Disclaimer: I know that CD Baby is a business, and if there’s a valid reason why they can’t support selling physical media, then there is. I also understand that the most likely reason that they can’t so support it is because the listening public doesn’t want to buy enough CDs these days. I even agree that, assuming the two previous sentences is correct, shutting down their physical distribution business is the smart play for CD Baby.
I just think that people should reconsider only buying digital. Digital’s easier to corrupt. Easier to lose…Easier to bowdlerize.
But never mind me.
The problem is that CDs degrade over time. Planned obsolescence is built right in, as the physical medium deteriorates, and there’s not a bloody thing you can do to prevent it. (DVDs and Blu-Ray likewise.)
Just to be clear, I’m not talking about scratches or physical damage, but chemical decomposition/oxidization.
(And yeah, I’m old enough to remember how they first marketed them to us by promoting how they had better fidelity and would never wear out no matter how many times you played them. And yeah, I’m still pissed off about it. I lost a bunch of disks before I learned that I needed to back them up on magnetic media.)
It’s much faster and easier to copy a file than rip a disk.
But you absolutely have to take ownership of your data. Especially if you’re using Apple. Or Amazon. Or any proprietary device or program. (It was absolutely horrifying when Apple took it upon itself to wipe the music off of their customer’s hard drives. After all, the “standard” versions were available to you in the cloud. Who cares if you had a rare version or an original master? There’s a reason they went from dominating the audio engineering market to competing for market share overnight.)
Back your bleep up. Manually. On a removable drive that’s air gapped except when you’re adding something new. At minimum.
Keeping another set of copies on a Linux box is also recommended.
When possible, avoid default locations and names. Amazon is going to look for its library where it expects it to be. Which is fine for your Kindle, but on your computer, you have other options. Likewise, an update that tries to scrape your “Music” file won’t get much if you’ve got your crap stored in Downloads/Kisum. (If it scans your entire HD for MP3 and Wav files, you’re still screwed, but that level of intrusion should set off alarm bells.)
Dude.
https://jukeboxrecords.org/
Mew