A digital life. - The Bear and Badger

g.man

My pants have a firewall.

g.man

Brooks

Guys, don't wear asbestos.

Kow

I'm digging your hacking.

Kow

The sixties upside down is the tenties. What do we call this decade anyway?

Diluted Dante

g.man wrote:

My pants have a firewall.

That must be uncomfortable

Brooks

The End Times

g.man

The Misery.

Kow

The woeful years. With savages.

Brooks

Still - hundreds of movies on a single brick! We're going to our ruin entertained.

Diluted Dante

Kow wrote:

The sixties upside down is the tenties. What do we call this decade anyway?

Surely you've already hit upon that?

Facewon

I'm generally embracing all this digital lark these days. Subs for rdio, quickflix, lots of DLC for consoles. Streaming iview and such. Haven't gotten on to a kindle/ipad yet, but will do eventually.

Funnily enough, what I'm finding it means is that when I do buy physical stuff it's generally only for special occasions, and/or particular favorites. Me and my best mate always used to get each other cds for birthdays and christmas, but since stuff went digital, that's been slowing. he just got a record player this year though, so without even discussing it, we got each other records for our birthdays this year. Nice.

Best of both worlds, innit.

Diluted Dante

I'd much rather have a CD that I can rip into mp3 than an mp3.

I like vinyl with awesome artwork though. It helps that I can also rip that as well.

Facewon

I have all my cds in freakin boxes in a cupboard. They are literally a complete waste of space. There's so many means of getting copies of the music you're after these days that holding on to cds seems to me to be part hoarding, part fear of digital apocolypse. ZOMG, what happens if the world wide web collapses, how will I listen to my music????!!!! If the www collapses, I'd suggest your music collection will be a fair way down the list of issues.

g.man

werd.

Diluted Dante

I'm thinking more along the lines of what do I do if my hard drive breaks, like it currently has done. My answer so far has been to get a CD off the shelf in my room and play that.

Facewon

Fair play. Although with all this cloud lark and streaming services, even that is less of an issue.

using rdio or spotify, there's no hdd required really, you're streaming stuff. (With the option to rip things to your phone or ipod.) I know the response to that is what if I'm not online? but to me that's mostly moot these days.

I dunno, I embrace our digital overlords, for the most part, it's baiscally inevitable that we'll be all but 100% digital in the near future, it's just a matter of switching when the tech is working well enough, and deciding what works for the individual re when to get more physical stuff.

Diluted Dante

Spotify is a subscription though. It's an excellent service for sure, but I like to own music.

I also listen to a lot of music in the kitchen, which wouldn't exactly be practical for any net based thing, so CD's are rather useful there. I could use my phone I guess, but the battery drains enough as it is.

Facewon

Preface: Don't want to seem to be badgering you, just find the mentality interesting.

I have had a similar mentality re owning stuff in the past, but I'm fast coming around to the idea that it's a bit of an outmoded way of thinking about things.

Spotify is a sub, but there are ways and means. If you want to listen to it in the kitchen, I'd look at getting a device that can handle it there. There's plenty of cool and cheap options. might cost for the initial outlay, but the cost of not buying individual cds will make up for it.

(rdio is $13 a month. New release cds out here are $20 minimum. Given how much music I've nabbed from it, the math works out well in my favour.)

Diluted Dante

Not feeling badgered Face, it's interesting to see both sides of the discussion.

Owning stuff is a way of directly supporting the artist. A fair amount of my CD's come from gigs. I reckon MC Lars likely has had more money from me buying his CD's than he would if I'd listened the equivalent amount on Spotify or whatever. I'm not often there with new releases. If I get the new Billy Talent CD this weekend that's probably going to be the quickest I'd have bought a CD from launch in years by a long shot.

For bigger artists though, a lot of my stuff has come from HMV's offers. Stuff like Rage, Tom Waits, Bad Religion, this is all stuff from when I was either really young or not even born that I've picked up for pennies.

The problem with the kitchen is that past the first couple of feet, the wi-fi doesn't reach. Unless I'm wall mounting whatever I'm using near the door, I'll need a new router. I realise this is getting rather more specific to me though.

More pertinent is that I can't guarantee that I'll have the money for the sub. It might not be much, but I also don't have much. I'm not always going to be buying CD's every month. I might however listen to the same three on rotation over the course of that month like I did with Motion City Soundtrack recently.

Facewon

Yeah, buying cds/etc to support specific artists from gigs is a good thing.

The thing with subs is that they should, in principle, still meet the demands of both artist and consumer, ie convenience for consumer and artist still gets paid. I have heard though, that spotify's business model isn't great for artists, not sure how rdio goes.

Still, as I say, in principle, subs should be better for artists than outright piracy, and in a perfect world, it'd be nice if they were better than the physical copy situation, I would have thought.

Also, I understand re not wanting to pay subs if you're not getting that much music. I certainly wouldn't suggest rdio for my folks, for instance, they buy like 2 cds a year. it doesn't add up, for me though, I have been known to buy 3-4 cds a month when I was working full time. $13 a month is an absolute bargain.

Diluted Dante

I'm certainly nowhere near that volume.

I know last year a ton of small labels puled stuff from Spotify. Granted this was mostly dubstep, so there is an argument that it improved the content on offer, but still. I think that a lot of the criticism of Spotify is misplaced though. largely it's from people who don't understand the internet and can't see the industry has shifted. From my experience, Spotify users are those that used to pirate. Not in all cases obviously, but it's an example of someone making a service that's easy enough and cheap enough to use to make piracy not worth the bother.

Diluted Dante

Looking around on Spotify criticism, found this rather refreshing view from a chap at Universal:

Universal Music Groupâ€™s digital boss Rob Wells has weighed into the debate around artists keeping their new albums off streaming services like Spotify.
In an interview for Topspin CEO Ian Rogersâ€™ This Week in Music web show, Wells criticised the assumption that â€œyouâ€™re not going to earn the same moneyâ€ from a Spotify stream as from an iTunes download. â€œBut what if itâ€™s incremental revenue, not cannibalistic revenue? So this is all additional money.â€

Wells went on to suggest that the music industry â€œshould be supporting these services because what will fix this remuneration is scale. Thatâ€™s all. Itâ€™s just scale.â€ He also had sharp words for artists like Coldplay, whose new album Mylo Xyloto is not available to stream.

â€œI do find it quite irritating when bands decide they donâ€™t want to do thisâ€¦ As an industry we should be showing some sort of solidarity, because there is a wave of customers â€“ the demographic on these services is between 16 and 22-24 â€“ and the disappointing thing about a band like Coldplay doing this is that consumers who are on these services are not going to turn away and buy that album on iTunes. They may miss out.â€

HP

That full interview might be worth watching.

Facewon

Yeah, you'd think that big bands should just completely dive in. They'll get the volume that makes it worthwhile. And if scale is the key, then that helps everyone out.

adkm1979

g.man wrote:

Fuck stuff. Even my underwear is digital! 0111000001100001011011100111010001110011 g.man

Well, that's just pants.

I don't think I need ever buy another book ever again. Â I've got loads I haven't read, and never seem to get to it. Â That said, even if I could get all my paperbacks onto a Kindle as easily as I can get my CDs onto an iPod, I wouldn't get rid of all my books. Â If got a growing collection from The Folio Society, and they really are lovely things.

Apart from that, I can do without physical things. Â I haven't bought a music or movie disc in ages. Â I'd like to get all my DVDs ripped so I can get all that space back.

Moto70

adkm1979 wrote:

I haven't bought a music or movie disc in ages. Â I'd like to get all my DVDs ripped so I can get all that space back.

I have actually found myself buying more than I ever have done in the past. I would love to be able to rip all my films to HDD, the best of both worlds for me then, the case on the shelf with the simplicity of a digital copy.

MattyJ

The only reason I buy CDs is for playing in the car, as the sound quality is better due to me not having proper iPod integration, but using an FM transmitter.

Books, I only buy on my Kindle now. I really like my Kindle, it's very useful and I like how it operates. The e-ink is a must though, looking at an LCD screen at night is bad bad bad.

I still buy films, but that's a rarety these days as I just don't have as much time for watching them. Back a few years ago at uni and before I was living with my girlfriend, I'd just stick a film on to watch in bed at night till the wee hours, so having a decent selection to call upon was worth it. Now though, I have a LoveFilm subscription, and a lot of films that I would've just purchased because I fancied watching it I know just rent instead.

My only concern with the ever digital life, is the ownership of the content. Sure I know I don't actually own any of the games I have, but if I die or want to pass them on then there is no issue and I can just hand it over. With digital, this is either impossible or much more difficult.

Jacuzzi_Jackson

Diluted Dante wrote:

I'd much rather have a CD that I can rip into mp3 than an mp3. I like vinyl with awesome artwork though. It helps that I can also rip that as well.

Vinyl rips sound a bit weird imo. I like how you usually get the full mp3 album with Vinyl now. Sometimes you'll get the CD, mp3 download and vinyl just for the price of the vinyl. Which is sadly very pricey.

Mod74

I pay for the Zune (soon to be Xbox Music) pass. For the price of one CD a month I can legally download pretty much anything and everything on a monthly rental basis.

It's shared between the three of us here, the missus and the lad use it a lot more than I do. I didn't used to spend that much on CDs anyway, but the missus did and the lad being 15/16/17 obviously would. Overall it's 'saved' us a fair amount of cash.

The artist royalties thing is interesting, but one way to look at it is giving a small amount to a wide variety of artists rather than a larger amount to just one.

Jacuzzi_Jackson

I think legalsounds.com is like that. Keep meaning to sign up.

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