An observation about streamed music

In spite of the author’s preferred music streamer and his implied belief that Klipsch speakers are the audiophile’s choice speakers, a point about the fragility of non-physical media.

FWIW -

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the lifestyle collector tastefully pairing a record with a bottle of natural wine.

The best line of the entire article. I wonder what wine pairs well with Ornette Coleman.

Being old enough to have witnessed cassettes overtaking LPs and then CDs overtaking cassettes (and LPs) and then MP3s overtaking CDs and finally streaming overtaking all of them, my own personal approach has always been to hold onto physical and digital media (well except for cassettes, almost all mine were tossed years ago) since they provide a very good backup copy should streaming go belly up.

All my CDs were ripped into flac files years ago but I still have the discs. I got rid of those space hogging jewel cases so the discs and covers are in plastic sleeves. I also have all my three thousand LPs and even play them but only if I have the correct wine to pair them with. :grin:

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Not surprisingly, out of business.

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Digital download purchases are not physical media and are yours forever. That is in theory the most robust choice.

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Backup!! :slightly_smiling_face:

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Backup won’t help if the service you’ve been streaming either goes out of business (or some variation thereof) or no longer makes available a particular tune you like.

Agreed. Purchased downloads from either a streaming service or a strictly download service gives one the security of an owned local copy without the waste of physical media, i.e. CDs.

Vinyl is a completely different equation.

Perhaps

Night Train or Mad Dog, maybe?

Yes, sorry I meant this as a reply to Marian_T. regarding digital download purchases. Forgot to hit the reply button.
That is what I do as well in lieu of saving items from Qobuz or Tidal. I have Qobuz and have a few items saved there, but if I really want something I see, I track it down on Bandcamp or somewhere and buy it. My own digital library is my main source, culled from CDs and digital downloads. Works great in conjunction with Qobuz and Roon too. A giant seed table for Roon Radio it seems. And particularly giving Valence a lot to work with, truly my favorite feature of Roon.
So I agree with the OP and posted article. We should not be reliant on cloud services for our personal library. Even if they don’t go belly up, you may want to switch as I did from Tidal to Qobuz. And they may not be available 24/7.
So trust but verify. And backup up the wazoo! :smiley:

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I have reviewed my listening habits of late mostly to limit my screen time due to ailing neck and hands. My conclusion was I pay for uncapped internet and Tidal (and Netflix on the video side) why not use them to the full. To that end I migrated my core to a NUC with a 4Tb SSD.

I have put only my favourites on the drive , the rest stay on a HDD in a different computer, just in case.

I have split my library to minimise my “active” library . Anything old say old Nazareth I can find in Tidal for that nostalgic listen.

I did consider NO LOCAL files but I just couldn’t do it :sunglasses: maybe my new approach will turn into this.

The real proviso is that ant “obscure” albums can be got at by Tidal. If not the get voted into the Core library . Let’s see how long I keep this up.

PS the full Library still lives and is available via JRiver

Does it mean you actually sync the time of the record to emptying the bottle? :slight_smile: :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: