I just bought Beverley Craven’s new album (well, it was released last year, but I’m slow to pick up on such things, so it’s still new to me) from Amazon’s MP3 store (no, that’s not an affiliate link). I almost ordered the disc, being a recovering obsessive-compulsive donottrustanyripbutyourown lossless-audio nut, but in the end I really must start to accept that that is a waste of time and resources1. I have to keep telling myself this.
(“Listen man, it would be wasteful. Seriously. … Hey, stop entering your shipping address!”)
Relapse
It’s been a while since I bought MP3s from Amazon. I got a few albums from them when they first opened the MP3 store in the UK, but then I had a relapse into buying CDs and ripping them myself2. Anyway, according to encspot3 Amazon still use Lame 3.97 like before, with a “vbr-old” pre-set, so they’re a little bit behind on the state-of-the-art, but it’s certainly not bad.
(“I know, I know. If you had a lossless backup you could re-encode with new super-duper settings. Yes, that would also future-proof things for when you’re finally getting that digital parametric equalizer. But really, aren’t you simply enjoying the music right now? You are. So? IT’S NOT BAD.”)
Software habit < hardware habit
One minor downside to downloading the album is of course that now you can’t slip in a nifty new Firewire audio-interface with your shipping order.
(“Dude!! Does your laptop-output sound distorted? No. Does it drive your headphones well? Yes. How much are you saving by not getting that thing? Twenty, thirty albums-worth? Right. Also, it would just end up as e-waste. Now STOP entering your shipping address.”)
Day one
That’s right, today was a little triumph.
Oh, and Beverley Craven sounds wonderful, as on her earlier albums4.
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I was going to insert a link to The Story Of Stuff here (uh, so now I did anyway), which I stumbled across the other day. It’s a very nicely produced presentation, compelling us to be less wasteful and to seek sustainability, but as so many of these stories, it’s laced with the typical “big, bad government serves big, bad corporations” rhetoric that only muddles the real message - hence my hesitation. ↩
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It’s not helping that most CDs are about the same price as the download would be, and are offered with free shipping. (“Dude, listen. The disc just takes up shelf space. Extra value, maybe, an extra burden, definitely. You’ll get lots of packaging material, and a stack of flyers advertising rubbish, and it’s just a waste. AND you get to obsess over the rip being faulty.” Help!!!) ↩
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I hadn’t used this in a while, and it took a moment to find a build for Ubuntu 9.10 - in the end I found it at getdeb.net. ↩
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(“I’m proud of you. You didn’t even start about how the other albums are FLAC files with embedded cue-sheets, and how these MP3s mess up the ORDER OF THINGS. I’m so proud of you.”) ↩
