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Report Claims 95% of Music Downloads Are Illegal
Un pobre guey writes "The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) press release claims that 95% of music file downloads in 2008, an estimated 40 billion files, were illegal. Oddly enough, digital music sales are up: 'The digital music business internationally saw a sixth year of expansion in 2008, growing by an estimated 25 per cent to US$3.7 billion in trade value. Digital platforms now account for around 20 per cent of recorded music sales, up from 15 per cent in 2007. Recorded music is at the forefront of the online and mobile revolution, generating more revenue in percentage terms through digital platforms than the newspaper (4%), magazine (1%) and film industries (4%) combined... Despite these developments, the music sector is still overshadowed by the huge amount of unlicensed music distributed online. Collating separate studies in 16 countries over a three-year period, IFPI estimates over 40 billion files were illegally file-shared in 2008, giving a piracy rate of around 95 per cent.'"
"You can't "break" an MP3 like a scratched CD." Unless you're running an unpatched Windows 7 beta. http://www.neowin.net/news/main/09/01/05/warning-windows-7-beta-could-corrupt-your-mp3s
Remember that the digital revenue increase is matched with a non-digital revenue decrease. That is, increased downloads come in part from people who used to buy CDs. So, total revenues are not up 25%.
Hey, what do you use to rip 'em?
What format do you output to?
I'm actually in the middle of ripping my entire 300+ CD collection which starts with CDs from about 20 years ago. And yes, some of them do 'rust', but this doesn't necessarily mean you can't get a good rip from them. The central factor is (command line tool) cdparanoia. I use two gui interfaces which use cdparanoia. Mostly, I use rubyripper. This uses cdparanoia with no error correction etc. - but it rips in chuncks two or more times and compares the results, and rerips (only the) bad chunks repeatedly. For 'good quality' CDs it rips much faster than any other reliable method. For about 1 cd in 50 with bad scratches or corrosion I use Grip, which by default uses cdparanoia in 'maximum paranoia mode'. This can be *a lot* slower than using rubyripper but it will rip any but the most damaged discs.
Woo! While typing this comment I've discovered my missing (genuine shop bought) copy of Marillion's "Script for a Jester's Tear" in the wrong CD case.
Anyhow, I've ripped about 200/300 now with complete sucess using the above.
You also asked what format to rip to. With current disc space prices, the *only* answer is lossless. FLAC is probably best, you can easily convert this to wav or any other format and it doesn't take much more space than good quality compressed. If you've got plenty of disc space, like I have, you might as well use uncompressed wav format - makes life simpler. My whole music collection uncompressed will fit in about 200Gb