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Comment by 6stringmerc | Hacker News Reader

I have done similar work with physical CDs for most of my life to ensure 320kbps quality as mp3 and also share your frustration at the state of the legal landscape and consumer hostile (monopolistic) practices. I get downvoted frequently here for mentioning the landscape should change but simply side-stepping the laws is still just that and throwing tantrums is a bad look (re: my critique of Ars Technica / TechDirt in another thread).

Unfortunately it seems like legislation will have to be used to fix the problems we both face, but the likelihood is slim. Perhaps a wholesale collapse of the Federal Government would free states to experiment with new approaches. Thanks for sharing and I really wish I had an answer as well.

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CD audio is unencrypted, so nothing needs to be broken in order to copy it, unlike even the extremely weak encryption on DVDs. Is there any legal issue with making a personal copy of unencrypted media?

I believe format shifting (ripping CDs for personal use) is still illegal in the UK.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Format_shifting

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/quashing-of-private-copyi...

Probably due to the following, but can't find it from a quick Google:

R (British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors and others) v Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills [2015] EWHC 1723

Yeah, I have a lot of CDs as well, I rip them to FLAC because, even though I doubt I can actually hear a diff between 320kbps and FLAC, it makes me feel like it sounds better.

I find it highly doubtful that legislation will save us with this. It seems like congress, at least in the US, has worked hard to make copyrights longer and longer and worse and terrible. I would love it if they prove me wrong, and made copyright in the US much better, but I think corporations are too intermingled with politics to make that likely.

FLAC's nice because it's future-proof, you can encode it into whatever you need with no loss. 350-400MB for an album hardly seems worth worrying about in a world where if you want a top-quality film rip you're looking at 40-80GB—and you can fit hundreds of such albums on a chip the size of a 1-year-old's pinkie nail that cost tens of dollars, let alone an actual spinning rust hard drive.

I was all about high-quality MP3 in like the early '00s, but now? FLAC's fine, music's not going to be the reason I run out of disk space.

I have a 288TB storage array, so I basically have infinite storage. I never compress anything unless it is lossless lol.

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