Concern

Very tired, so I’ll have to keep this brief, if it’s to be comprehensible (and maybe not even then…).

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I recently bought a new turntable, which has a USB output in addition to the standard RCA jacks. I’ve been using it to convert my modest vinyl collection to AAC, and have bought new albums on vinyl instead of on CD whenever I can.

This is remarkably painless, and I’m even doing this only using free software. Audacity works nicely for editing tracks when it’s easiest to look at the waveform; gramofile works on OS X, and for some records, it does an admirable job of splitting tracks (though, on many it’s completely hopeless). The results are, mostly, rather good. You do get surface noise, and for some reason the turntable I bought starts getting really distorted, and it has to be powered down (unplugging the USB cable, too, of course). Some albums produce a lot of cracking, though, even on the first play out of the sleeve (I’m guessing this is static electricity, perhaps? Because vinyl records do build up quite the charge).

The other cool part is that a lot of labels will include either a full CD along with the album (Interpol’s Our Love to Admire does, and Squarepusher’s Hello Everything can be bought with both) or they include a coupon so you can download the entire album as MP3 (Interpol’s Antics and Neon Bible by The Arcade Fire — although the latter is 192Kbps MP3, not the 256Kbps my ears seem to like so much better, so I may go ahead and record it off vinyl anyway).

Most of the time I buy music on CD, partly because I find DRM and intellectual “property” rights an asinine topic, and partly because I can’t stand AAC files encoded at 128kbps (I’ll rip each CD at 256kbps). I bought a few songs on iTunes, and a few albums (I used to buy whole albums sometimes; now I just go a la carte if there’s one specific song I want, not necessarily caring about the freedom or quality), and always disliked the quality, and even bumped into DRM issues when just trying to use stuff I bought.

So, Apple’s new “iTunes Plus,” where songs are DRM-free AAC encoded at 256kbps, sounds like the perfect solution. It only took $30 to update the parts of my library that I could, and though it still hasn’t finished downloading all the songs (it is stuck on some Brian Eno songs, one of which is 56MB (!) — it looks like the ITS is under some heavy load at the moment), I have to say that I like it so far.

The higher bit-rate makes a difference. A big difference. It’s hard to elucidate how they differ, but the higher bit-rate sounds a lot better. I haven’t done any A/B comparisons yet, but I can’t see myself ever buying music at a low bit-rate again. Double the size be damned; disk space is plentiful and cheap.

I don’t have any practical use for DRM-free tracks (I still just use iTunes or my iPod), but it’s a nice feeling to know that none of that lunacy is present in those files, and that Apple trusts me as adult enough that I’m not going to go right out and send these files to thousands of people on the Internet.