I realized this morning that it’s been a really long time since I’ve gone to a music store and bought a CD. I’m not sure when the last one was.
I used to be really proud of my CD collection, and I guess I’m still proud of my music collection but there’s no longer a growing pile on my floor to show it off. Just a hard drive waiting to crash.
The reason for this, of course, is iTunes. I’ve always bought my music whether it was in plastic form or download form. It’s not really a legal vs. illegal or moral vs. immoral thing. I’ve always just wanted the best quality and that came in CD form. When the iTunes Music Store went live I decided their 128k AAC format was “good enough” and I’ve spent a lot of money there since.
iTunes just makes it so damn easy to buy music. I’ve always been the type of person to buy an album cause I like one song I heard and now it happens all the time. I’ll hear a song on XM, or the radio, or in a movie and I have the entire album like 10 minutes later. Talk about appealing to my restless nature.
I’ve had all my music on my computer since about 1999. Back then I ripped all my CDs using a really bad MP3 encoder and I recently had to do it all over again. So I’m starting to wonder why I’m keeping all the CDs. I don’t think I’ve actually put one in a CD player in years so they are just taking up space. I could probably sell them for a few thousand dollars, too. Of course, that would be illegal and immoral.
It’s funny, if I want to take an album with me on CD it’s usually faster to put a blank in the computer and burn it from iTunes than to find the CD in the pile.
The only problem with all of this is that if Apple ever suddenly goes out of business, or gets sued into oblivion, or even if their server is just down one day, I can’t listen to my music.
For a while I was converting all my iTunes music to straight AAC without DRM using JHymn but then Jon Lech Johansen (dvdjon) moved to the US, found out about girls, money, good food and wine and stopped working on it. Now the options are pretty slim and pretty much don’t work.
Was there a point here?
I’ve been super busy recently with vimoMail, vPod 2.0 and two other new projects that are still so secret that I’d have to hack your computer and delete all records of me ever saying anything if I said anything. That doesn’t mean I’m not still acting like a idiot on the weekends. I’m just too busy to write about it.
What else? I’ve got about 7000 miles on my bike now. Since March 31st. And… no one is buying vimoMail. Please buy vimoMail.