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Comment by georgeecollins | Hacker News Reader

You can still buy albums on MP3 from a variety of places. I guess that is the same as getting the CD and ripping it, but I like to own MP3s I have paid for. I enjoy playing music from my collection rather than having it served to me by a service for a variety of reasons. But I am not knocking streaming. It's just nice to really have the asset.

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You can't trust that commercial MP3s are encoded for gapless playback which is sort of important for live albums that play through without stopping. On my rips all pregaps are preserved at the end of the previous track and playback is always identical to the CD.

one problem i've found with music is someone discovers an uncleared sample, and the album either becomes unavailable, or stays available with samples removed so its not actually the same album anymore.

Not a problem if you buy DRM free files, which most places offer. You're just responsible for storing them from the moment of purchase.

it is a problem. if you go to buy the album today, the updated versions already have the offending samples removed. the originally released CD does not have this problem.

Maybe I'm being pedantic, but CDs are higher quality than MP3 usually. You can rip losslessly to WAV or FLAC and preserve the original. MP3 is lossy and will be a lesser version.

when you buy a CD from amazon.. for lots of them, you can download the MP3s right away after you paid for it

Didn't know that. It's a weird disparity that you can't download a PDF when you bought a book. You get an online book viewer instead. I would have expected them to likewise stream the audio if anything, or require you to use their app to listen to it.

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