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Comment by yeahdef | Hacker News Reader

Another perspective: I am less concerned with music discovery or seamless device hand-offs. I know what I want to listen to. As a former club DJ, I accrued a large amount of records that are simply unavailable via streaming networks. I recently starting ripping a lot of those vinyl records to mp3. I have tried spotify, google play music, and Apple Music. Apple Music is the clear winner when it comes to the importing, tagging, artwork curation workflow. I am really enjoying building my up library from scratch (forgive the pun).

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Why would you rip your collection to a lossy format like MP3? Sure, you're probably going to explain how you don't hear a difference which is fair, but a lossless format like FLAC or ALAC (recommended if you're in the Apple eco system) has other advantages besides superior audio quality. It allows you to convert to any other format, including MP3, at a later point. Storage is cheap these days and there's really no excuse not to use a lossless format. You can set up iTunes to automatically transcode everything you sync to your mobile device to a smaller, lossy format while leaving the lossless master copy untouched at home.

The one thing you probably want to avoid is regretting your choice and ripping your collection again because you opted for the lesser format on the first try.

Fair reasoning from the archival master standpoint. I share a lot of what I rip with other DJ friends. If I sent them a FLAC or ALAC file, they would respond "what the hell is this? how do i listen to this?". mp3 is ubiquitous and 320 kbps does the trick for me. I hope I don't feel that sting of regret you mention, but my gut feeling is that I will not. I still have the records themselves on the shelf which should last longer than the harddrives :)

When I ripped my LP collection I first saved each recording out as FLAC (16 bits @ 48kHz), then re-exported it as VBR MP3. Audacity (a Mac recording app) makes this easy. I keep the FLAC files on my home server for future use (or for when 1TB microSD cards become cheap :-).

While it's not cheap I recently got a 1TB external SSD ( http://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/product/po... ) in order to be able to take my whole lossless collection with me if I need to (in addition to the NAS at home). Admittedly, music doesn't need an SSD drive but I won't buy any spinning drives these days. Plus, this thing is incredibly small, robust, bus-powered and very performant. Great product.

I highly doubt that any of your friends use a player that can't play FLAC or ALAC - any decent player does these days.

And if you really need the occassional lossy copy it's trivial to quickly create one with XLD or similar tools.

I'm sorry if I sound more upset by this than I should be, but ripping an entire record collection is a time intensive task and you're cutting corners on an issue that doesn't save you any effort, but might actually cause more someday.

I agree. I own a lot of music (some legal digital downloads, some rips from CDs and vinyl) that isn't available for streaming on any platform. Apple Music is the best at allowing me to mix in my library with theirs.

Many people subscribe to Spotify even if they also subscribe to Prime because Spotify has more music. Apple Music is one step further.

Publishing to a streaming service isn't always a good deal for small acts. It's important for independent musicians that some music listeners are willing to buy directly from them to decrease their margin. In addition, even some larger bands, Tool being a prime example, are absent from streaming services. I'm concerned with how much power streaming services will have as they consume a lager and larger part of the music industry. It creates a new cultural gatekeeper, and the internet is best when is removes cultural gatekeeper.

I really like this aspect of Apple Music, and I wish Spotify would do the same. I too have a lot of music which is not available in their catalogue, that I'd love to have available in the same cloud service that I use for the rest of my listening.

However, iTunes Match's file size/length limit (200mb/2 hours) means that I can't upload many of the DJ mixes I'd like to have in the cloud. That and the fact that I love Spotify's recommendations means that I end up using Spotify most of the time, but have all my mp3s uploaded to Google Play. Works OK, but I'd rather have them all in one place!

Didn't Apple have major issues with overwriting and syncing up imported music?

They had. There was a problem when Apple Music would try too aggressively to pull in songs from their library if it had the same name/artist. But this has been fixed some time ago (by doing fingerprinting properly)

I've also had issues with Apple-products (iTunes) erasing the MP3-metadata for my entire collection in the past.

It had taken me ages to build up in the first place and fixing it afterwards was a painstaking manual labour which took weeks and weeks and weeks.

Needless to say, I won't allow another Apple music-product near any of my files ever again.

Edit: This thread brings back memories. I can't tell how many times iTunes have formatted or deleted all music on my iPods and iPhones over the years, forcing me to re-copy or re-sync everything. Again

I really, really, really won't let Apple touch my music-files ever. So much wasted time....

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