If I had been buying and saving LP’s and CD’s over the past 60+ years, I would certainly keep them and listen to them every day. Of course, I would have ripped them and stored the hard copies away somewhere. Tidal and/or Qobuz would be used as “filler” and I would purchase music that I really liked.
Never having bought any LP’s or CD’s since I was about 18 years old, and my brothers somehow disposing of what I had, streaming is the logical option for me now. It’s all good. Do what works for you.
Yes local music is relevant, but to a much smaller degree.
Certain albums are not available on streaming services.
Certain albums keep disappearing from streaming services due to licensing changes.
Streaming services carry painfully awful sounding “remastered” versions of certain albums. Case in point “Rage Against The Machine” by “Rage Against The Machine”.
In case of a rare extended internet outage it’s nice to have favorite music to listen to.
Very relevant to me and many others.
All the reasons you mentioned above got me buying more physical and downloads again
Might be less relevant to younger people and those without libraries
Now I’m curious. I always thought you were about my age, mid 60s. But you say you haven’t bought LPs or CDs since you were 18. And you’re such a music lover yet many of those years there were no other options i.e. no streaming services. Were you just listening to the radio? Or?
Pretty much just the radio in my car. I was always making music as a drummer with various bands and orchestras, etc. I was more into other things such as flying airplanes and drag racing and my job.
I have never seriously compared AIFF and FLAC. I gravitated to AIFFs, being (mostly) very happy in the Apple environment. If I still used Windows I’m pretty sure I’d be using FLAC. I put much more time and listening to determine the sampling and bit rate to use. These septuagenarian ears usually don’t hear any significant difference when moving up to 96k so I settled on 48/24. I still have a few old 192/16 files from the first days of iPod and boy do they sound thin and attenuated.
As someone who does about half of his listening while out of the house and in places where I can’t guarantee a suitable network connection (and I do not consider my mobile data connection to be “suitable” except in a short term emergency situation(*) because I have a monthly data cap that is adequate for my current needs but that streaming would soon chew through). In those situations I need to play locally stored music.
In theory problem for streamers, I think pretty much every streaming client allows local downloads, but the problem for me is that I never know what I really want to hear from one hour to the next and I don’t want to end up sitting in my streaming app downloading 50 or 100 albums prior to going away on a trip in an attempt to second guess myself and even then very probably discovering that what I want to listen to next is not amongst the albums that I downloaded. My solution is to keep a copy of all my purchased lossless files (either downloaded from the Qobuz download store or riped from my old CDs) in AAC format on my iPhone so that they are always with me.
I haven’t found any streaming client that conveniently allows a collection of 1,000 or so favourite albums to be downloaded in a single click and in any reasonable amount of time(**) so for now the only solution I see that meets my requirements is locally stored master (lossless) files with tools on my PC to bulk convert and then maintain my shadow AAC copies and a tool (in my case iTunes) to sync those shadow AAC files to my phone.
My setup isn’t quite as streamlined and seamless as I make out. At any given time there are albums that are new to me, often discovered via by Roon Radio, that I am still deciding whether I like enough to buy them as a download or not. Those albums do sit in my Roon library as Qobuz favourites alongside my locally stored files and there, at least for the albums that I think are very likely to make titles to a purchase, I do go into the Qobuz app and download them for offline listening.
(*) I can imagine some people rolling their eyes at my characterisation of wanting to listen to a certain piece of music and not having it on my phone as an “emergency situation”. My characterisation was tongue in cheek.
(**) Even Roon ARC doesn’t have a convenient download-everything button yet and also maintaining two versions of every file in the main Roon library is messy when viewed from Roon ARC album browser (it shows 2 copies of every album) but I hear that the current early access release of Roon ARC has better bulk download capabilities and that the ability to dynamically compress downloads should come in Q1 next year so soon I hope to be able to do all of what I want entirely within the Roon ecosystem.
I have almost all of my own digital music once as AAC on a 2007 160 GB iPod Classic, which still (still!) works; and once in lossless quality on an Onkyo DAP, on two microSD cards. So I’m well provided for when I’m on the move.
But since I buy less and less and stream more and more, I see it similarly to you. Unfortunately, when it comes to downloading streaming titles, nothing currently works for me without the Qobuz app, as I can only download my own albums or titles with Roon ARC. However, I don’t like the Qobuz app very much for downloading, because you always have to monitor the downloads / keep the app in the foreground.
