Who still buys CD's?

[powah]

I recently bought OK Computer and In Rainbows by Radiohead. So, who else still buys CD's? An by CD's I mean the actual case with disc and everything.

[jensked]

o/


Nothing beats a real cd: you can see what music is on the disc and you can play it in your car.

as for legally downloaded mp's on a disc: i wouldn't bother writing what's on it and i would loose it.

[Devon]

I still buy CDs, I have no issue paying for music.

It also allows me to convert them into digital format at a high quality for my iPod. Most downloaded music is at a crap quality, so is a waste of time.

[Homer_Bart]

I buy from iTunes, since not all songs in a single album are nice.

[Werner]

i occasionaly buy a cd, but downloading is not against the law in my country, as long as you keep the downloads for personal use, so don't use torrents and get your album from usenet or rapidshare or something. same goes for dvd's.

so it's tempting to download everything, but sometimes you want the 'real deal'.

[Lilleput]

I bought my last CD in 1998.. Get with it Record industry!

[NooDle]

Me!
Because some CDs I just have to have.
Because you still can't find EVERYTHING on the Net.
And sometimes because it's a hard to find compilation and I can't be arsed to go find every song individually, even if they're all easy to find.

[Lurch0001]

I still buy CDs because:

(a) I'm old-fashioned;
(b) sometimes the album as a whole is better than the individual songs;
(c) I'm just plain old.

[Speedtouch]

In Rainbow is pretty bad. Its just one song repeated! Its an OK song, but gets very boring after a bit. Muse FTW!

[Crazyjeeper]

I buy a CD if its something that I really want. Most of my downloaded music is just because.

[Vector]

In Rainbow is pretty bad. Its just one song repeated! Its an OK song, but gets very boring after a bit. Muse FTW!

^Bite your tounge. If you're talking about being repetative, then Muse is the worst for that. They were good, once, but lately all their 'new' stuff sounds the same as the old.

Anyway, I prefer to have mp3s. I can burn 5 or 6 albums to one CD and play them in any of my mp3 playing CD players, or put them onto a thumb drive and have dozens of albums to choose from and play them either from a computer or any stereo that accepts USB (which is becoming more and more common now).

CDs are nice for show... and that's about it.

[NecroJoe]

I've had 2 hard drives crash, with too much available-by-download-only music lost. Positron! Records has a digital "locker" which saves all of your purchases, and you can re-download them if something like that were to happen, but I don't want to have to go to every label's site, or every online store's site...and backing up these larger and larger drives costs a lot. I've already got over 1,5000 CD's, so it just feels "right" to buy more.

Plus, a previous poster was right...most downloaded mp3's sound like shit.

Whatever marketing genius came up with the "128 is CD quality" needs to win an award, and then be shot. When I rip, i use 320, but I refuse to listen to anything below 160...it hurts my ears. Even then, 160 -192 is for car use only.

[luvcars]

I've bought a few CD's this year!

[hype]

me!!!

[TJP]

I'm also still buying CD's. I like to support the artists that I like in anyway that I can (despite the record companies paying their talent S.F.A) As a plus, I get the artwork & liner notes.

Another benefit is you can rip the CD into the format that you prefer & at your preferred bit rate.

I only download off the internet if I am unsure of the artist and/or album.

Lossy formats also sound like rubbish when played through any reasonable 2 channel set-up. A lot of people still like to listen to music on CD & vinyl through a 2 channel setup with some nice speakers (I like the Paradigm Signature series )

Cheers.

[chilicoke]

Being the headphone nut I am, I too, buy CDs regularly. I don't bother with pay-to-download services because the compression quality are usually pretty poor. I do however, rip and encode most of my CDs with EAC/LAME at "-V2 --vbr-new", not the highest possible bite rate but the audio quality is transparent enough for portable use and casual listing on the computer (when I don't want to wait for tubes to warm up).

[evoWALO]

I'm starting to consider buying CDs again as you can hear how badly recorded a lot of MP3s are. Wish everyone would start using a lossless format or record in better than 256kbps AACs

[chilicoke]

^ People don't usually encode in lossless or AAC is because those formats aren't as widely used as MP3s. However properly encoded MP3s can sound just as good if not better than other lossy formats without the loss of usability.

Look up EAC and LAME 3.97, which are usually considered as the most accurate ripper and transparent encoder within audio communities. Their popularity had hugely increased over the past few year and because of this, we new have much better MP3s to download as a whole than 6-7 years ago when most people ripped and encoded with generic players like Windows Media Player and Winamp.

If you download MP3s from torrent trackers, all you need to do is look for the rip/encode report created by EAC to see how accurate the rip was and what encoder was used to generate those MP3s.

[toma_alimosh]

Nope, haven't bought CDs in a long while. Mind you, I don't buy them because I can't find what I'm looking for around here. Record stores here are filled with very few things: Rock, pop, hip-hop and reggae. On top of that, there's just a bit of classical, country, easy listening, jazz, etc.
But there's no electronic dance music at all. So I buy from online stores ... I like to buy mp3s at 320 kbps. You also have the option at some of the stores to buy the full WAV uncompressed, but I don't because they charge a ridiculous amount for that, and 320 is more than good enough for my uses.

[MadCow809]

Last time I bought a CD from a store was about an year ago.

I never have an issue paying for a good CD.