Preferred Format for Music
 

Which do you prefer, Vinyl, CD's, Digital, or something else? And why...

I like Vinyl when I'm at home, but it certainly doesn't travel well. My turntable can rip to MP3, which I haven't tried with it yet, but I have tons of digital music for my iPod anyway.

In short, Vinyl>Digital>CDs

digital all the way.

i don't like vinyl. it sounds too soft and muffled to me, especially since a lot of the music i listen to started life as digital sounds anyway. cds sound good, but they're cumbersome, prone to scratches, and you can really only put on one at a time.

but with digital music, you can shuffle across hundreds of albums at once. and you can organize your collection in a thousand different ways. you can instantly find any track, artist, album, or whatever else you seek. you can rate tracks, embed (and search) lyrics, add comments... you can keep track of how many times you've listened to a song, and when you last heard it. you can analyze the sound volume of tracks, and apply non-destructive gain on a track level or on an album level.

and don't even get me started on playlists! a few clicks and i can queue up all tracks with the genre tag "electronic" and the style tag "trip hop" that have a rating of 4 or more stars. try that with vinyl!

plus, you can fit thousands of albums in the space of a few jewel cases. then you can dump a few hundred of them onto a pocket-sized player to take with you wherever you go.

it's really no contest...

I prefer CDs for my collection and for the physical artwork/package, which I can rip to digital format for everyday use.

If you mean which format I buy the most then its CDs, as I've never bought vinyl or straight mp3's.

If you mean which do I listen to the most, then it's digital since I rip all my CD's to flac. I do listen to the actual discs occasionally, so they'd be second. I haven't listened to vinyl, but I get more interested reading about it lately. Sounds fun.

digital all the way

I prefer a digital format because it makes traveling incredibly easy. I don't need to fumble around with CD's in the car or have to worry about them getting scratched or damaged. While .mp3's can become corrupted, they're easily replaceable. I also have to take into account the massive amount of space I save not having a CD rack. Having everything on an external hard drive makes transferring music over to other people a painless process (unless they're using a Mac in which case I have to reformat my HDD so the Mac can read it). While I do miss out on the album artwork, I feel the convenience that comes with the digital format far outweighs the negative aspects.

Collecting vinyl was fun for awhile, but I never really got the full enjoyment out of the process because my record player was a piece of shit, I had to tweak the stereo receiver just right for the sound, and the entire thing took up a lot of room. When I did get everything set up right the sound was quite impressive, but I'm not an audiophile so it only impressed me for a short while before the cons began to add up.

Wax cylinders. Call me a Luddite.

How about Luddy for short?

"You can call me Susan if it makes you happy."

Digital because the convenience factor. It takes up less space in my pocket and my room.