e-Everything
Tuesday, March 24th, 2009When the MP3 revolution came, I was skeptical about it at first. I was like, no I don’t really want to have all my music on a hard drive. What if the hard drive ceases to function? Then I lose all my music. This actually happened to me and I lost a lot of music I was not able to get back. Now this was before iTunes, before anything was available to be purchased on mp3. So what was done? You either bought the CD and then ripped the music to mp3s on your computer, or you just straight up pirated the music from Napster or anything else that was around at the time (Most of them obsolete now). I was somewhere between the two. I bought a lot of CD’s, but then I also downloaded a lot of music as well. Then a year later I lost all my MP3s in a hard disk crash. I was able to replace only the songs that I had on CD. From that point on, any music I really liked, I bought it on CD. Hard copy. Something that is permanent.
There is a lesson to be learned here. Now, if I lose all my music, I can just re-rip all of my CDs to AAC (the successor of MP3, fact, not Apple propaganda), and since I’ve bought a lot of music off of iTunes, I can redownload the songs I’ve lost, at no cost. Wait a minute. I have to download them, from who? From Apple. What if I no longer have an Internet connection? What if Apple goes out of business? What if the MafiAA forces Apple to shut iTunes down? That last one no where near as far-fetched as it sounds and actually has come REALLY close to happening. If any of those things happen, you cannot retrieve your music. Worse though, it is not music you downloaded for free, it is music you paid good money for.
So what’s the solution? You could burn the music you bought from iTunes to a CD-R, right? Well, CD-Rs aren’t like pressed CDs where the digital information is etched into metal. The data is imprinted on a film of dye on the back of the CD-R. This is significantly less permanent than a CD, and it has been proven that CD-Rs will not stand the test of time. It is even questionable if pressed CDs and DVDs will.