I wish I could use my physical CD collection as a "pass" to download high quality rips so I can skip the part where I have to do the labor of ripping them myself.
For musicians who are on Bandcamp you can buy a CD and get a FLAC download. (Ofc there's no telling what happens to your access when Bandcamp folds, so that sort of defeats the point.)
I use this[1] for making sure I have everything I've purchased from Bandcamp downloaded to my NAS. Even made a bash alias to wrap it so I just type `bandcamp` after I've purchased something and it downloads and sorts it immediately.
Well, if you're afraid of Bandcamp folding, you'd better download the FLACs right now. That's the advantage when you compare it to MoviesAnywhere - there's no way to get a DRM-free downloadable version of the video material you bought...
Don't (just) be afraid of Bandcamp folding - be afraid of artists folding. Some years ago I purchased a few tracks by an artist on Bandcamp, downloaded them as Ogg Vorbis - and now, almost ten years later, I wanted to re-download them as FLAC for archival, but the artist has completely shut down their Bandcamp page. It's a bit of an extraordinary case but serves as a good reminder to download in the highest-possible quality at the earliest possible point in time. It doesn't help that it was a really niche artist and there are no warez copies of his tracks, at least not in the open web.
> Don't (just) be afraid of Bandcamp folding - be afraid of artists folding.
I've recently come across that problem at least twice – I learned about a potentially interesting album done by somebody, but it had already disappeared from Bandcamp without so much of trace. In one case it turned out I had missed the album by only two months, because the album page still appeared in Google's search index cache with a corresponding last indexed-date, but of course that's not much use as far as getting the actual music is concerned.
Is the Wayback Machine even able to save the preview streams? Trying it for some other artists that are still live on Bandcamp this doesn't seem to be the case, and in any case it certainly wasn't the case for the particular album I was looking for.
Ultimately, unlike the OP I luckily found at least the one album I was most interested in "elsewhere", though it's still a bit of a shame that it's no longer regularly available and it'd absolutely would have merited paying for it.
I have a similar story, about a band that apparently only ever appeared live as an opening act for another pretty niche band called Texas (they had a few hits in the nineties) five years ago and has since been inactive - https://www.facebook.com/hightre. I liked them and fortunately bought a CD at the souvenir stand at the end of the concert - to my knowledge the music is not available anywhere else, in any form...
It was by a guy called Dombrovski. I started digging, trying to see if I can track him down in other ways and ask him for a copy, but then I wish I hadn't done that because I dug up quite some dirt... (seems like he was sort of a con man, his website dombrovski.com now just redirects to a court case, which makes me think that his domain was seized and maybe also his other sources of income such as his bandcamp account)
In reality the IP owners wish you'd pay for each version separately and they've implemented that version of reality pretty much across the board. Once the last CD dies out, that's it.
That would be awesome. I know some indie bands do that (buy our CD, get free downloads) but it would be better to see an industry effort, the same way we have MoviesAnywhere for films on disc
I have my Dad's record collection. A digital jukebox that has all the record covers - and plays the right version and track listing when you pick an album, would be just fantastic.
Just try to get ahold of Rust in Peace today. The rerecorded album by Dave's Megadeth cover band sounds terrible, and the original is out of print and not available from any of the legal streaming platforms. I'm considering stocking up on original CDs and pressings, and storing them in different locations. I'm not even joking.
If you really want the right version and track listing, you'll have to preserve it yourself.
Columbia Records managed to mess up a number of live albums while uploading them for digital distribution by leaving out the transitions between the individual tracks.
In each instance I've come across this problem (mainly various Bob Dylan albums so far), it turned out that on the actual CDs, the affected portion had been mastered as part of the pre-gap (i.e. the bit where a hardware CD player will show a negative timecode counting back up to 00:00), so as silly as it sounds, it almost feels like they themselves simply ripped the CDs in order to upload them for digital downloads and streaming, and somehow managed to mess up the process and discard the pre-gap bits.
Though unlike your example at least in that case the CDs are still in print, so for now you're not completely stuck there…
why do you feel that sounds silly, as it sounds exactly like what I would expect them to have done. it was probably some intern tasked with the job as well. it's not like they were going to go back to some mastering format to have the streaming files created for the entirety of the back catalog.
When I was in middle school, Tanqueray had a spokesman named “Tony Sinclair.” I loved every commercial he was in, they were so fun and the background music was amazing.
Anyhoo, the official site had all the songs (5) for download so I forged my age to access the mp3s and I still listen to them, to this day.
I just wish I knew more about music formats back then, I have no idea if there were FLAC versions available. My annual pleas to the Tanqueray and Music Beast Twitter accounts remain ignored.
I vaguely remember a project somebody made where they made mini album covers on card stock and attached an NFC sticker. They would pick an album, set it on a reader, and it would start playing.
I’ve digitized every record I own and have “cut” like 2/3 into WAV, FLAC, and mp3 “sides” to listen to. A digital jukebox as you described sounds like a fun long term project…
In a sense, laws around “format shifting” can make room for that to happen.
As long as someone is not “distributing” (AKA uploading to any user. AKA torrents are off the table.), then an argument can be made that the user is format shifting using the internet as the format-shifting tool.
Even though the US (and now other countries) are a bit of a nightmare for fans of copyright works, I always thought we’d end up with more tools that “read” a physical item, then download the bit-perfect copy.
