I do not own any physical copies of any music, and that kind of really irks me.
Yeah, because
consumer rights have no downloadable alternative. Playing music from the cloud disservice also mean that the music you supposedly paid for can be taken away or quietly modified/censored at any time, and playback control
can be actively hijacked to manipulate you; all with little-to-no recourse as a consumer. And with the way copyright laws are written, even "buying" music files you play locally won't earn you half of legal rights you'd get by default with physical media.
So I only pay for music
in physical media for legal reasons (more on that below), and the format I'd personally recommend doing this in is
CD.
You asked why, right?
Beause audio CD is uncompressed
lossless 44.1 kHz 16-bit stereo
digital audio, with no
Digital Restriction Management handcuffs attached:
- As digital media, audio quality is perfect (1), no degradation between each playback, instant seek, can be live-shuffled, longevity is great; and with correct software, you can have bit-perfect copy (2) whenever you feel like to, format-shifted to any device you prefer.
- As physical media, you have full consumer rights (transferable lifetime copyright license, fair dealing, and resale rights) without having to be coerced to accept abusive EULA, or rely on any dystopian computing device/software to play them. Physical media cannot be taken away from you once you bought it (3); and you can fully keep your privacy by buying it in cash like I do.
With both digital capabilities and "analog" consumer rights in the same product;
you have the best of both worlds with CD.
(Of course, you can also make your
mixtape mixdisc too: CD-R and CD-RW exist, and there are neither quality loss nor 1x dubbing speed limitation when creating such mixdiscs
(4). And if 80 minutes wasn't enough for your play-all-night clubmix/carmix, you can compromise a bit on quality by
making that an MP3 CD, and it's good to go)
But as someone who have uses cassettes as a kid, I would like to say something about cassette tape here:
Cassette is an audio recording format simple enough for one to be able to assemble or repair their players/recorders by hand using scrap electronics/electromagnetic parts, and the medium is low-density enough to be
visually inspected and edited (cut/spliced) physically.
With these, I consider cassette as an "apocalypse ready" audio format. Not something I would want to use everyday, and especially not as a "master copy" of music I pay money for; but as a format which its player allows electronics tinkering and experimenting curiosities
(5), and for it to be there "just in case".
(1) Ignore those 96-kHz/24-bit salesmen, because
no one hear any difference; the 44.1-kHz/16-bit PCM quality already covers beyond the limit of human hearing, it is truly enough for every consumers.
(2) People on path of the Free would be familiar with Xiph.org's
CD Paranoia; while people living under the regime of proprietary overlord might have heard of
Exact Audio Copy.
(3) Take that, streaming disservices.
(4) Unless you did that by using S/PDIF streaming to a professional CD recorder. (You probably don't have
such professional machine at hand anyway, do you?)
(5) I wouldn't do the same with CD players/boomboxes I have, tampering with equipment parts which required optical precision isn't my forte.
Posts & Arts: 42/1k.beats
Thank you for today! 
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