I never stopped buying CDs. Granted I buy used off eBay for cheap.
But for really good CDs I’ll buy directly from the band website or Amazon for new.
I also still buy, DVDs, BluRay and 4K BluRays from eBay as well. Just bought the Cosby Show complete series on DVD from eBay.

I rip all my CDs immediately to a FLAC file using Exact Audio Copy.
I rip all my DVDs, BluRays, and 4K BluRays immediately as well to MKV files using Make MKV.

Those are all on my PlexServer and with PlexPass I can stream all of my media to any of my devices anytime I want.

Works very nicely.

If you have specific music that you want, ownership is great. I can't fault anyone for feeling that's the better approach.

I resisted streaming music for a lot of years, but started a few years back, and I am really enjoying the ability to explore and experience new music. For what I am consuming now, I think it's a great value. Probably the best money for value I spend each month really.

Even though I did not bash streaming previously, I too buy CD's.

BTW ~ CD's are Digital Music.

I ripped all 8-900 of my CD's to FLAC with CD Ripper from dBpoweramp.
It takes a long time but worth it.
Advice is to make sure you have backed it up otherwise you have to do it all over again.
Put it on a local server (computer with dlna server software) and you can play anything on multiple devices.
Make fun of "convenience" if you like but it is better than having to pull out a CD each time you want to play something and to boot you have to have a local CD player.
Any network device > computer, phone, stereo connected can have sound >> with the same quality of the CD.
Use a streaming source just adds to the collection, allows to sample new music with fidelity.
Having grew up with records, CD, tape (even managed a record store for a short time) I love looking at the liner notes of CD's or album covers of the past.

I'm stuck in the ecosystem and the only app that plays right with Apple Carplay is the Apple Music app on iOS, so the majority of my music is ripped in ALAC format since Apple has their own Lossless codec.

And since a lot of the expanded soundtrack albums are CD only because of rights issues, my external drive gets a lot of work.

quote:

Originally posted by r0gue:
If you have specific music that you want, ownership is great. I can't fault anyone for feeling that's the better approach.

I resisted streaming music for a lot of years, but started a few years back, and I am really enjoying the ability to explore and experience new music. For what I am consuming now, I think it's a great value. Probably the best money for value I spend each month really.

I stream a lot of music as well but buy a bunch as well. There is a bunch not worth buying an entire album for.
Also it’s how I learn about new music.

One problem with streaming is it can go away.
Nate Fueurstain’s (now known as NF) as2 EPs that used to be available on Prime Music (paid) and they are no longer available.
They are available on YouTube but quality is not great.
I’d love to find the EPs on disc.

quote:

Originally posted by r0gue:
If you have specific music that you want, ownership is great. I can't fault anyone for feeling that's the better approach.

I resisted streaming music for a lot of years, but started a few years back, and I am really enjoying the ability to explore and experience new music. For what I am consuming now, I think it's a great value. Probably the best money for value I spend each month really.

This is more or less where I'm at today. For decades I was a consumer of music of the physical kind. Bought vinyl and then CDs all of the time. At least a couple of thousand different vinyl LP titles and almost double that in CD titles over the decades. Perceptibly more music than I could ever find the time to truly sit down and enjoy listening to. Just not enough hours in the remaining days of my life.

Also as my hearing range has deteriorated over the decades (shooting, various loud environments, aging, etc.), my desire to go out and shop for new CD or vinyl music has waned. In the last 10 or 12 years I can likely count all of the CD titles that I've bought with both hands, with at least 3 or even 4 fingers unused. However I could never completely abandon listening to music. So I'm became a renter and I have no qualms in doing so. The available content in those streaming libraries are MASSIVE, and it's actually quite pleasurable to just go out and sample all of that music that I've missed along the way. For the relative pittance this costs each month, I'm more than satisfied with what I've gotten out of streaming. The relatively mediocre specs of streaming SQ is easily tolerable given where my hearing is at today; 'good enough' has never been so 'okay' with me. Plus it doesn't hurt my bank account that I used to spend considerably more each month on purchasing CDs than what I now pay for streaming.

Since I more or less stopped buying physical music media (the exception is concert DVD/Blu-Ray disc, and even here these are uncommon purchases), I also got the added benefit of me no longer having to find space for this clutter that it becomes. There's only so much walls in a house to back storage shelves to, fighting with all of the other possessions that we own, each bumping elbows as we're looking for their own display and storage space.

One of the misconceptions is that purchased CD's are better than other forms including streaming or downloaded.

The quality of the former can be worse or better technically.

https://www.headphonesty.com/2...-bit-depth-bit-rate/

The difference is the format and sampling rate.
It is why those of us actual in to quality audio will download with a a sampling rate/bit equal to or greater than wat the CD offers 44K/16 and use a lossy format aka not MP3 or similar.
With LP's most if not all now are mastered or remastered digitally as well.
However, vinyl is a whole 'nother wonderful subject.

For most it is most likely the same with more differences being in the the playback equipment/methods.
So I imagine the conversation is really about the hassle factor or being annoyed by streaming.
I also imagine most younger listeners now days are not as committed to music listening as us that grew up in the pre-Internet music listening era.
So there is some inherited ignorance of the prior formats.

But IMO, there is room for both methods for full music enjoyment and can enhance it quite nicely whatever you utilize.

quote:

Originally posted by smschulz:
FLAC is the better format if you care about fidelity not mp3.

I still buy CDs and rip them to FLAC for better fidelity. It is audible to me, even in the car or on computer speakers. It is easily audible if I listen with good headphones and a headphone amp. mp3 files sound flat and lifeless. I do have old rips to mp3, and I am slowly replacing them with FLAC copies.

The files are bigger, but with cheap, large storage devices, it isn't really a problem.

I started doing this after trying iPods and iTunes when they first came out. iTunes was so bad it drove me away within months. Like Tonydec, it soured me on Apple in general.