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Comment by krick | Hacker News Reader

I feel almost guilty admitting it, but these behaviour seems completely natural to me. Paper books, music on CDs. Seems to me much more rational to buy something like this, than buying (heck, it's not even buying, it's more like renting by some weird license!) array of bytes, that can be deleted by some Apple or Amazon from your device, and doing so for nearly the same money as if you buy real book or CD! It's not japanese who are crazy, it's more like western people are totally irrational and insane!

And, well, I'm a bit missing these times when you could exchange CDs with your friends and all that kind of stuff. But dismiss it. However ability to not have CD-ROM in your notebook is major bonus. And size of portable music players as well.

I wonder if paper books are as expensive in Japan as in the western countries.

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Amazon and Apple both sell DRM-free audio files, which is no different than buying and ripping a CD, minus having the superfluous physical disc lying around. They can't be deleted from your device.

This is true, but the hard-drive music player seems to be on its way out now as well, with the iPod Classic gone and Apple moving toward the streaming market or "cloud" model, where they have ultimate control over the user's access to the content. While I'm not a CD junkie, I find myself clinging to the model you mention, because I am not eager to hand over control to a company that continually required me to pay. For those are a fan of Spotify: you pay $10/month for access to millions(?) of songs, but what happens when Spotify goes under, or gets bought? You've been paying for, let's say, 3 years - $360 - and what do you have to show for it? I much prefer sinking that amount of money into backing up my music collection.

> You've been paying for, let's say, 3 years - $360 - and what do you have to show for it?

The answer is 3 years of music enjoyment.

Honestly, this seems like a terrible example - I don't think anybody pays for spotify on the basis that they will have the music forever, it's very explicitly a rental service. Instead, people pay because it's the most convenient (including being cheap) way to access the music they want.

> While I'm not a CD junkie, I find myself clinging to the model you mention, because I am not eager to hand over control to a company that continually required me to pay

This doesn't really make sense either. If you don't like rental services, don't pay for them, buy the albums just like you always did - it's easy to buy DRM free mp3s nowadays.

At $120/year, Spotify is much more expensive than most people's annual music budget.[0] It might be convenient, but it certainly isn't cheap. At least with individual album purchases, you are building 'equity' in a music collection $10 at a time.

[0] https://recode.net/2014/03/18/the-price-of-music/

Then those people probably don't want to pay for spotify. I didn't mean to imply that spotify is automatically a good deal for everyone, obviously it isn't, but I think it's plausibly a good deal for a lot of people.

> but it certainly isn't cheap

I'll admit, I was speaking more from the perspective of listening to a lot of music. For instance, the combined purchase value of all the albums in my spotify playlists far exceeds the total amount I ever spent on spotify, though I haven't used it for a while. I'm sure there are many people for whom this is true, even if they aren't a large proportion of the whole population.

In general you're right of course, 'cheap' is a matter of perspective. Spotify is not cheap for everyone, but it is potentially cheap for plenty of people. I still don't see the problem with this.

>The answer is 3 years of music enjoyment

And, too, the collaborative experience that Spotify brings. I neglected to consider that. While very little money goes to the artists, the "sharing" aspect of Spotify is something that many people value and gladly pay for. Personally, I find that aspect too involved (I'm an albums person, not a playlist person) but from a marketing perspective this might be better for artists than physical media. I'm still too possessive for the rent-a-song method. What happened when I sign on and the music I like it out of license? Much better for me to have it as near to me as possible.

Years ago there was a local used record store in my town that offered a "trial" period on any album purchased. If you "didn't like" the album you could return it for a small "restocking" fee. Unsurprisingly this store also had a good business in the sale of blank cassette tapes.

What prevents someone from doing the same thing with Spotify? Play music on one device, record it on another using audio patch cables if needed. Or maybe it isn't even that hard, just record the audio signal right out of the audio card in your PC. Is this prevented somehow?

It's not prevented. You don't even need to go that far -- there are programs that will get the ogg files directly from Spotify. I'm not going to link to them, but I trust you'll find one with sufficient google-fu.

Isn't the fall of the hard-drive music player just because phones do that? I buy digital tracks rather than streaming (particularly since the whole point of most of my music is to listen while on the Underground), but my MP3 player sits gathering dust, because my phone can do that and more.

I think I've ripped my entire audio collection 3 or 4 times now. Back in the day I was naively convinced M4A would displace MP3. And depending on the disk size of the day, I've ripped with various bit rates (not necessarily VBR). Amazon and Apple seem to give you high quality rips these days, but I like having the flexibility of going back to the source material as needed.

Also, I guess I'm increasingly in the minority, but I really enjoy reading liner notes.

It would be a lot easier to buy more storage and just buy digital lossless copies of all your music. The extra cost would be more than made up for in the time savings from not having to rerip your audio collection so many times.

Sure. I don't recall anyone selling anything over 160 kbps in 2004. Apple introduced their lossless encoding around then, but extra storage for that many discs was prohibitively expensive. I think Amazon is still ~250 kbps and doesn't offer lossless at all.

Fortunately, I haven't had to rerip in a while. And if I really wanted to throw in the towel, services like Murfie exist that will take your collection and rip for you in a variety of formats. But, having physical CDs really doesn't bother me either.

You also miss the booklet and liner notes. Whether this matters is probably genre-specific. Jazz in particular has more meta-data than is ever encoded in an mp3, and if it was encoded, players don't support showing it. Classical has the same issue.

For random songs, I use the amazon store, which I am very happy with - the ability to download a plain old, DRM-free mp3 file is a consumer-friendly environment that I would not have predicted in this day and age.

However, if I want an album, I always buy and rip the CD to WAV/PCM. It's the real, unprocessed, uncompressed (lossy or lossless) bits of the CD, and I know of no other way to get those.

In my opinion, unless you have the PCM of the cd track, you will buy or rip that song again. This way you have it for good.

This is one thing that I really dislike about digital music stores - the fact that most of them don't offer a lossless option at all, and in the rare chance that they do, it usually costs extra, even though it really should come by default (because sheesh, it's what we've been getting on CDs for ages). Bandcamp is one of the few exceptions that get at least this thing right by offering a variety of options for a single price with lossless being one of them.

By the way, there's no reason to keep stuff around as WAV/PCM, it'll be just as lossless as FLACs (and thus can be further transcoded with no issue whatsoever) and you can actually tag the stuff like that too.

Why the hell would you rip it to WAV/PCM and not FLAC? You'll save on the order of 80% space without losing any quality; you can always convert the FLAC right back to WAV without anything being different.

However, there are other ways to get those as well. Bandcamp offers downloads in flac, mp3, ogg, and others. If the album isn't on bandcamp, or some other site that offers flac copies, then you can illegally pirate flac content from some-of-a-few audiophile websites.

I'm quite a fan of bandcamp and I'd highly recommend seeing if you can find good music there.

Not every use case involves a system that can play FLAC files, but just about everything can play a WAV file. For instance, one of my desktops is Irix on MIPS which I can play WAV files on, but not fancy things like FLAC.

Again, having the WAV file means I never have to touch that music again. Ever.

What year is you post from? :)

I used to play flac files on my Octane (300 MHz,1 CPU). Given how little load it caused, I'd expect it to work well on a O2 180mhz r5k. Perhaps you are using an older still iris machine though?

While just about any device can play .wav, many devices have so little storage that I find myself ripping on flac, the re-encoding to something lossy and lower bit rate to get a reasonable amount onto a mobile device.

> For instance, one of my desktops is Irix on MIPS which I can play WAV files on, but not fancy things like FLAC.

Why would that be? libFLAC has IRIX support since ~2002, and computational power certainly isn't the issue, there used to be (and may still be) devices with <100MHz ARM chips doing real-time FLAC decoding in software (using just libFLAC).

Amazon will sell you audio files, they won't sell them to me. I live in the wrong country.

Amazon will sell me a CD at the same price you pay, plus shipping.

Apple will sell me audio files, at a 30% premium over what they charge you.

Prices are generally higher than in North America. Most of the CDs that I would buy in the US for around $15-20 is anywhere from ¥2450-5400. Additionally, most of the "extras" are just advertising fluff. Books are priced similarly to the US, but the majority of them are Japan's version of trade paperbacks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunkobon) – thin paper cover, cheap thin pages, small format, and wrapped at the register with an additional protective cover (usually with the store logo). Nicer hardcover books seem to be priced about the same as in the US. The biggest thing going for the whole industry (despite everything feeling so cheap) is that there is a book for everything. Manuals for open source software, a biography for some barely known musician, etc.– and you can actually find them browsing a regular Sanseido, Yurindo, or Kinokuniya.

My rational to it is that I have enough clutter, in my house and on my hard drive, that I don't need to add to it with stacks of CDs or GBs of hard drive space. You and the Japanese should meditate on the nature of impermanence, everything in the physical world is rented so your music should be too ;)

>> "heck, it's not even buying, it's more like renting by some weird license!)"

Nearly all the music I've bought online in the last 5 years has been DRM free which means I can play it on any device and nobody can delete it. I bought it, I own it. It's not rented.As for sharing with you friends that doesn't happen very often but mainly I think because it's easier for them to just get their own copy than meet me to borrow mine. When it was more common to borrow media from people that was not only because it was free but because they would have to travel to a shop, and if that shop didn't have it, travel to another and another until they found it. Now they can own it in seconds.

I have no love lost for CDs, but I still buy Vinyl, and the best thing about Vinyl is that the majority of new albums also come with a digital download, best of both worlds. At home I listen to the Vinyl for the experience but on the go I have my phone with MP3s that no one can touch but me.

I do the same thing, trying to buy most new stuff on vinyl that has the digital downloads. I also have a ton of older records - Opera and Jazz mostly. I also have a large collection of 80s New Wave / Dance 12 inch remixes, most of which you cannot find digitally. The Recordman in Redwood City, CA is a good place to find stuff.

> and doing so for nearly the same money as if you buy real book or CD!

A lot of e-books are either half off or more than their physical counterparts. Also when you're buying technical books, their electronic versions will get updated and you buy and get access to e-books in draft form which is pretty useful for bleeding edge tech.

It's also pretty cool to be able to fit your entire library in your pocket.

Everything said, I still would never buy the digital version of art books and coffee table books and I still own the physical copies of the books I really like. I tend to buy digital copies more as an accessory.

The digital copies definitely should be cheaper when you consider the cost of producing and shipping CDs... which is why I download them from Youtube since apparently artists get paid this way (thank you youtube-dl)

I've come to hate physical media and I rarely buy it. Music is drm-free now and when I buy ebooks I only buy ones where I can crack the drm so I don't have to worry about licenses being revoked or drm servers going offline.

I've also moved a lot so carrying a couple hard drives is much easier than boxes and boxes of books and cds - let alone people that collect vinyl.

Often buying a used CD on amazon is cheaper than buying the album on itunes or amazon download. Sad but true. I admit I also enjoy the packaging for music I care about.

Buying a CD is still buying a license. You don't own the data in either case.

>It's not japanese who are crazy, it's more like western people are totally irrational and insane!

The main thing that's crazy is really the digital distribution systems available to us. If all we have is some DRM-crippled products, then you can't actually buy things digitally - merely rent them for an undefined period of time. Luckily, there are at least some things you can buy without DRM (music does pretty decently in this regard, games somewhat), but on the whole the situation is rather gloomy (especially with anything video). And while I do like the catalog rental model that services like Netflix offer with their subscriptions, at the very least I would like to be able to digitally buy the things I really like, which is flat-out impossible in many cases.

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