I grew up listening to my parents’ music. I later started listening to WCMS 99.9FM. “Almost Perfect Radio” Their original was “Western and Country Music Station”.
Most of the music my parents owned had been transferred to reel-to-reel tape. This is actually a real problem. There were a couple of “albums” that I wish I knew the names of.
When I went to University, I was exposed to different music. Mostly because, being a collage town, they had no country music radio station. If I would rather not listen to the latest pop music, I had to find my own.
Then a fantastic thing happened, CD’s. Because the CD was not harmed when played, the CD emporium would let you listen to a CD before you purchased it. And boy did I listen to a lot. I purchased even more.
When I divorced my first wife, that CD collection was a sticking point. I ripped all of those CDs. All 500+ of them.
And then google ate it. GRRRRR
Not having the CDs in front of me, I’ve had to remember albums I used to listen to. The other night I listened to the London stage recording of ‘Cats’. Why? Because it was one of those albums I used to own.
So here is a song from a group I use to listen to:
Ahh, the golden days. Thanks awa.
Do not trust the cloud. It’s handy but you have no actual reason to believe anything you back up there is either secure or safe. I too have ripped my CD collection (though I still have the CDs) — but those are on local computers, backed up to local backup.
^^ THIS ^^
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I’ve lost “digital purchase” albums I paid real money for — and downloaded to my device — when Amazon apparently decided I didn’t need them anymore and removed them from the cloud (on their devices) and their app (on my device).
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Poof. Gone.
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Luckily it wasn’t a huge loss — maybe four or five albums’ worth — just annoying as hell.
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(I’ve never tried Google’s or Apple’s cloud storage for personal stuff, but I imagine they’re equally reliable and “forever”. I do use Microsoft’s cloud storage and it’s been OK, but that doesn’t count; it’s for work stuff, and I bet they’re significantly less likely to f@#k around with corporate accounts.)
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So I’ll keep my CDs, thanks. In addition to having the physical discs stored away, I have them ripped onto physical hard drives (plural) — both online and offline — and I copy whatever files I want readily-available to my device(s) or cloud storage. If they disappear, no biggie; I re-copy them. Still annoying, but not as bad, and no cost other than the time.
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And I pointedly ignore all the ads to upload all my photos to any cloud service. First, those are personal/private and I don’t trust any Big Tech company to not scrape them for facial recognition and/or AI “training”. Second, given my experience with bought-and-paid-for digital media, I simply don’t trust them to retain anything. So I’ll keep my photo albums, too, thanks.
I don’t do subscription music, but I do get e-books at times. For exactly the reasons you described, my practice is to download the actual files, convert them if needed, and keep them on my own computer in the “calibre” e-book library program. That way I can load them into any of my e-book readers and not worry about the source going away. In my case, the worry is more bankruptcy — I use a Barnes & Noble “nook” reader.
The various purveyors are making it harder and harder to do this, but there tend to be ways even so. It helps that a bunch of decent authors make their publishers issue the e-books “without DRM” so I don’t have to jump through hoops to strip off that crud.
Exactly. I have multiple external hard drives, and maintain at least two generation backups.
“The Register” is always coming out with stories of ‘bit buckets’ (silos) with Amazon or other cloud providers being found to be unsecured.