A (hopeful) beginner's guide to downloading

[David-G]

Sorry to be so simple-minded, but ... What exactly is a tag? What are they used for, and how? How does one create tags? Are they necessary?

[Beef Oven!]

Yes, an excellent point. We will no longer own things - just be permitted to use them under very restricted conditions. What was that about 'freedom & democracy' & consumer choice?

Not true. We own our iPods, Laptops, MP3 players, but not the the music - just like we owned vinyl LPs, cassetes, CDs, but not the music. plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose!

[Frances_iom]

... just like we owned vinyl LPs, cassetes, CDs, but not the music. ...

which we could loan, give to others etc - not with digital drm'd material

[Frances_iom]

Sorry to be so simple-minded, but ... What exactly is a tag? What are they used for, and how? How does one create tags? Are they necessary?

the usual answer can be put LMGIFY tho you may prefer Bing
in a nutshell embedded metadata within a MP3 (or other system) describing + naming the music being played - distinct from the name of the digital file containg said MP3 music along with its metadata

[Don Petter]

Sorry to be so simple-minded, but ... What exactly is a tag? What are they used for, and how? How does one create tags? Are they necessary?

Tags are used in such storage/retrieval libraries such as iTunes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID3

They can store such items as 'title', 'artist', 'album' etc. Originally conceived for popular music, they do not immediately allow for such classical requirements as conductor and orchestra. Users have to use some personal system (such as deciding whether soloist or conductor should go in the 'artist' tag). Downloaded items, even if the tags are pre-filled, are unlikely to match the required system, so tag editing software must be used to make the required alterations.

If this is not done in some consistent way, retrieval of items from iTunes for playing may become difficult.

Tags are not needed if files are just stored on a PC for playback using software such as Windows Media Player or Winamp. Just put the files in meaningful folders and create playlists to combine groups such as individual movements (or whole 'recitals') in the right order. Similarly, CDRs can easily be burned from these files, again without using tags at all.

[jayne lee wilson]

Very enthusiastic for downloads for a few years, largely due to the attractions of hi-res i.e. 24/96/48/44.1 etc. Find it hard to understand why classical music lovers who happily bought CDs for years accepted a downgrade to MP3... hate them, lowest I tolerate is 320kbps AAC mainly used for streaming as per Radio 3. Went back to CD-only purchases after a DAC upgrade and I don't fancy the task of transferring 1000s of discs to drives anyway...

But hi-res doesn't always sound significantly different, those available won't always be what you want, and with lossless you've either got the CD or might as well buy the physical format (although lossless files can be cheaper) - unless space and storage are a factor, still the best reason for using files instead of discs. For storage/playback I use XBMC, but jriver is probably better still. Lots of choice!

I always smile when someone like AVI talk about "legacy CD" as if trying very hard to make it seem oldfashioned. No it ain't dead and not going away soon - but more specialist classical labels and repertoire will probably become more of a niche. You may have to buy CDs to order (as per Pristine). The best indies like BIS, Hyperion, Chandos etc always offer both the disc and the file so just buy what you're comfortable with - what gives you the most musical pleasure.

Best sites: eclassical (run by BIS - vast selection of labels, vg value) The Classical Shop (Chandos, vast selection again, not quite so cheap). DaCapo are excellent but only roll their own, HDTracks are nominally USA-only, HiResAudio tend to offer the same as Linn's own (rather expensive) service. With TCS and eclassical, you'll always be offered the booklet/cover art for free if available... Pristine Audio are excellent too, but offer only their own very good-sounding transfers of historical recordings from the early 60s back. A great site for finding out about downloads, both the formats and the how-to. (A shame though, that you have to buy the whole album there - you can't select just the piece you want, which should be a point in favour of buying files).

[teamsaint]

I think you have missed the key point - Richard Stallman had it corect over 20 years ago when he argued that we would have to pay every time we read anything - that is the key behind downloads, very easy to add DRM (and in case of Amazon even take back ebooks you have bought) - in reality all you are actually buying in download is a licence to replay the music in a specific way - admittedly Apple have found it convenient to remove the DRM that enforces this but instead forces you to buy via the iTunes store thus taking their cut from the licence price but note that DRM is probably about to be built into all new web browsers under an extension to HTML5.
The owners of the now obscenely extended copyrights have lobbied hard to have the enforcement of what was civil infringement made into a criminal offence and thus the public pay for any prosecution (our boy David is a key supporter of this and has added along with other free speech restrictions such necessary measures to the supposedly antiPorn filters that ISPs must provide - just go read the small print thereof and it includes much much more than antiPorn) - so much so that the City of London police used to take down websites until one small ISP went to court, merely on the say so of Hollywood) - welcome to the US of England in bed both with NSA and Hollywood

I'm sure you have it spot on here, F_IOM.

The BBC is obsessed with DRM too. Even digital radio is potentially a target, so that as you suggest, we could end up paying every time we watch or listen.And that is at best.
The control issues are scary too. What happens when your online local library is inaccessible, for instance?
We need to be aware of what is going on.
We should treat our access to physical media with great care.


All of which is a bit off topic. personally, I'm leaving downloading (especially of classical,) till some clever bod has sorted an easy method of organising the music, for when it is the only alternative, and until its the only option left..
My advice. Buy a sandisc clip for music on the move, £30 and easy as you like to use.

[Gordon]

Yes, an excellent point. We will no longer own things - just be permitted to use them under very restricted conditions. What was that about 'freedom & democracy' & consumer choice?

That is how the business model for software works.

What about the creative artist's rights to be rewarded for his/her efforts? DRM is about protecting those but unfortunately, as often happens, this is hi-jacked by commerce and the artist is ripped off - so what is new in this world? Up to a point that is fair enough provided there is open competition without cartels. We pay for a ticket every time we go to a live concert, why not pay every time we play a track? Nowadays the web has made people believe that everything should be free.

[DublinJimbo]

For me, the biggest surprise in this thread so far is the post by Jayne Lee Wilson. I had long thought of JLW as a firm advocate for downloading, and am surprised to learn that she has switched track on the road back from Damascus.

Me? I'm delighted that I've moved almost exclusively to downloads. Sites I visit most often are eClassical and Qobuz. Hyperion is head and shoulders above most of the own-label sites, though I also regularly check Dacapo, Analekta, Atma Classique and Çedille for new releases. Linn gets the occasional nod, but suffers because of its high pricing. I wish I liked The Classical Shop more, since Chandos, the label which it was set up to serve, produces such fine recordings, but the site is clunky and unsightly, the download procedure is ungainly, their booklets almost always require re-formatting by the end-user, and their tagging is often quite bad.

I hardly ever download from the iTunes Store because only compressed audio files are available and I have set my personal bar at CD-quality as a minimum standard. However, I use iTunes itself exclusively for music management. It copes faultlessly with my collection of over 40,000 files (3000 'albums'). Playback from iTunes is via the excellent BitPerfect software add-on, through an external DAC to my hi-fi system. My music files are accessed wirelessly, and are stored on a two-terabyte hard drive dedicated to the purpose.

The principal advantage of downloads in my experience is the ease of retrieval of whatever music I wish to listen to. I no longer need to conjure up images of CD covers to recall what it is coupled with or where it is placed on a shelf. All I do is search in iTunes to go straight to what I want. It does not matter how the background files are named or what folder structure they're stored in: all that matters is that my tagging within iTunes is absolutely consistent, and this is achieved by editing tags as soon as each download is brought in to iTunes. I agree with others here that consistent tagging is absolutely vital once having taken the download route, but it becomes less of a chore when it is done at the outset as a matter of course.

I haven't completely eschewed physical CDs. There are still situations where the download alternative is not appropriate (for vocal music, for instance, when the download does not include a booklet; or if the CD release includes extras which are not available to download — a bonus DVD, for example), but my music buying for the past several years has been well over 90% downloads and I have absolutely no regrets. I have some 2500 CDs in my collection in addition to my accumulated downloads. Rather than tackle the enormous task of producing digital files from these by a process of working through them all one by one, I only burn a CD when I have taken it down from the shelf to listen to it. Again, I use iTunes to create the files, using the Gracenote tags as a starting point from which I edit them in line with my own preferences. Adopting this piecemeal approach makes the process much less of a chore. The CD pile of already-ripped material is only gradually increasing in numbers, and I doubt if I will ever transfer everything over, but I'm not at all concerned about that.

Sorry for the length of this post. Now that JLW has moved back to the physical-CD camp, I feel rather lonely in my commitment to downloading, but I hope I've managed to explain why I have chosen this route and why I am happy to have done so.

[Frances_iom]

That is how the business model for software works.

theorectically - in practice monopolies arise like Microsoft who abuse their position effectively killing off a market for user modifiable software - free + open source software such as Linux can make money by the support packages but still offer the possibility of user modification - MS uses their monopoly to force buggy systems such as Vista and unwanted innovations such as win8 onto the marketplace (and their behaviour on supposedly neutral stanadrds committees is appalling - they bought delegates to force Word to be accepted as an ISO standard ) - interestingly Linux dominates in servers, is the basis of Android which dominates the smartphone + tablet market.
Do you pay an author every time you read a book - for how many years post appearance of text should such payments continue ?

[Flosshilde]

That is how the business model for software works.

What does 'business model' mean? who has decided that that's how it works? The people who create the software, of course - there isn't some divine law that says that's how it has to work.

What about the creative artist's rights to be rewarded for his/her efforts?

That's what copyright legislation is for.

Nowadays the web has made people believe that everything should be free.

Quite - & downloading has played a large part in that.

[Gordon]

theorectically - in practice monopolies arise like Microsoft who abuse their position effectively killing off a market for user modifiable software - free + open source software such as Linux can make money by the support packages but still offer the possibility of user modification - MS uses their monopoly to force buggy systems such as Vista and unwanted innovations such as win8 onto the marketplace (and their behaviour on supposedly neutral standards committees is appalling - they bought delegates to force Word to be accepted as an ISO standard ) - interestingly Linux dominates in servers, is the basis of Android which dominates the smartphone + tablet market.
Do you pay an author every time you read a book - for how many years post appearance of text should such payments continue ?

I don't disagree re Microsoft at al, but the model still applies even if it is abused by the market practices of dominant players - so what is new - Sony tried to be a bully boy in the professional video business some years ago but didn't quite make it because of real timely competition from Panasonic - but how did they get there? The free market is supposed to work through competition so why hasn't someone done it better than Microsoft and shown them the error of their ways? We all know that the most commercially successful technology isn't necessarily the best. It's the way the world works.

The book model was long established, well before [like centuries, if you ignore the cost of a scribe for dedicated hand made copies but then did the author get his cut?] other more modern models with technology support. The Kindle could of course change all that by having an auto-delete after a time or so many reads. The 78 and LP record etc was the same as the book - buy it for life and so the reward model accommodated it, rather in favour of the record companies of course. The introduction of digital media broke that mould and so one can't compare anachronistic methods of reward. The "digital revolution" is not just technical.

Getting back to topic, for all the apparent "value" of downloads I still find it rather sterile and remote, possibly because the music is hidden away in a file, and does not replace the tangible nature of a physical object and its packaging. Perhaps that's my long experience of collecting recorded music on a physical carrier. I also find myself in agreement with JLW in #21 [for once!!] about downloads.

[Gordon]

What does 'business model' mean? who has decided that that's how it works? The people who create the software, of course - there isn't some divine law that says that's how it has to work.

How else is it supposed to work? Isn't that how the commercial world in general works? Someone has a product that they have invested time and money in and other people buy it if the price is right. If there is a better one they'll buy that instead. The "divine" bit is: whoever invests expects a return - that's capitalism. A state monopoly for example just sends the reward elsewhere and it has different objectives anyway which may well be one size fits all but actually fits no-one. The main objective of any commercial firm is to run everyone else off the business and have a monopoly - it's up to those others to survive by preventing them.

[Word]

Word to be accepted as an ISO standard

And so I should be .

interestingly Linux dominates in servers, is the basis of Android which dominates the smartphone + tablet market.

Lies, damn lies and Wikipedia.

It looks as if Linux is actually the third most widely used server OS (for web servers at least), behind various flavours of ‘proper’ UNIX and Windows Server, though it's very close with roughly a third each. That’s not to say that Linux isn’t a good choice for servers, and embedded devices too, (it’s just a poor choice on the desktop if you could be using a Mac running OS X instead).
If, on the other hand, you’re operating one of the world's top 500 supercomputers then the chances are you’ll be using a custom version of Linux.

Android, though, is just a (third-rate) collection of APIs with a (second-rate) Java VM. It’s usually run on top of a Linux kernel but can and has been run on other OSes such as Windows.
It’s telling that though Android is shipped on around 80% of smartphones these days (thanks to Google being desperate to continue monitoring and tracking individuals’ on-line activity by employing business practices arguably sharper than anything Microsoft managed) on-line usage of those devices still lags behind iOS.

[Beef Oven!]

which we could loan, give to others etc - not with digital drm'd material

You can loan and give to others, but it's very inconvenient!