Predicting the End of Physical Media?

[fas42]

They can take away anything they want from this planet, but they can't take away my Blues.

So you're happy to be always unhappy, Bob, eh ...

Frank

 

[Old Listener]

Bill,

You said it all. I use (or should use ..) all these rules for my daily work. But I want to keep my music and cooking free from them!

I am sure that sometime in the future we will have standard, cheap, easy to use and maintenance free ways of listening to virtual music. But IMHO we are not yet arrived to this point.

I agree with Gary. Gary said
"It's not much work to keep things backed-up. It's A LOT more work to re-rip your entire music database."

It is often easier to solve a specific instance of a problem than to solve the general problem. Once you rip CDs and tag the resulting files, those files won't be changed very often. It would be sufficient to run a new backup only when there have been enough additions or changes to make it worthwhile/necessary.

In practice, I backup my music collection along with our personal PCs every one to two weeks. These are incremental backups so they finish quickly:

Music files - 90 seconds
MusicPC - 90 seconds
My personal PC - ~ 20 minutes
My wife's personal PC - ~ 20 minutes

I run an incremental backup on the music files when I rip a new CD or import a new download. Then I do an incremental restore to the duplicate copy of the music files on my personal PC.

Bill,
It is nice to know you like port , also known as Vinho do Porto. If you would live in my neighborhood I think I could assure your advice and help also sharing some Porto wine - I keep a few bottles in my cellar, the one we are drinking (and unhappily is almost empty...) is a 1927 vintage!

I'm love to share part of a bottle of port with you some day.

1927 eh? I'm very envious. Regular drinking for me and for my wife is Graham's six grapes ruby port or Heitz Cellars Ink Grade port which is made in California using grape varieties from Portugal. Our port evenings with our friend sometimes get to 20 year old ports.

Bill

 

[mep]

No, call me old fashioned and a worry wart, but I want something that can't be fiddled with…

Why Frank, the essence of your being is fiddling with stuff until you have it on song.

 

[fas42]

Ah, but I'm talking about the replay of the medium, not the medium itself! But of course the latter is now strictly no longer true, I'm making some headway in getting a handle on this compression, decompression stuff; hopefully will have a first cut, a roughie, of a before and after version for people to play with before too long ...

Frank

 

[NorthStar]

So you're happy to be always unhappy, Bob, eh ...

Frank

Wow, how did you came up with that mathematical application Frank? Lol

Can you sing me a song? Please?

 

[microstrip]

I am going to host an Audio Research DAC8 next week, and decided to choose the JRivers software referred in this thread. I have downloaded it, installed it and questions immediately arise.

Can I install only the music part, not the full media center? I have some directories with a few recordings (24/192 samples and a few 26/96 downloads from HD tracks. How can I move them to the JRivers MC?

 

[Old Listener]

I have downloaded it, installed it and questions immediately arise.

When JRiver MC is first installed, it may try to scan your PC's hard drives looking for media content which it can import. It will wait for 30 seconds to give you a chance to cancel the automatic scanning. A small window at the lower left corner of the main MC window shows the count-down and offers a cancel button.

I'd suggest that you cancel that automatic scan. If the scan has already run, take a look to see whether the contents of the library are acceptable to you. If not, you can select files you don't want in the library and delete them. When you delete files, you are offered choices: remove the files from the library (database) but leave the actual files intact on you hard drive. The other choices remove the files from the library database AND delete the files themselves.

Can I install only the music part, not the full media center?

No, you get all the functionality. Don't worry about it.

You can choose what kinds of files MC imports. If you don't want to use video or image files from MC, just don't import those file types.

I have some directories with a few recordings (24/192 samples and a few 26/96 downloads from HD tracks. How can I move them to the JRivers MC?

MC does not require you to put your files in a particular place. I'd suggest that you collect your audio files in folders under a base folder (like d:\music). I would not recommend that you keep your files in a folder that Windows controls (like MyMusic.)

MC imports files in more than one way:

1 - the automatic scan on first use can locate files and add them to your library.

2 - You can specify folders that MC will scan for new files automatically. It will continue to monitor these folders at intervals for changes.

3 - You can command MC to import files (once) from a folder (and its sub-folders) that you specify. If you have files in more than one base folder, you can perform the manual import operation more than once.

I suggested that you cancel the automatic scan. The Import command on the Tools menu gives you access to the automatic monitoring and manual importing methods. I'd suggest using manual importing so that you have control over what's happening.

After you select "Import a single folder" and click on the Next button, you will see a list of media types. You can exclude video and images if you like. You can click on the arrow head beside "Audio" to choose which types of audio files you want to import.

Once you have imported some files, you can choose an user interface mode that suits the way you are using MC and what you want to see.

Bill

 

[microstrip]

Thanks, Bill. I have now uninstalled and re-installed the Server software.

After reading some posts it seems I should have all music in FLAC format. Can JRivers MC rip the CDs to this format? Is there any advantage using special ripping software?

 

[Old Listener]

After reading some posts it seems I should have all music in FLAC format. Can JRivers MC rip the CDs to this format? Is there any advantage using special ripping software?

Flac is a good choice. You will have tags in your files. If you get bitten by the WAV sounds better" bug, you can convert youyr files with a few keystrokes.

J River MC can rip to Flac. Look on the Tools/Options dialog.

When a MC user was having trouble ripping CDs in JRMC, I prepared a very detailed list of setup steps to insure that I could understand just what he was doing. Here is that list of steps with screenshots

http://naturelover.smugmug.com/Other/J-River-MC-15-process-for/14155242_FR9fhG#1044373019_Q3VLb

Note that you specify where MC stores the Flac files from ripping a CD. The folder name and file name are normally generated based on tag values. MC or another ripper will look up the CD in its tag database and use that information to populate the tags values in the files and automatically generate files names.

Getting tag values in your files comes for free when MC retrieves tag information and used it to generate file names. It isn't some additional process that you have to do.

dBpoweramp can be faster than MC if the CD you rip is in its AccurateRip database. I compared the audio contents of files ripped with dBpoweramp and found them to be the same as the corresponding files from JRMC with the exception of a few zero samples that dBpoweramp (and EAC) add to compensate for CD/DVD read offsets. No big deal.

For classical music and other music where both composer and performer are significant, MC's superior features for entering and editing tag information were more important to me than the extra speed dBpoweramp provides in some cases. (In addition, dBpoweramp uses a couple of online tag databases that in some cases provide better information than the ones MC uses. That translates into less work editing tags manually. I would not get too excited about this. Even when the online tag database has the right information on a CD, you may need to reformat it to suit your purposes.)

Explore the MC menus, right-click on things to see what options and commands are available. Experiment with a library of perhaps 30 CDs worth of files and build your understand of what's possible and what you want before you plunge in to rip your entire collection.

Bill

 

[microstrip]

Another naive question - is there any sonic advantage of using Windows 7 over Windows XP with SP3? I am going to use the ASIO DAC8 drivers.

 

[amirm]

If you are using ASIO then you are bypassing the operating system audio stack. So it should not matter.

 

[JackD201]

Never have I had such mixed feelings. On one hand, I dream of the possibilities in the progression of audio quality unhampered by physical formats and the resultant format wars. In that regard, I want the whole friggin' world to embrace downloadable music. The depressing part is that in the here and now the mass market seems to be wholly content with MP3, AAC. Stuff that isn't even at par with what we have become accustomed too. Once more quality has taken a back seat to convenience and instant gratification. For people like us that continue to explore new artists and new interpretations of old music the frustration is all too great.

Right now, we still need the CDs to rip, that or take a rip or D to A to D transfer from somebody that has done it. Same goes for Hi-Rez files. All well and good for those that are content with the existing CD, DVDA and SACD catalogs. Not so bright a future moving forward.

My take is that it will be the computer hardware manufacturers and not the market that will push for higher resolution downloadable material, just so you will be forced to buy more and more memory.

 

[egidius]

what about unreadable CD's (78's !!!)

I feel a great disquiet at the thought of turning all recordings into a form which is easily erased. I was in the computer game for 35 years, and have zero trust and confidence in the ability for computerised information to remain inviolable. As a good bit of conspiracy paranoia, imagine some brilliant but fiendishly evil chap who hates all music, and creates a computer virus which stealthily spreads out to every device which contains music files. And at some key moment the trigger is pulled and all music files that can be found are thoroughly erased. Yes, there will be backups for much of it, but a lot of of very significant material will be lost forever.

No, call me old fashioned and a worry wart, but I want something that can't be fiddled with, or possibily corrupted by someone fooling around on a keyboard on the other side of the world ...

Frank

Well, I am battling against old CDR's, copied somewhen in the nineties, not being readable anymore, sometimes it depends on the transport, but more often on the CD - so I regularly transfer them freshly, although i have taken to put them on a hard disk, true.

On the other hand I am truly looking forward to listen to my now huge collection of 78's, when my Thorens TD124 is coming back from a refurbishment. Amazing and technologically humbling ;-)
(if not musically, me being a violinist, I am so impressed by my dead colleagues recording spirit!)
Egidius

 

[NorthStar]

LP is also a physical media. ...So, is there an end in view?

An LP is made of what? Is it a material that eventually will not be permissible to use any longer?
...Hazardous material, like old film negatives?

 

[Old Listener]

Never have I had such mixed feelings. ... In that regard, I want the whole friggin' world to embrace downloadable music. The depressing part is that in the here and now the mass market seems to be wholly content with MP3, AAC. Stuff that isn't even at par with what we have become accustomed too.
...
Right now, we still need the CDs to rip, that or take a rip or D to A to D transfer from somebody that has done it. Same goes for Hi-Rez files. All well and good for those that are content with the existing CD, DVDA and SACD catalogs. Not so bright a future moving forward.

For classical music and some other genres, we are in a golden age when much of the recorded music from the last 60 years is available whether it is officially in the issuing record company's catalog or not.

I'm in the buy-it-now mode for recorded music. I've watched some music go from being cheap as used CDs on Amazon Marketplace to being available as very expensive used CDs to being unavailable as CDs at all. At that point, the music might or might not be available as MP3 downloads. I think that more and more out-of the catalog CDs will follow that path.

I don't think that there will be a legal market for used downloads. Once an album disappears from online stores like Apple and Amazon, it may be unavailable for purchase.

Bill

 

[egidius]

For classical music and some other genres, we are in a golden age when much of the recorded music from the last 60 years is available whether it is officially in the issuing record company's catalog or not.

I'm in the buy-it-now mode for recorded music. I've watched some music go from being cheap as used CDs on Amazon Marketplace to being available as very expensive used CDs to being unavailable as CDs at all. At that point, the music might or might not be available as MP3 downloads. I think that more and more out-of the catalog CDs will follow that path.

I don't think that there will be a legal market for used downloads. Once an album disappears from online stores like Apple and Amazon, it may be unavailable for purchase.

Bill

Ah, well, from my side, as a performing and recording musician, this reality has already struck home: Most of your recordings (I used to be so proud, when I had made a CD!) tend to be published in numbers ranging from 3000 to 1500 (Naxos) to 1000 to 500 : I wonder how long it will take for you to go to a studio, record your bit, and carry YOUR CD home with you ;-)

The background of this is of course: On one hand, nobody wants to burn their fingers on non selling CD's, on the other hand, small editions have gotten so cheap, it does even make sense to make too much ahead of need, it is so quickly reprinted.

E

 

[treitz3]

*clears throat*

It's been a while since this thread was active but I thought it would be a good idea to continue the discussions. Close to a year later, do feel the same or have things changed?

Tom

 

[Old Listener]

Close to a year later, do feel the same or have things changed?

The major labels continue to merge and/or shrink. The need to buy music now or lose the opportunity to ever buy it feels more real than it did a year ago.

Bargain boxes are great value at $ 1-2 per CD but it feels like an industry-wide going out of business sale.

I've picked off lots of bargains and what's left on my lists is mostly CDs sold at high collector prices. Do I wait and hope or pay collector prices to get the recordings now?

Bill

 

[garylkoh]

“I sell a lot of tickets. I’ve sold 1.2million albums and there’s eight million downloads as well, illegally. You can live off your sales and you allow people to illegally download it and come to your gigs. My gig tickets are £18 and my album is £8, so it’s all relative.” Ed Sheeran, UK’s most BitTorrented artist

In the first half of 2012, 96.7million files were downloaded by BitTorrent alone in the US. 217million in the top 5 BitTorrent downloading countries. Not all were illegal. Billy Van (dubstep artist) released his latest EP on BitTorrent only.

I think that the drift away from physical media is accelerating.

 

[Andre Marc]

“I sell a lot of tickets. I’ve sold 1.2million albums and there’s eight million downloads as well, illegally. You can live off your sales and you allow people to illegally download it and come to your gigs. My gig tickets are £18 and my album is £8, so it’s all relative.” Ed Sheeran, UK’s most BitTorrented artist

In the first half of 2012, 96.7million files were downloaded by BitTorrent alone in the US. 217million in the top 5 BitTorrent downloading countries. Not all were illegal. Billy Van (dubstep artist) released his latest EP on BitTorrent only.

I think that the drift away from physical media is accelerating.

Disagree. Several generations away. As long record companies can mine back catalogs with Deluxe Editions with lavish packaging and DVD content, like
the recent Bruce Springsteen, REM, and King Crimson releases, they will continue.

The pronouncement of death of physical media is one of the major embarrassments for Stereophile and TAS. I have back issues
from 2007 claiming they had a few years to go. Here we are at almost 2013 and I still have magic shiny discs arriving in my mail box
from Amazon because a tiny, tiny fraction of artists are offering lossless downloads.