What Music Format Do You Prefer To Buy In?

by **Vashtanaraada** » Sat Apr 11, 2015 3:20 pm

When you buy music either in a shop or on the internet, what format do you buy it on most commonly?

I tend to buy vinyl records as they are cheaper than CDs where I buy them. I also love the enlargement of album covers, and the way you can get picture and different coloured discs; without the limitations of what CD or tape packaging can be.

If a format that I haven't mentioned is your answer, feel free to post below, fellow audiophiles and music-lovers

by **Insaeldor** » Sat Apr 11, 2015 3:23 pm

Digital all the way. More accessible, and improved sound quality.

by **Vashtanaraada** » Sat Apr 11, 2015 3:28 pm

Insaeldor wrote:Digital all the way. More accessible, and improved sound quality.

I tend to find that as long as you have really good software and therefore a sack full of money, Vinyl is just as good as long as it's pre-1990s vinyl (the manufacturing techniques were better and the actual records sturdier and more reliable) and without damage.

Plus, many great bands in the decades of the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s that may never be one CD can be listened to, from some of the most irrepeatable decades in human history

My Last.fm · by **Ancient Magmia** » Sat Apr 11, 2015 8:40 pm

CDs and vinyl. When I can, I'll buy albums on both formats.

by **Floppieland** » Sun Apr 12, 2015 1:54 am

old albums: vinyl
new albums: cd

by **L Ron Cupboard** » Sun Apr 12, 2015 2:40 am

I grew up with vinyl and I was glad to see the back of the rumble, scratches, dust, and having to get up every 20 or 30 minutes to turn it over. People talk a lot of hipster bullshit about the 'warmer sound' of vinyl, they are probably the same people who pay £100 for a speaker cable that makes absolutely no improvement but they claim to be able to hear one. So CDs because I like to have a tangible thing, followed by electronic formats for me

by **Vashtanaraada** » Sun Apr 12, 2015 3:49 am

I get that hipster thing a lot, they are the idiots that don't buy second hand and buy new vinyl, which say on average in the UK is a good £20 an album. Where I get my music, I can get albums for like 50p, a pound.

Just depends man. To be, the crackly sound that accompanies for example my red vinyl single of 'The Number of The Beast' by Iron Maiden adds to the deep and spooky atmosphere.

Other than that, I'm addicted to putting metal albums that support 33RPM on 45 and seeing how it sounds XD

Last.fm · by **Cosumar** » Sun Apr 12, 2015 9:17 am

CDs when I have the money and time. Otherwise, I download mp3 from iTunes/Amazon/YouTube.

by **The New Sea Territory** » Mon Apr 13, 2015 6:59 pm

I don't buy music. I either stream it or convert off YouTube.

by **Longingland** » Sat May 23, 2015 11:26 pm

Cassette Tapes all the way shakabrah :ugeek:

by **Teemant** » Sun May 24, 2015 12:14 am

Is youtube a format?

I usually don't listen to music when I'm not at home so I don't have any music on my telephone.

by **Soviet Haaregrad** » Sun May 24, 2015 9:13 am

Live performance.

No, not a recording of a live performance, an actual live performance.

by **Kaboomlandia** » Sun May 24, 2015 1:06 pm

iTunes

by **Charlotte Ryberg** » Fri May 29, 2015 5:10 pm

Throughout last weekend, I suddenly turned into an audiophile (a person enthusiastic about high-fidelity sound reproduction). I do not remember exactly how I suddenly became that obsessed with sound quality, but it is most likely to be partly as a result of changes to my practice in photography some while back, by rejecting the fundamentally lossy JPG format for the lossless TIF.

I believe that during last weekend, I was tinkering with some MP3s in Adobe Audition and when I exported the modified track, a warning dialog appeared saying that the MP3 format was a compressed (lossy) format, and advised me to use a lossless format to ‘preserve full audio fidelity’. Quick research confirmed that MP3 was fundamentally lossy, even at the highest setting (44.1 KHz, 32-bits). I was thinking that if I kept saving MP3s as MP3s again and again then the quality would deteriorate.

Then, I found out that the reason why some stores like Amazon sell in MP3 format is not necessarily to do with fighting online piracy, but also to ensure it could fit into digital music players together with hundreds of other MP3s, at a time when terabyte-sized storage was … well, too pricey, and the number of songs an music player could store was (and still is) a fine line between success or failure.

There is still a case for MP3s for portable devices, but storage capacity in a mobile device is increasing rapidly, eating away the current advantages of the MP3: in 2012, the iPhone 5 went up to 64 GB, while in 2014 the iPhone 6 now goes up to 128 GB (twice as large, but remember that the OS and applications will take up a chunk of that space).

I could go to the internet and download the songs in a lossless format like FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec, Linux/PC), ALAC (Apple Lossless, Mac) or WAV, but I remember that the original CDs and Albums may be a better option if I want to have something tangible, and be in control of the sound quality of the digitised files. On Tuesday (26 May), I decided to buy Scritti Politti's original Cupid & Psyche CD (UK release) from 1985, from an eBay user in Derby.

When it arrived by post yesterday morning (I'm posting this on a Saturday), I digitised the required songs using the ALAC format, and compared one of the newly ripped ALACs (i.e. Wood Beez) against the MP3s, using a program called Spek.

Lossy vs. Lossless by Antje, on Flickr

As the spectrograms above show, the quality of the lossy MP3 is notably poorer than the lossless ALAC, because more of the information in the ALAC file exceeds 20 kHz, the upper limit for the human hearing range. However, the ALAC is 35 MB in file size, while the MP3 is 9.5 MB, which explains the quality loss. Therefore, MP3s were fine for me until now, but because of the falling prices in storage capacity, the time has come for me to take music to the next level.

As a side note, I once thought that I had run into an audio problem with the ALAC version of Scritti Politti's Perfect Way when I noticed that the big drum fill (18 seconds in) was missing, but when I researched into the song, it turned out that the version I had was the original original … as in, the MP3 I had was the later (remixed) version! Although the original sounds much better with the advantages of lossless digitisation, along with the original arrangement, I will try and hunt down the remixed version on CD at a later date, maybe after Propaganda and Act, which feature Claudia Brücken.

by **Zdakia** » Sat May 30, 2015 5:05 am

buy

Hahaha...

Well, the one or two times I have bought music it's been CD, but that was back when 'portable' CD players were something you could find at walgreens. CDs take up too much room, and you have to rip them if you want to throw it into your computer's media player, and that's not always legal. If I were buying anything now I'd like it in FLAC, or some other digital lossless and DRM-free format to ensure that I recieve the entire song I payed for. Then I'd convert it to ogg and throw away the flac file, or just keep it lossless if it wasn't too many songs.

^ Look into Ogg Vorbis, and possibly Opus (if your media player supports it). You don't need to sacrifice quality (or freedom) to go lossless.