Vinyl vs. CD vs. tapes vs. digital. What's your favourite storage medium for owning your music and why?

I am pretty much referring to music that you actually own in one way or another, not music from Spotify, Deezer, SoundCloud, YT (Music) or whatever provider you use to stream music.

I am a bit old-fashioned and I prefer to have actual ownership of the music. I have a bunch of vinyls, some physical CDs that I use for backup (basically I rip them again if I ever have a problem with the already ripped files on my PC - also saves time because I can skip the albums that I own on CD when backing up my computer) and that I also buy because they're cheaper, and finally I source the music from wherever I can find (mostly on Bandcamp when I can buy it). My rule of thumb is to keep .flac files on my PC and .mp3 on my phone, as the storage is lower - but sometimes the formats in which songs are available vary.

How are you keeping your music? Is it a digital or physical/analog environment? If it's digital, which is the format of your choice? Why did you find it better for yourself than the rest?

(Sorry if this might not be the appropriate community for this question)

boolean,
boolean avatar

Digital (hard drive) > CD > Vinyl

lossless digital because it’s searchable, accessible and manipulable.

CD as archival storage. Slower to acess, high quality, lossless.

Vinyl for archival and playback. Something awesome and magical about analog.

Visikde,

Any of it is so much better than listening to an AM radio while I delivered newspapers.
Yesterday I heard a Red Rider song from an album that I had recorded on cassette off FM radio.
I converted whatever music I had into MP3s 20 years ago, When I was converting LPs to MP3 I did several concept albums which didn’t have songs, so I set the length at 6 minutes or less. I was using MP3 Direct Cut which had a bar graph, I could visually chop up albums into songs without actually listening. Over some years I went through my collection & chopped up songs that were too long or have intros longer than 10 seconds, I may or maynot keep the originals. I use the comment field for tags to make it easier include/exclude long, duplicate, alternate versions I have more than a few copies of music files, including data cd’s from 15 years ago, sata hdd, sd cards, nvme. every 6 months or so I renew a couple of the back ups

storksforlegs, (edited )
@storksforlegs@beehaw.org avatar

I have a soft spot for cassettes, they were my main musical … thing growing up well into high school. I cant remember the last time I actually listened to any of my old tapes but I keep them around to look at. Ive also got a cd collection, much smaller since I went basically right from tapes to downloading. These days i stream most music but I still purchase digital copies of albums (directly if I can to support the artists) and listen to mp3 on my desktop regularly

megopie,

I really like tapes, if only because they’re a very versatile and accessible format. The tech behind them is also simple in a way I really like. I enjoy world building and because tapes and their readers are so relatively simple, they fit in well with worlds where there is technology but no huge supply chains and economies of scale to make more complex things practical.

I also like mini disks because they’re so interesting in how they work.

Not much of this is relevant to the music I suppose, but it’s why I have these things and music on them.

Tippon,

I love the idea of vinyl, because that’s what I grew up with. My father had hundreds of albums at home, and would play a lot of them quite regularly.

Realistically though, CD is better for most of my uses, and ripping them to mp3, or another format now that there’s more support for smaller files, covers every use case that I have.

As Scrubbles suggested above though, vinyl wall art with NFC tags could be perfect for me. Maybe some CD artwork for the less influential releases too :)

techwooded,

Depends on band somewhat for me. I guess preference overall is digital, but I’ve always bought Wilco albums in vinyl for some reason and I’ve always bought Mountain Goats albums on tapes due to his history with the format

colourlesspony,
@colourlesspony@pawb.social avatar

For me, I only keep digital music and in flac form if I can get it in high quality. I personally don’t have any nostalgia for physical stuff.

HalJor,
@HalJor@beehaw.org avatar

Owning, CD. Then rip to mp3 and play through Plex via my local network.

sanzky,

minidisc is the right answer, but the world collectively said no to it.

Appoxo,
@Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Owning (physical): CD
Actually: FLAC
Actually: FLAC on a big HDD backed up 2 times.

scrubbles,
@scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech avatar

I’ll add I like vinyl for my favorite records (even a couple signed ones) that sit on the wall. A fun project was to do NFC cards to (when tapped) will start playing the flac albums on my stereo, which makes it feel more physical and connected.

Tippon,

That’s a good idea. I’ve been considering making the NFC jukebox, but I like the idea of having vinyl as wall art too. This would be a great way to have both :)

invertedspear,

CD is the best answer IMO. I get why people like vinyl, but what they refer to as “warm tone” I hear as just static noise and pops. It’s a hell of a lot harder to rip tracks from vinyl to digital versions. Cassettes were always terrible, but they were portable. CDs sucked in cars or worse yet workouts, but being able to easily convert them to MP3 solves that nicely. CD is the best long term source storage, and like you said rerip them if your digital files get screwed up in some way.

petrescatraian,

@invertedspear So are you storing the (ripped) files in .mp3? Why not other format? 😁

invertedspear, (edited )

Transferability, and I have some hearing issues so the loss of quality vs lossless audio is unnoticeable to me.

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