Tech Blog

[#1]

I recently spent the better part of a couple of hours on a Friday night deleting duplicates from my iTunes music player.   Some might point to the inherent flaws in iTunes to map only paths to files and not files themselves, I point to the digitization of music.  Back in the day, I didn't suddenly end up with 2 copies of a cd if I moved it from my bedroom to my car.

Today we can buy music on our iPhone while waiting in line in a Starbucks.  We can buy physical copies of it at a store.  We can buy digital copies while at work or home computers.  We can buy a song on our laptop, we can buy it on a friend's laptop.  There are lots of ways to buy music, but when you buy it, it tends to become stuck to a device.  The song isn't as portable as taking a cd out of your car stereo and playing it on your home stereo.

Some digital rights management issues have been lessened lately to allow for copying of songs onto multiple devices and drives, but it's still a lot more work than pressing the eject button on a cd player and tossing the disc in your bag.

Improperly backup your computer and lifelong digital libraries can be lost.

Sure, call me an old man, but during those 2 hours of "house cleaning" of my iTunes, I was tempted to go into the basement and dig up my box of cd's and vinyl.  I had my own physical iTunes set up in my room back in the day.  Everything was alphabetical, easily sorted and found and if I ended up with a duplicate, it meant I borrowed a friend's disc and I gave it back.

While many wait and whine about The Beatles not being available in the iTunes store, the band not so quietly went about re-releasing their entire digitally remastered catalog - on cd.  Sure, the digital remastering was done in part to pave the way for future online sales, but in the meantime The Fab 4, more than 30 years split up, still sold more than 2M physical discs in the first two weeks the new copies went on sale.

Now I'm not going to try and make you believe that everyone who went and bought these cd's is heading in to the attic to dust off their discman to listen to the tracks at the gym.  I realize the discs were promptly opened and played once.  On a computer.  To import into iTunes. To play on an iPod or streamed on the network throughout the house.  But here's the difference between The Beatles on CD and if the band had joined the iTunes Music Store: once the cd's were ripped and the songs loaded on to various devices, the discs were then summarily repackaged and put in the basement with the rest of the cd collection.  A perfect physical backup.

Try and do that with your virtual music.

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[#2]

Good post.  Exactly the reason why I still buy physical copies of just about everything and am doing everything I personally can - which albeit, is not much - to stall the onslaught of digital distribution.

Call me old fashioned, but I very much enjoy seeing my collection of movies, music, and games on the wall, rather than as files on my computer screen.