It’s controversial, many are up in arms about it, and it’s becoming ubiquitous. I’m talking, of course, about the recent cost hikes in online music. iTunes now sells music at 69¢, 99¢, and $1.29 price points (although you’ll be extremely hard pressed to find 69¢ music… most everything is now $1.29 (up from 99¢). Right on cue, the Amazon MP3 store has followed suit and now charges the same $1.29 per download. Well, here’s my solution to dealing with over-priced music downloads:
Several months ago I discovered that, if I like 1 song from an album, I generally like 2-3 more… and if I listen to the whole CD several times, another 2-3 songs start to grow on me. Considering this, I’ve started purchasing full albums from Amazon. The trick, however, is to purchase USED CDs… which are usually extremely cheap ($2.50 shipping typically dominates the cost). It doesn’t matter if the discs are a little scuffed up… good CD ripping solutions can make use of the data redundancy built into the CD specs and recover from pretty significant errors.
This way, I can get full CD quality music for ~40¢ per track. I immediately rip the CD to 256 kbps M4AMusic compressed with the M4A format is MUCH higher quality than MP3… I consider it a vastly superior file format. files and then archive the physical disc… no need to worry about backing up my downloads. Additionally, if a new file format becomes popular in the future, I still have my source media and can re-rip my collection to stay up-to-date with technology. All and all, a win-win-win solution!
