UK CD Singles - End Of The Affair

[nfotxn]

Spent the afternoon ripping all my UK CD Singles I'd bought at the Inverness HMV (and Amazon UK/Warpmart) into iTunes. Given that HMV writes the price on a big alternative UPC sticker on all their CD Singles I decided to add up what I spent in 4 months of working in the dark of Inverness:

£90 or $162USD/$205CAD

This got me about 78 songs, 312.8mb (at 128kbps AAC) or 5.8 hours of music including doubles. Of which I'd be hard pressed of to find 1 hour that I really like and did not end up buying the LP.

The entire time I (at the very least) curbed my P2P use for downloading and previewing songs. At about the rate of about $610CAD/year I will receive about 3 LP's worth of music that I actually like.

So my question as to wether or not the UK CD Single market is an already suitable pre-existing solution to the grey legality of the P2P try-before-you-buy has a resounding answer:

No. It's expensive and rather fruitless.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/speedy_/]

Why do you use AAC instead of MP3?

[nfotxn.livejournal.com]

It's essentially an MP3 work-alike and has improved sound quality at the similar bitrates. There's enough compatibility on most platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux) to use the files there as well. I use Traktor a lot too which imports the iTunes library meaning that I can rip, import and organize music easily to play in my sets.

AAC mostly doesn't work with Windows Media because that division of Microsoft is being VERY aggressive about promoting their codec WMA. Which works very well although comes with an implicit pledge to use Windows Media products if you want to get any job done well.