Matisyahu's Blog

I find it interesting how there was first the trend of vinyl returning then tape and how CDs are making a comeback as people realise that paying to hear the same music over and over again isn’t a smart way to spend money. I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up seeing a return of DVDs and BluRay as people have found out that the films they thought they had bought from their favourite service couldn’t easily disappear from their library of videos in the cloud.

I’ve probably mentioned it in the past of when I tried Spotify and Apple Music a try with the problem being that you’ll find an album then discover that not all the tracks are available or it is an edition that is missing the songs you like (Joe Cocker, Mad Dogs and Englishmen, the version available online is missing ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’) then if you’ve found the holy grail of the entire album available you then run into a problem 2-3 months later when there is a falling out between the streamer and owner of the music resulting in the album disappearing out of your collection.

If you are wanting to start up a music CD collection the best thing to do is start off by picking up a few CDs when they’re on special, I did that when I lived in Christchurch where there was a Borders where they would routinely have specials such as ‘buy 2 CDs and get a third one free’. I also took advantage of specials on Amazon, there was a closing down sale where I had a hunt through all the CDs they had which were selling at over half price. In a space of around 25 years I’ve build up a pretty decent collection and I am still buying albums today but at a slower pace.

For the software I use on my computer, I have a copy of dbPoweramp where I rip all the music to FLAC then upload it to the cloud for backup purposes and then encode the ripped music into AAC format with true VBR (Variable Bit Rate) on the highest quality setting. The net result is that I have around 60GB+ music and the audio quality is transparent when playing through the speakers I have on my computer (along with the headphones when listening to it on my iPhone).