How do you listen to your music?

[Metalhead]

This thread is about your favorite audio formats.

I am a huge fan of Apple Music and also of my vinyl collection.

 

[Crabcore]

I hate physical media, I just stream everything

 

[Misery]

I use CDs, they specifically go into my car's player for when I'm out of the house.

It's all game soundtrack stuff, so it's just downloaded from wherever and then burned onto those. Though modern PCs seem to be allergic to CDs so I have to use an external drive to make the discs.

 

[SusanLR]

My new 2022 SUV doesn't have a CD player.
So, I stream or use the radio when driving.
I still like CDs and use them in my room all the time.

I have a ton of cassettes, but a good player is a thing of the past.

 

[Raggamuffin]

Downloaded - usually from Bandcamp as WAV, or purchases as MP3 from MP3million which is by far the cheapest, legal MP3 site I've ever seen. It's less than 10p a track. It's bonkers. Used Spotify in the early days when you could top up account credit and buy tracks for 50p each. Soon as they removed the buy/download option - I left and never looked back I also use Amazon for harder to find MP3's.

Bandcamp is my main go to - as it has a lot of the underground genres and artists I enjoy. I also rip WAV files from CD's, and I intend to eventually get a USB turntable so that I can obtain really rare underground tracks and get them into a digital format for my computer.

I love collecting music - so much.

Ed

 

[Mr. Stevens]

Streaming and CDs. I've been getting rid of my CDs to reduce clutter and because I don't plan on buying a new player once mine dies. But, I still love some old CDs for the sound quality--back before everything was mastered to be loud in cars, earbuds, etc.

 

[Luca]

Downloaded, and Youtube, and iTunes/Apple music. I still use an iPod, even though I'm aware that it is well past the mid-2000s lol. I'm personally not a fan of streaming because I like to have a more "tangible" copy of the songs, I guess. If I could afford to purchase hundreds of CD albums and find a CD Walkman that was still usable, I probably still would. People would think I was nuts though.

I don't listen to the radio at all because I can't stand any of the music that's currently on the radio. I know I rant about this a lot but it is so bad and everything sounds exactly the same. I'm not trying to be funny when I say I can't distinguish between the current 50 popular female singers with identical voices.

I used a Walkman until I was in mid- high school, I think. That was way after people stopped buying CDs. But I think that was still before the masses had made the transition from iPods to full-blown iPhones which were relatively new at the time. I actually still had a flip phone lol. And yes other kids did make fun of me.

So now I'm the old weirdo who looks like I'm trying to make a statement by still using an iPod and real headphones lol

 

[Outdated]

I have a large music collection on my harddrive. It started back in the early 2000s, CDs don't last too long in the tropics and I wanted backups, I ripped all my own CDs as 256 kbps MP3s.

Then while drinking with friends one night we heard the local radio station announcing that they had 24,000 tracks available for their request line, that seemed like a bit of a challenge to us so all my mates brought all their CDs around and I ripped all of those too. The collection grew and grew.

I now have more than 70,000 tracks on my computer. I don't download tracks off of the net because the quality usually isn't all that good, but occasionally I run in to people with a collection like mine and we share.

 

[Progster]

CDs, vinyl and digital downloads. I usually go for FLAC, but it that isn't available, I'll get mp3 320 kbsp. Bandcamp is great, I've found some great music there and many of my favourite artists upload their music there.

 

[Raggamuffin]

@Progster I did ponder pursuing FLAC but when I spoke with a sound engineer when I visited Cornwall in summer, he told me WAV was the way to go. Mind you, I think the difference is probably negligible between WAV/FLAC.

I gradually started redownloading my Bandcamp purchases in WAV format. Also, ripping CD's in WAV via Windows Media Player.

I definitely can't get my entire library in WAV, but I'll do my best to get most of it.

Ed

 

[Judge]

My entire music collection fits on 16 GB USB flash drives. I can play them through my Sony living room home theater audio system via Roku Ultra, but most of my USB listening time is through my car's 9-Speaker 285 Watt Bose audio system.

Genres: Classic Rock, Pop, Folk Rock, Southern Rock, Classical, Soul, Jazz, Techno and many Soundtracks.

About half my audio collection is based on commercial CDs while the other half are digital downloads from the Internet. Only a tiny number of them are from cassette tapes, and maybe one or two from ancient vinyl records that somehow have little or no artifacts. All edited personally to my own specs through Audacity 2.33 using my Audio Technica headphones. Though for everything I've downloaded digitally, I've ripped them on CDs using the .WAV format. Gave up on recording using the .CDA format some time ago. (Windows didn't make it easy.)

But just recently I've kind of laughed looking over my disc collection. Mainly because I seldom play them at all. Not when I can play them so easily in .MP3 format with a few movements of my thumb on a remote unit. Plus instead of seeing "track 1, track 39, track etc.", I can see each and every song name, artist, date, album, etc..

All that said, I'm still an old man with very fond memories of spending hours in Tower Records.

 

[Loren]

Mainly:

AccuRadio
Radio
Vinyl
Bandcamp
SoundCloud
YouTube on occasion

 

[Judge]

I now have more than 70,000 tracks on my computer. I don't download tracks off of the net because the quality usually isn't all that good, but occasionally I run in to people with a collection like mine and we share.

Cool. But just out of curiousity, how many gigs of hard drive space does that require?

Yeah, for downloading off the net you have to be very discriminating. Too many people out there uploading poor quality over-modulated sound with vinyl artifacts and digital compression issues. Making it more often than not a real crapshoot. Which is why I'm compelled to edit everything downloaded using Audacity. And on occasion I may even run into audible glitches found on a commercial CD. Go figure.

 

[Sherlock77]

How about live music shows... I would say that's where a good portion of where my music consumption happens... And I'm talking about local shows, mostly local musicians in smaller settings...

 

[Outdated]

Cool. But just out of curiousity, how many gigs of hard drive space does that require?

380 Gigs

Mostly whole albums.

 

[Hazel_1914]

FM radio (NPR classical)
Edison cylinder records because I started collecting those
78rpm shellac gramophone records
Edison Diamond Disc record, the 80rpm vertical cut specialty that I wish I'd discovered sooner.
Cassette tapes in the car
Sheet music and a pump organ
Lots and lots of YouTube

 

[Outdated]

And on occasion I may even run into audible glitches found on a commercial CD. Go figure.

I used Grip to rip all my disks. It took a long time, average about 6 CDs an hour. A surprisingly efficient little program, it even managed to recover a lot of music from damaged discs.

 

[Judge]

Downloaded, and Youtube, and iTunes/Apple music. I still use an iPod, even though I'm aware that it is well past the mid-2000s lol. I'm personally not a fan of streaming because I like to have a more "tangible" copy of the songs, I guess. If I could afford to purchase hundreds of CD albums and find a CD Walkman that was still usable, I probably still would. People would think I was nuts though.

I don't listen to the radio at all because I can't stand any of the music that's currently on the radio. I know I rant about this a lot but it is so bad and everything sounds exactly the same. I'm not trying to be funny when I say I can't distinguish between the current 50 popular female singers with identical voices.

I used a Walkman until I was in mid- high school, I think. That was way after people stopped buying CDs. But I think that was still before the masses had made the transition from iPods to full-blown iPhones which were relatively new at the time. I actually still had a flip phone lol. And yes other kids did make fun of me.

So now I'm the old weirdo who looks like I'm trying to make a statement by still using an iPod and real headphones lol

My brother still uses his CD Walkman all the time, especially when he does his daily walks. Nothing infuriates him more than me sending him MP3 files. Can't play them on his old Walkman or his car stereo.....

 

[LadyS]

Youtube Music.

 

[Progster]

@Progster I did ponder pursuing FLAC but when I spoke with a sound engineer when I visited Cornwall in summer, he told me WAV was the way to go. Mind you, I think the difference is probably negligible between WAV/FLAC.

I gradually started redownloading my Bandcamp purchases in WAV format. Also, ripping CD's in WAV via Windows Media Player.

I definitely can't get my entire library in WAV, but I'll do my best to get most of it.

Ed

WAV has a higher bitrate than FLAC, but they are both lossless formats. They are similar in terms of quality, but FLAC takes up less disc space.