Slashdot Mirror
Alternative view of MP3s
A reader sent us an alternative viewpoint of the MP3 craze.
Although the writer likes MP3s for their ability to allow small artists to get their material out,
or to catch those last few B-sides, he still wants to collect actual physical media.
Caveat: My comments only apply to those whose musical tastes are relatively MP3-encoding-friendly, and for those who don't consider themselves audiophiles; that is, those for whom 128k is adequate for their needs, and to whom 160k is indistinguisable from the original. I believe my comments would also extend to most MP3-"unfriendly" music with a sufficiently high bit rate - try VBR, 160, or higher, until your ears don't notice.
The author writes that "there's something about looking at a big mass of music". I get the same feeling when I look at a hard drive full of MP3s - it's just as big a "mass" of music, just in a different form.
Ane yes, you can have the same feeling of "hunting down" MP3s as with other media. I find it odd that the author writes that one can build up a huge library "with a T1 and a healthy dose of spare time" (emphasis added), and then goes on to say in the next paragraph says that only collection of physical media offers the feeling of reward that comes with finding a long-sought item. If the "item" is the experience of being able to listen to the song at any time you like, it's not just a matter of downloading it. Someone else has to have it, rip it, encode it, and post it to USENET or an FTP/WWW site. If an FTP/WWW site, you've gotta find it, and then you've gotta get through to it to make the download. If USENET, you've gotta be reading the appropriate group at the right time, all the pieces have to propagate from the poster's server to yours, or you've gotta hope/pray/beg for a repost. In either case, music that's "rare" on physical media can often be every bi n MP3.
The author's snort of derision ("Oh, how impressive") at the notion of an 18G hard drive of MP3s strikes me as bizarre. I think what we have here is a culture clash. I'm a geek. I think small is cool, and the thought of having 18G of MP3-based music in the palm of one's hands as immensely attractive. Does the author snort just as derisively at a CD of music when the bulkier 78RPM vinyl format could have been used? (A hint - we call them "albums" because a collection of songs from a single artist in the days of "78s" was a hefty book of discs. Each "track" was roughly the mass of a 12" vinyl recording. I snort in derision at the notion of a CD as a tangible item :-)
How many of us have looked at our hard drives and remembered when floppies were king, pondering the question "how many rooms full of floppies are on that drive?", and marvelling at the answer? I think of it the same way - how many shelves of CDs can I fit in the palm of my hand?
As for permanence, I think the /. crowd needs little reminding that backing up an 18G hard drive (or transferring it to some other storage media when "hard drive" technology is replaced by something else) is far simpler than backing up a wall full of vinyl or CD. A safety deposit box in a bank costs as little as $20/year. A spare 18G hard drive, a little over $250 and falling. If you've got 18G of data, a monthly trip to the bank for offsite backup is the least of your worries.
Lastly, getting back to the notion of collecting as a hobby that requires effort - how long does it take to download 18G of data? And given the impermanence of FTP/web sites and USENET binary postings, how long would it take one to replace every track on those 18G worth of MP3s? About as long as it took to find the MP3s in the first place, assuming a random probability of any specific MP3 showing up in any given place. I dunno about you, but at the rate I've been accumulating MP3s, our author's hypothetical 18G collection would represent several years of work.
To recap - yes, if you're interested in "original" material and the ability to say that you have one of the 500 pressings of Foo's limited edition single, maybe an MP3 collection isn't for you. But if it's the music, not the packaging, that you collect, collecting MP3s can be a hobby that's every bit as rewarding as collecting physical media.