CD vs Downloads, promise to love & cherish till the day you die?

[stalepie]

I don't know a solution to gift giving with digital. There are some options like "gifting" a game on Steam, but I doubt that is the same as receiving a present in person on a birthday or Christmas or anniversary. I don't know that gift cards have the same kind of experience as a good gift. Same with inheritance being rather different ("Dad willed me his hard drive; I deleted the porn, but kept the music..."?)

There's something to be said for the memories created with discovering music or where you were when you bought it. I think works better with physical. Most of my recent memories (last ten years) with discovering music is just the right-hand column of YouTube, where it gives related links. No stores I've gone to or people I've met.

 

[Dismayed]

I just signed up for a free 3 month Tidal trial. Wow! Huge library, and it sounds great. There are some holes in their classical library, though, so my personal library is still important. So now I'm in a trial period with Roon. This changes everything! It nicely integrates with library with Tidal. Now I'm wondering if I'll ever buy CDs or music files again.

 

[Dismayed]

I listen to a lot of classical and have approximately 7,000 ripped CDs and high-res albums on my music server. I also use Tidal.

I just began a Roon trial, and I must say, it remains horrible for classical. It is absolutely impossible to find anything using it.

So my use of Foobar and classical files sorted into directories on hard disk--an admittedly inelegant solution--continues.

I'm resigned to the fact that index and search of classical music is a challenge. So I've been searching for favorite artists and tagging them in my favorites. But I'm still just using search when I'm looking for recordings of specific works. Not ideal, but it is what it is. At least the library is pretty large, even if there are holes in it when compared to my smaller personal library of 1,000 CDs. So I live with it, and I hope that management of classical music will improve within Roon.

 

[FrantzM]

Roon still is struggling with Classical Music... Most every service is ... I need to give Musichi a serious look but ...

I can't comprehend the need for CD... Beyond me.. Roon and Tidal and, yes, Spotify (streaming in general) make music discovery and plain listening, a joy. Not only Roon works and well (when genre is not classical) it allows you to just listen to music. On top of that it seems to have a DSP-thing to it.
Streaming music is the wave of the future but since I have a rather sizable collection of about 3000 CD and same number of LPs, I will continue to use my (of course CD, the LPs rarely but rarely get to be played in spite of my stooooopid investment in a top-flight Vinyl system) library as much as possible through Roon which makes the switch from my own library to Tidal seamless. I finally got an Internet Service in Haiti that allows me to stream Tidal in full def .. yeah!

 

[Fitzcaraldo215]

I have been using JRiver for years with great success, and despite Roon's promise on a number of fronts, yes, it cannot adequately deal with a large classical library. MusiChi has had classical very much in mind from the get go and supports it well, although much manual tagging is still necessary, though less than with JRiver.

It is possible with a little effort to import media with MusiChi tagging into JRiver. My good friend and classical tagging guru, Andrew Quint, uses both for CDs, with final library playback in JRiver, where all his media, also including hirez and Mch, are combined in one library with one common user interface. I do not maintain a library of ripped CDs, just SACDs and downloads mainly in hirez Mch.

I have not yet committed my large library of wonderful opera, concert and ballet Bluray videos to JRiver, as BD tagging and BD disc menu access is not yet sufficient in JRiver, though there may be signs that might happen eventually. But, I do use JR as a renderer for all video watching, including occasional TV via a FIOS Cablecard tuner on my network.

But, aside from very good classical support, JRiver works quite well for me. It has broader scope, media support and functionality than anything else, though extensive feature bloat makes it a bit tough to learn at first. However, it also enabled me to eliminate a Mch preamp/processor, optical disc player and cable box from my playback system in favor of my current Media PC via USB to DAC and HDMI to TV monitor setup. Nice! Optical drives in the PC provide for playback of silver discs, except for SACD, which must first be ripped to my NAS.

JRiver does not support streaming well, yet. But, I do not use streaming yet, anyway, because it also generally does not provide adequately good searching in classical or availability of hirez Mch.

 

[RayDunzl]

I can't comprehend the need for CD.

I can, every time I go looking for something that I know exists on CD, yet isn't available on the streaming menu.

 

[FrantzM]

I can, every time I go looking for something that I know exists on CD, yet isn't available on the streaming menu.

True, the only reason why I buy a CD these days. Not all things are available for downloads or streaming. Some stuff I like are , at this time only available on LP Haven't had the time or will to digitize my LP collection.

 

[Wombat]

CDs can be much more inexpensive.

Approx . $US5(plus $4 pp to Australia), new, from a UK Ebay music vendor:

I can provide vendor link if anyone is interested.

 

[Jorj]

I've been hearing disturbing rumors that both streaming services and some HD outlets are upconverting for sales to unsuspecting buyers. I've also heard that some studios are getting the message that volume leveling on the streaming services makes compressed-to-death music sound like the re-heated donkey dung it is. It seems like we might be in a bit of a crapshoot right now. You might get music that is mastered better than the CD by buying it for digital delivery in HiRes, or you might be getting up-converted reheated donkey dung. Fun! It would be nice to have a way to know quickly which you are getting when your DL starts.

 

[Sal1950]

I've been hearing disturbing rumors that both streaming services and some HD outlets are upconverting for sales to unsuspecting buyers

There was a bit of this going on in the early days of Hi Rez downloads. It's pretty easy to catch if you now how and the vendors were caught and called out on it. I don't believe there's any of that going on today, too many looking over their shoulders.

 

[Wayne]

I can provide vendor link if anyone is interested.

I would. Thanks; PM me,

 

[Wombat]

I would. Thanks; PM me,

PM sent.

 

[Cosmik]

There was a bit of this going on in the early days of Hi Rez downloads. It's pretty easy to catch if you now how and the vendors were caught and called out on it. I don't believe there's any of that going on today, too many looking over their shoulders.

But very easy to fake the characteristics of 'high res' against those people who think that an FFT provides incontrovertible proof of whether a recording is upsampled. If I were doing this sort of thing I would design my upsampling software to add a wash of higher frequencies in just the approved manner - with some random variation to avoid any sort of identifiable 'signature'. Maybe I might even add some 'spikes' to show that computer monitors in the studio or whatever were accidentally picked up. (You will notice that in doing so, I would be completely ignoring the idea that a human audiophile might be able to hear that, in fact, the upsampled high res version was worse than the low res version. In this, I would bet that I would be correct. The audiophiles would still 'hear' it as better!).

 

[Sal1950]

If I was doing this sort of thing I would design my

How's your printing skills?
Maybe some $20 bills to start with?
Let's PM a deal.

 

[JBNY]

I mean I think the CD still hold some value as a way to get the music, but once you physically have it I don't understand why you keep it in only that format. Just convert to to flac or some other lossless codec and it's so much easier to enjoy.

 

[Frank Dernie]

I mean I think the CD still hold some value as a way to get the music, but once you physically have it I don't understand why you keep it in only that format. Just convert to to flac or some other lossless codec and it's so much easier to enjoy.

If you mainly buy classical CDs ripping it to a computer is a source of frustration and irritation because the standard tagging strategy only favours popular music. By the time you have tagged and rearranged it so it actually appears in a logical place in the library you have spent more time than walking to the rack and playing the CD 20 times.
I gave up on it after years of frustration once I no longer needed the music on a portable for travel.
I still rip pop CDs as soon as I get them, but don't often have the streaming gadget switched on, since I use it so infrequently, so still not convenient

 

[JBNY]

If you mainly buy classical CDs ripping it to a computer is a source of frustration and irritation because the standard tagging strategy only favours popular music. By the time you have tagged and rearranged it so it actually appears in a logical place in the library you have spent more time than walking to the rack and playing the CD 20 times.
I gave up on it after years of frustration once I no longer needed the music on a portable for travel.
I still rip pop CDs as soon as I get them, but don't often have the streaming gadget switched on, since I use it so infrequently, so still not convenient

OK I get that, I don't have that many Classical CDs in my collection, about 110. But it was a real pain to get them organized correctly so I get your point.

 

[Fitzcaraldo215]

If you mainly buy classical CDs ripping it to a computer is a source of frustration and irritation because the standard tagging strategy only favours popular music. By the time you have tagged and rearranged it so it actually appears in a logical place in the library you have spent more time than walking to the rack and playing the CD 20 times.
I gave up on it after years of frustration once I no longer needed the music on a portable for travel.
I still rip pop CDs as soon as I get them, but don't often have the streaming gadget switched on, since I use it so infrequently, so still not convenient

Agreed. Especially with classical, and to a much lesser extent with pop, jazz, etc., tagging is a royal pain. Standards are lacking. So, even Roon's auto-tagging just does not cut it for classical. Streaming sites also do not seem to care about maintaining the few additional metadata fields it takes additively to the pop music scheme to make classical tagging work well.

But, with concerted effort on doing the library tagging over a long time, I find there are many rewards to having a tagged classical library. And, backup of that tagging data, representing a lot of care and effort, becomes essential.

 

[Frank Dernie]

But, with concerted effort on doing the library tagging over a long time, I find there are many rewards to having a tagged classical library. And, backup of that tagging data, representing a lot of care and effort, becomes essential.

I am 67. It takes me about 30 minutes to re-tag a classical rip. It takes me about 10-12 seconds to wander over to the bookcase, choose the CD and put it in the CD player. So I would need to play a CD over 100 times before it was more convenient to have ripped and tagged it. I have around 4000 CDs, not many will get played over 100 times in my lifetime.
If I had started tagging when I first started buying CDs maybe it would seem less pointless.

 

[RayDunzl]

I'm 64, but have no F1 credentials.

10-12 seconds is outstanding!

I did a dry run, took me around 30 seconds (but stubbed my toe on the way).