
