I need advice, so I came here, where else?

Who downloads music from the internet? I mean, instead of buying a music CD, do you buy the downloadable MP3 version? Good, bad or mediocre results? I have a few hundred CD's, but haven't bought any real CD's in years. There's some wonderful music by Tommy Emmanuel, David Grisman, Frank Vignola and other artists available.

Thanks in advance for your input.

Leon

Personally, I purchase and download individual MP3 versions from Amazon Music. I't easy and individual songs normally cost less that $1.50

I'm sure others here will provide you with additional ideas.

Good luck!

I have Spotify, Amazon Music and Google Play but it is rare that I cannot find what I am looking for on YouTube.

__________________
Music/Sports/Beer fan

There are some pay music sites, probably the most well known being Apple iTunes and Amazon. But there are many free sites also, just Google free music downloads. One of the better ones is YouTube, but you will need to download a YouTube downloader. If you have Opera or Firefox browsers, they have add-ons that will do that. You can probably find any music and any version that was ever recorded on YouTube.

I'm not an audiophile, but even I can tell a slight difference between compressed music files like mp3 and the original, played back on decent equipment.
Also, the ability to playback some downloaded music files depends on your ownership rights being maintained on a server. If the server gets stopped, so does your music.
Since you already maintain a substantial library of physical CDs, you might as well add to it.
If you haven't already done so, copying your CDs to a large computer hard drive in a "lossless" audio file format makes a good backup and eases transportability of your collection.

Sent from my Moto G (5) Plus using Tapatalk

__________________
Slava Ukraini!

And if your hard drive isn't big enough to store all your CD's, you can buy an external hard drive with as much as 4-5 TB's of storage for less than $200.00

I'm mostly into classical (with a few exceptions of jazz and bluegrass) and now mostly buy downloads as long as they're uncompressed; most of mine are FLAC, delivered as .zip files. I can then convert them to mp3 if I want, always at maximum quality (320kb/s) although my hearing isn't really good enough now to tell the difference. (Several years ago I did compare a 320 kb to the WAV original and the difference was extremely small.)

I will buy a used CD off Amazon if what I want isn't otherwse available, but I rip it to .WAV and mp3 for storage. I have a 4TB USB drive and an external digital-analogue converter to feed the stereo from the computer.

Even though MP3 files are compressed and lossy, unless you have the ears (and sound equipment) of an audiophile, you probably won't notice it. Just about all the downloads I have are played mainly on my truck sound system, and you definitely won't detect any quality differences from playing a MP3 file there due to road and wind noise. And you can get an enormous number of MP3 recordings on a CD and far more on a DVD or USB drive.

I use iTunes, the quality is good.

Beware the subscription services - if you discontinue your subscription, the songs that came from that service disappear. If you buy the songs, they are yours forever, without continuing to pay the rent.

__________________
Common sense isn't so common.

Download music? I've done that for decades, every time a record slid down the spindle on my record player.

I am one of those people who doesn’t get hooked on a group or artist as such, but latches onto specific songs across the music spectrum (except opera). I wasted a lot of money in my younger years buying whole albums just to add a song or two to a compilation tape or CD and then never touch the album again.

So I switched to individual downloads as soon as these became a thing, first Napster and then i-tunes. I’ve always found the sound quality perfectly sufficient.

When my audiophile friends and family lecture on the superiorlty of vinyl or whatever, I nod politely and tune them out. Apparently I’m lucky enough not to be aggravated by hearing any difference.

Nowadays I’m increasingly getting lazy. If I just need background music, it’s “Alexa, play Morricone” or “Alexa, play Abba”. And Alexa says “shuffling songs by ....” and we’re on. If I want to consciously listen, I prefer to find live concert video or at least official music performance video on youtube.

Thanks for all the great suggestions. I have a couple of hard drives that I have been thinking of hooking them up to a dedicated computer just for music.

Have a blessed day,

Leon

For audiophiles — I’m not, but my brother is — Tidal is a lossless music streaming service.

I use Spotify and YouTube. Don’t even have a CD player in my US residence. I am still blown away by the idea that you can now listen to any piece of music you want, instantly, with streaming services.

I’ve mentioned this before, but if you get a DAC (digital audio converter), you can plug it into an old audio system and play music from a streaming service via your phone or computer. My audio system in Japan dates back to the 1990s and sounds great. My brother, the audiophile, rebuilds and uses 1970s audio equipment (and streams Tidal) believing that era made the best sounding stuff.

I did Apple iTunes for years and had thousands of songs in my library (still do). Spotify makes it so easy, so I switched over. I'm 100% Spotify now. I love it. It's $9.00 a month to stream any song in their very comprehensive library. Allows you to make playlists for work, play, driving, etc. I listen to it all day, and if there's a song I want to hear, I just search for it and add it with a click of a finger. I was spending way more than $9.00 a month with iTunes.

__________________
What could possibly go wrong?

And then there is the debate over whether tube amplifiers have better sound quality than solid state. Such discussions don't keep me awake until 3 AM.

I did this a few years ago when I started listening to online radio. I was a bit sceptical that it would make a difference vs running a line from the headphone jack of my computer to the stereo, given that online radio is only 128k (I think) but I was surprised that there was an improvement.

Nowadays I'm not sure I would hear much difference, but back in the day I did some professional audio recording and still have very good playback gear (B&W 804 monitors and Bryston electronics.)

This thread has reminded me that I have an old HP netbook (remember those?) which I put Ubuntu Linux on as it's less of a load on the tiny CPU. I could repurpose it as a music player, hooking my audio drive up to it and using the DAC to feed my stereo rather than running the line from my MacBook Air.

Another "distraction activity" to avoid doing other stuff today!

Agreed. Mind you, I'm often awake at 3am anyway, but not because of that.

...everything has a place. My cell phone is full of downloaded MP3s and I plug it into my aux and have great time on the road. Everything from Doo-Wop to Wagner.

When I was recording live music,much of it classical vocal stuff I was VERY particular and a budget audiophile. Things change though.

I noticed a lot of difference even between top of the line cd players playing the same disc. I held off until things improved a bit.

__________________
"He was kinda funny lookin'"

Now a Doo-Wop version of the Ride of the Valkyries would be... interesting!

Been there! I did a lot of choral stuff, too. B&K or Schoeps mics. Still have the Schoeps and latterly an Apogee Element 8 interface which I run on my MacBook Air. Light and simple. Reaper DAW is what I use for editing now. Runs on Mac or Windows.

As to the original subject.... I did decide to repurpose my old Linux Netbook + DAC as an audio centre as I wasn't really using it for anything else. Was still running Ubuntu 14.04 but foolishly I decided to upgrade on notch to 16 (Don't think later versions would run on it very well as it's 2010 vintage, albeit with a small SSD added a few years ago.) Disaster! Upgrade froze part way through and wrecked the OS so I'm now creating a new Install USB drive from my Windows laptop. Tried it from Mac but the app wouldn't burn the ISO to the USB drive for some reason. So what should have taken an hour or maybe a bit longer has now taken all morning and into the afternoon. Will then have to choose a music player app but there appear to be lots of those. Hopefully I'll have music by this evening.

I won't notice since I have a real hearing problem, from firing an M1 back in the day, (1963), the army didn't know (or care) about hearing loss or protection. Another story for another time.

Have a blessed day,

Leon

Plenty of free downloads on Amazon Music with Prime.

Plenty of free music, period. No need for subscriptions or memberships - It just takes a bit of patience and knowledge.

As far as music storage, I save them to disk/dvd and I also store them on Ipods - one Ipod Touch has 256GB and three Ipod Shuffles.

__________________
Thread Killer.