send this one out to the old school....

This is a massive few weeks for new releases: this coming Monday alone sees the release of both the New Daft Punk album, "Random Access Memories", and "Trouble Will Find Me" by the National.  Last Monday saw the release of Vampire Weekend's third album, "Modern Vampires of the City".  The schedules are packed with decent music just waiting to be released.

I don't know about you, but I always feel that this now produces something of a dilemma: CD or download?  Instinctively, I'm still the kind of person who likes to buy a physical copy and file it in the appropriate place on the shelves with my other CDs.  Some of my friends have got to the point where they've more or less sold or given away their entire collection of CDs, but I've got hundreds and hundreds of them and have no intention of getting rid of them any time soon.

That said, my consumption of music is now almost entirely digital.  Even when I have a physical copy, the very first thing that I will do with it is to rip it into iTunes and add it to my music library.  The CD itself may never actually get played before it gets put onto the shelf, and I will listen to the MP3 file either streamed to some speakers from my laptop or by using an iPod/iPhone.  I used to have a little wallet of CDs that I kept in the car, but these days it's just a simple cable and we're good to go with an iPhone wired directly into the car sound system.  That CD wallet is now kicking around inside the house somewhere, with the CDs still in it from the last time it was used.  Here it is..... Gorillaz, Rufus Wainwright, Snow Patrol, Arctic Monkeys, Beatles, Billy Joel, Kings of Leon, Killers, Editors, Moby, Radiohead.... so about 2005, I would say.  I've never even bothered to put the CDs back in their cases.

I suppose it's true that I quite like having a physical copy as backup.  I do buy and download music all the time, but I'm not quite at a place where I entirely feel comfortable putting my whole music collection into the cloud.  Some stuff, yes... and instant gratification is a marvellous thing, and back catalogue albums are often ridiculously cheap to download too (especially if you shop around).   But as I sat in front of Amazon the other day wondering if I should buy a CD or just pre-order the download of Monday's new releases, the price difference wasn't big enough to make me feel like I was wasting money on a physical copy.  So I bought the CDs.

Besides, I kind of like having them around.

It's only a few months since we put a new shelving system into my cave to allow me to put all my CDs and books and things in one place.  It had been stressing me out for months that, if I wanted to put my hand onto my copy of "Graceland", one of the many albums in my collection that I've never quite got around to ripping, then I didn't know immediately where it was.  Now I do, and when I last fancied listening to it, I pulled it down, ripped it, put it back on the shelf and then streamed the music from my laptop through my good speakers.  Job done.

Apple TV is slowly starting to change the way I consume films - I bought my first ever film in the cloud the other day, "Batman: the Dark Knight Returns part 1".  It sits on Apple's servers and can be downloaded onto any of my devices at any time, but I do not possess a physical copy.  At the moment, that's the exception rather than the rule in my collection, and it's a slightly odd feeling, but it is SOOOOOO convenient.  Storage is cheap, but I don't want a de-facto set of servers in my house and I'm more than happy to outsource that service to Apple or to Amazon to do it for me.  I've never really got into Spotify, but I imagine it's a similar sort of thing.

Ah, but I'm only renting content and who is to say that these companies can't strip it away from me at any time.  Well, let's not forget that I bought the original Star Wars trilogy about four times in different formats and in different versions.  Just because I owned it on VHS didn't stop me buying it again on DVD.... this isn't really so different to that, is it?  I suppose I could have held onto my VHS player, but I willingly upgraded to something else.

Anyway.  What do you do? Do you download everything or are you a (mostly) luddite like me?   Thinking about it, it's probably just as well that I never got into vinyl.  Can you imagine what my house would look like now?  Didn't John Peel's house need reinforcing to support the weight of all his music collection?  Well, maybe not quite that....

Incidentally, on the subject of my new shelves....

.....now that's what I call a proper bookshelf.  It's not a man cave without many virtually identical books  of cricket statistics (and some Shakespeare folios).

at your inconvenience....

I'm the kind of guy who still buys CDs.  We had a shelving unit built into the man cave a few weeks ago pretty much for the sole purpose of enabling me to put all my CDs in one place.  I still have a 160Gb "classic" iPod that I carry around with every single thing I've ever ripped still on it (bar the odd thing I deleted back in the days when I only had an 80Gb hard drive, if you can imagine that).

I see HMV is going to the wall.  It seems that people aren't buying CDs or DVDs on the high street anymore.  You'd imagine, as someone who still buys CDs and DVDs, that I might be slightly sad about this.  Not a bit of it.  I used to work for HMV, remember, and this day has been coming for a long time.

I worked there back in 1996/7, on the shop floor in York.  Even then, the world wide web was already a thing.  I built my own website as a student, for goodness sake, and very dull it was too.  But I built one.  I'd used usenet usegroups as an undergraduate around 1994, but a mere couple of years later the technology had already moved on in leaps and bounds.  HMV, it seemed to me, were completely uninterested.  Worse than that, they were entirely complacent; they thought they had it made and that people would always be buying their music from them.

Wrong.

By 1999, I think that HMV had finally pulled themselves together enough to have some kind of transactional website.... but they chose to use it to offer CDs and other products at their full catalogue prices: a CD that you might be able to buy instore for £11.99 was listed on their website at £17.99 or worse.  Given that Amazon was already up and running and selling pretty much exactly the same product for less than a tenner, that was insult pricing.  The result?  I slowly but surely stopped shopping at HMV and started shopping for my CDs and DVDs online.  HMV simply didn't deserve my business.

The iPod came along soon enough, and before long I was ripping my CDs into MP3s and wondering how we had ever managed without this marvellous device.  I was an early enough adopter that Apple hadn't yet built a version of iTunes for the PC, so it wasn't until a little later that I actually downloaded my first song.  "Vertigo" by U2 in 2004.  I've bought individual songs online fairly steadily since then, but until recently, call me old-fashioned, but I've largely continued to buy the physical album.

I bought an Apple TV at the weekend, and it made me realise that my whole approach to the consumption of media is changing really quickly.  C. travels a lot, so I bought her an iPad mini for Christmas: it's small enough to slip easily into her bag, and I thought it would be a nice way of allowing her to fill those empty hours in airport and hotels by watching those TV programmes she's never got round to.  She's long wanted to watch "Mad Men", so I thought I'd buy season 1 and load it onto her iPad before giving it to her.  I nearly bought the DVD boxset, but then the thought of having to rip it and load it made me realise that just downloading it from the Apple Store would be so much easier would cost me only a little over a tenner.  So I did that.  It was the first TV programme that I have paid to own purely in digital form.

It was all incredibly easy, but it does take up a lot of space.... the season of a dozen episodes in HD sucks up the best part of 20Gb.  I've been toying with the idea of the Complete West Wing, but at around 150 episodes, I just don't have the storage space.  My current hard drive is 320GB.  I need a new laptop, but even then the storage space is only likely to be 712Gb.  Big, but hardly massive.... I've tried running iTunes on a separate drive, but it was a faff and it didn't work as well. The next generation of laptops, incidentally, don't even bother with a built-in optical drive.  Get the hint, right?

Apple know all this, of course.  So you know what they've done?  They've changed the Apple Store so that anything you have bought from them will be stored online and you can download it to your devices as and when you want them (Amazon store your purchases online too and allow you to stream and download as required).  This means that instead of keeping all those episodes of the West Wing on my hard drive, I could store them online and download them to my individual devices as I wanted to watch them.  With an Apple TV, that would also mean I could stream them in full 1080HD down to the TV in my front room instantly.  How cool is that?  More importantly, how convenient is that?

The only drawback, of course, is that I will have sacrificed control of the media I own for that convenience.  If Apple or the studio decide to change or withdraw that content, as I don't have copies of my own, there's very little I can do about it.  You know what.... I think I'm coming round to a point where I'm comfortable with that and where that's a trade-off I might just be prepared to make.   The convenience is king (and it was actually C's idea to get the Apple TV as she liked the idea of watching those Mad Men episodes on the bigger screen from time-to-time too, not to mention the film rentals.  It was only £99, but of course, it sucks you into buying your content exclusively through Apple).

So where does this leave HMV?  They're screwed.  I don't feel any pity for them as they have failed to adapt and they have long since played their customers for fools.  They're not the first business to collapse in this new world, and they sure won't be the last.  As I was watching my first film rented in full HD on my Apple TV the other day, it occurred to me that, in a world where you can stream and watch full series almost the moment they are broadcast, you can rent films instantly as soon as they come out and where you can even watch TV programmes on demand through your internet connected telly... how long before providers like Sky and Virgin start to feel the pinch too?  Why would I subscribe to Sky Atlantic if I can download the shows I want to watch for a couple of quid a time and watch them on any or all of my devices?  Goodness knows why I would bother walking over to Blockbuster to rent a film.....

Apple are rumoured to be about to launch a television of their own, and I imagine once they do so, Panasonic, Samsung, LG and all the other manufacturers will be crapping their pants and even more people will find themselves tied into a world where Apple are providing their hardware, software and all of the media that they consume on it.  I'm not sure I'm entirely comfortable with that, but as a relatively long-term user of Apple products, I can't deny that they are easy to use, convenient and increasingly the way that I turn when I want to be entertained because time is precious (although, to be fair, I don't brainlessly buy music from Apple: I price check with Amazon, too... and if I could, I'd buy directly from the artists themselves, as I did with Martin Rossiter's last album).

I still buy physical copies of some CDs and DVDs, but for how much longer?

(Incidentally.... I understand how a wifi enabled device connected to my Apple Store ID is able to buy and download movies and things, but how on earth can it also access my iTunes library on my laptop and let me use my iPad as a remote control?  That's witchcraft, that is.  Cool magic... but definitely black magic.)

hi fidelity can you hear me?

One of the consequences of shuffling things around in my man room is that I have finally set up my iTunes library so that it can be listened to through my best stereo. Like most people, getting an iPod back in the day was a tremendously liberating experience: suddenly I could carry a huge swathe of my record collection with me at all times. Now, if I wanted to listen to 2ManyDJs on a flight back from Australia or Scott III whilst sat at my desk at work, both albums were only ever a few clicks away. Brilliant. It was an innovation that really opened up the depths of my record collection, and the little CD wallet I used to carry around everywhere has quietly remained untouched since I got a connection that made my iPod work in the car -- with the CDs it contained still filed within, Billy Joel's Greatest Hits and all.

I quickly ripped a hefty chunk of my CDs and put them back on the shelf, where many of them have remained untouched ever since. I discovered a while ago that my CD copy of "By The Way", long kept in my car, was scratched beyond any hope of ever being played again. Given that I almost never play CDs now, it hardly seemed to matter. I had the album on my iPod and on my computer. Why would I ever need the CD again? And even if I did, I could just burn myself another copy. I still buy CDs, but now I rip them and most often never play the actual disc ever again.

Needless to say, this has led a lot of people to look at their CD collections and wonder why the hell they bother keeping them: why not free up the space and perhaps make a few quid by selling the CDs on? I've never been tempted. I have CDs lying all over the house, but just as I like books as tangible things and can't be doing with the idea of a Kindle, I have no desire to shift over to a record collection that sits exclusively online. I back my computer up every day, but the CDs are something of a fail-safe fallback, aren't they? (Rather stupidly, I also don't really like the way that downloaded albums tend to clog up my "recently purchased" playlist, much preferring them to disappear neatly into my artist and album filing on iTunes.)

Real audiophiles talk about how the compressed MP3 is markedly inferior in quality to physical storage formats like CDs and records. Until recently, I wouldn't say that I'd ever really noticed the difference: after all, I do most of my listening to my iPod through a pair of headphones, through my car stereo when I'm driving or on a little portable speaker dock thing that I carry around the house. Since connecting up my decent stereo to iTunes though, I've suddenly realised what they're talking about.

My decent stereo system consists of an Arcam Alpha 3 amplifier, a decent Rotel CD player and some Infinity bookshelf speakers. I say "decent", but in reality it was only a decent entry level separates system when I bought it back in about 1991 and I have no idea how it stacks up in terms of audio performance now. Two things were for certain though - it was better than any of the other stereos I was using and it was totally wasted hidden in the spare bedroom behind the futon. As I rearranged that room to become my man room, that stereo - with some new speaker cable - was suddenly centre stage and the connection to iTunes via airtunes means I am now listening to it all the time.

In the main, the streamed music sounds great, but out of idle curiosity, and a desire to hear how good the CD player still sounded, I did a side-by-side comparison of a song played through the amp/speaker: one streamed via iTunes, the other played directly via the CD player. As it was LB's idea, the song I chose was "Atlantic" by Keane, and the difference was immediately clear.... the CD version was louder, richer and warmer sounding than the MP3 equivalent. At a stroke, I realised the compromise inherent in the MP3 format and the impact if makes on the quality of the music we listen to. Not such a big deal through headphones or a crappy speaker dock, but as clear as a bell on a decent sound system. I'm hardly an audiophile, but the difference really is striking, even to my heavy-metal damaged ears. I realise that you can increase the quality of the files that you rip, but the trade-off is that they take up loads more space. If you want to carry huge numbers of files around, as I do, then you compromise the sound quality. I knew that before I did the test, I just hadn't appreciated how big a compromise that is.

I was never going to be selling my library of CDs, and I'm still going to mainly be listening to my iTunes library through those speakers simply because it is so convenient. What this discovery has done though is to make me even more reluctant to purchase whole albums electronically through the internet. Why would I? It's more convenient, but it's often no cheaper (the Air CDs that I bought on Play.com yesterday evening were £4.99 each and £7.99 to download from iTunes). It's not that I won't continue to buy or to listen to MP3s, it's just that I don't like the idea that I'm now knowingly buying something of an inferior quality and, without the CD, will have no recourse to a better quality sound should I want it.

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Incidentally, I am having some annoying intermittent drop-out problems with this airtunes set up, where a song will be happily playing, cut out for a few seconds and then come back. I thought this was related to the old stereo connection cable I was using between the amplifier and the airport, but I replaced that and I'm still hearing the problem every so often. I'm not having the problem with my other 2 (newer) airports hooked onto my network, but this one (running v6.3 of the firmware) is the only one that cuts out, even if for a few seconds every hour or so. It could be the amplifier, I guess, but I've heard that airtunes can have these problems. If anyone's got any bright ideas about what I can do to fix this, then I'm all ears.....

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... yeah, that's the way.  New URL, new start.... let's really wow'em with the first post proper, eh? Something cool, yet accessible.  Subtle, but witty and erudite.  Above all, something not in the least bit geeky.

...oh. Bugger it.

sheesh.