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Comment by beefsack | Hacker News Reader

The past couple of years I've gone back to buying physical CDs and ripping them myself (abcde is fantastic) in the quality and format I like.

My music collection is synced to Dropbox and automatically syncs across all my PCs and to my phone.

I've also come to enjoy walking into music stores and browsing the music looking for something that I'll enjoy coding to, and a lot of the time here in Australia it ends up being cheaper buying physical CDs nowadays, especially if you're not buying the latest stuff.

There's more than just convenience.

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I do the same thing. I bought music from Amazon for a while. Every now and again I bought some German music from Amazon.de. The purchase works well enough but after that none of my non-German music works in the Amazon player. The Xbox One will simply not let me purchase anything that's not from my region.

The CD or DVD just takes all that pain away.

The XBox One is an absolute disaster area when it comes to multi-region support. The single most annoying example is that the interface language is linked to the country you're in. For example, living in France, with a French credit card, I can't configure my XBox in ENglish if I want to be able to buy things. I can lie to my XBox and tell it I'm in Australia after having purchased things though, and it will then let me play my games in English, but I will have to switch everything back to French if I want to buy something else.

Why not just use Amazon or Google music and download everything ? Google Music is especially good because it lets you download a .zip with complete album compared to Amazon that only lets you download one song at a time.

I used to buy and rip CDs but it takes time and space and feels really backward.

I have a wall bookshelf which has a corner-to-corner shelf in it for CDs, and another for DVDs. That makes the bookshelf more interesting and gives an otherwise really cold-looking room warmth, without taking up space. As mentioned, Amazon makes it frustrating to buy digital content from another region (although it does work). Google is not an option because I'm one of those people that avoids anything Google, no matter how convenient their products may be.

All of this is very subjective. Your points are well made, nonetheless.

What pain compared to just buying MP3 files from Amazon? Unless you need a hardcopy I don't see an advantage (from a convenience POV).

I can see problems happening with the Amazon Player (I never used it), but CDs don't help with that.

I buy something from another region and download it using Amazon's tool. I then buy something from my own region, and the download tool and player can't download it, saying it's now tied to that other region. It takes a phone call to fix.

Also, I'm constrained by the encoding Amazon gives me.

Ah, thanks.

These days, companies keep trying to control a whole stack. Buy music from our store, use our software to play it, sync it to our devices. Buy ebooks from our store and read them on our reader.

I like your approach: pick the best thing in each category and use them together. A dumb TV with a good picture, getting video from a video input source of my choosing. An ebook in a standard format, read on whatever I want to use.

The short-term convenience that a "complete ecosystem" provides is often a giant pain the long run.

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