The end for The End?

[Kimavir]

I dont get digital legit downloading either. It costs the same as a real CD and you get only the music. I'll probably never buy from iTunes or Rhapsody or w/e

But it doesn't cost the same. I pick up a lot of digital albums for $8-$10 online, and many I never would have purchased for $13-$16 + shipping. By saving, at the best moments, half the purchase price, I get more music and support more artists. I still by real CDs, but only ones that I'm going to love and want to display.

 

[Jibrille]

Not at all interested in owning digital content. I want artwork, lyrics, a CD... something to put on the shelves of my CD case. If I got rid of my CDs in favor of all digital content, what would I display in my living room... a picture of my hard drive?

Zod

Actually, you can easily get an LCD monitor w/ a media center PC and put it somewhere in your living room. I know iTunes has a feature where it will scroll album artwork and there's other programs that will do this for multiple media types. And if someone wants to hear something, they can just hit enter.
At home I've got 3 computers. My desktop, my laptop, and Brian's laptop. My desktop basically acts a server w/ all my music shared so I'm not storing 60gbs of music on my 80gb laptop.

That being said, I always buy CDs. But I keep them in the guest bedroom after I've ripped them to my computer.

 

[J-Dubya 777]

How are these ripping programs different/better than Real Player or WMP? Not being a smart guy, just was curious. I usually use WMP, I pop in a CD, WMP asks me if I would like it to add the music to my Library, I click 'yes', 40-50 seconds later, it's done.

More tweakable for the audio nerd, better error correcting, more quality choices, and the LAME encoder is, imo, the best there is....
JMHO....

 

[PurpleCrayonWriter]

Seconded! EAC is the best ripper out there, and best of all, it's free:

http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/

So far, all of the rippers I've seen mentioned here are Windows only. No Mac support.

Can anyone recommend a good Mac-supporter CD ripper?

 

[Diamond45]

So is CDex, and it works like a charm for me.

CDex is pretty good but it is a bit slow. But the price is right.

 

[madFive]

+1 for the "gotta have the artwork and physical disk." I order most of my music from amazon these days (used cd's when possible - it's cheaper) - i'm addicted to the 1-click ordering system - makes the payment and shipping system a complete breaze. since i had a large case of cd's (still in the jewel-cases) stolen out of my car a few years ago, i don't keep any of the jewel cases any more. i now keep all the disks and artwork in massive walet-folders, so if people ever want to look over them they just flip though - also makes them much more easily transportable.

just recently got a decent mp3-player and started ripping everything to go on it - so far i've probably done about a third or my collection, and i'm up to somewhere around 200gb - i use lame at 320kbps - seems to work well.

 

[Valarien]

So far, all of the rippers I've seen mentioned here are Windows only. No Mac support.

Can anyone recommend a good Mac-supporter CD ripper?

Toast Titanium (w/Jam if you want to make custom mixes and mastering features)

 

[SkiBumMSP]

eMusic typically allows you to redownload your purchases free of charge. I dump everything on to an external hard drive as a backup though, as I don't want to deal with reripping. I also have a significant portion of my collection on my laptop.

Yes, I concur that eMusic does typically redownload purchases.

My take on this whole CD vs Digital. Preferably, I do like to try to get the actual CD whenever possible, but at the same time, i cannot dismiss the sheer convenience of digital downloads, especially if I would at least like to hear something before going through the trouble of ordering and then having to wait for a CD to arrive in the mail. Also, there is much to be said about simply jacking my iPod into my car stereo and having some 7,500+ songs available right at my fingertips. That was really nice when I drove out to Wisconsin last year - no having to try to "chase" radio stations. No trying to fumble with CD's. All my music right there, whatever I wanted to listen to, whenever I felt like it. No sitting through a bunch of crap to get to that one or two actual good songs that they just might play on the radio, etc.

In addition to my pretty sizable CD collection, I also have a pretty substantial collection of digital music on my dedicated server setup back in a spare room, backed up on external drives and on UPS. In addition, I also have most of my collection in my 160gig iPod, so if push really came to shove, I could restore it from there (yes, there are ways to get your music back off your iPod)

As for the quality of the music, I've found that 192 or better MP3 is quite adequate for most of my needs. I guess I am not as anal about it as some folks are. Now, given the choice, I do prefer to listen to the CD, especially on my Klipsch setup, but for shear convenience, I'll listen to the MP3s streamed off my server.

As for the DRMed stuff, that is why I use eMusic, which has everything in plain ol, non DRMed MP3 files, and have not bought a single thing from the likes of iTunes. I just will not buy into, nor support, any of the DRMed formats. Yes, I know iTunes has started providing DRM free files, but it seems the vast majority of the catalog on there is still DRMed.

 

[Diamond45]

+1

What Steve said. I use eMusic as well and promote it as much as I can. eMusic has mostly independent labels - and Nuclear Blast is well represented there. Great selection of metal of all sub-genres including prog and power metal.