mp3.
|
This
year, my wife and I finally joined the ranks of twenty-first century
music
listeners with our first mp3 players (thanks Craig).
So
my first complaint is all the different formats that are out there. My wife’s Sansa player will do mp3’s, but she
bought a bunch of songs online from WalMart, which only uses a
copy-protected wma
format. And, of course, the wma format,
being a windows thing, doesn’t play on my ipod.
The license is supposedly good for up to three machines,
so in theory
the music police will at least let me play her wma’s on my computer,
assuming of
course that we go through the rigmarole of setting up the licensing
(which
isn’t going to happen). Because she
started with that format, she’s also been ripping her CDs as wma’s,
meaning if
I want some of her songs I have to go back and rip them again. Great.
It
used to be that I bought songs on a record, cassette, or CD, and they
were mine.
Apparently, now I’m just renting
a song until the next hard drive crash.
I’m just guessing, but I really really
doubt that a song I pay for as an mp3 will last for half as long as a
song I
buy on CD. So, the music companies will
score yet again in a few years when I have to download another copy. And how is it that the music companies are
losing so much money when they’re charging us to download songs we’ve
already
bought on records or cassettes? On
the plus side, it looks like the whole digital rights thing is on its
way out, which
is fantastic. And, Amazon has finally
arrived on its white horse to give us an alternative to itunes. But now it’s getting harder to find CDs! Major chains are stocking fewer CDs because
so many people are just downloading mp3s.
And this brings us to the worst things about mp3s – we’re
now actually
paying more or less the same price for a crappier product.
Compressed songs? I’m no
audiophile, but I resent the fact that
the trend is toward poorer audio
quality. If I’m paying for a downloaded
song, I should be giving me the 44.1-kHz 16-bit wave file, not the
crummy hyper-compressed
mp3. If I want to compress it, I’ll rip
it myself. Or am I allowed to say that? |