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Digitise My Life.
Bear with me on this one. I'm asking for advice but I think it could be a useful reference topic.

I am a hoary old dinosaur when it comes to entertainment media. Not only to I get music CDs, I actually pay money for them. How appalling. So I have ended up with several hundred CDs, a few hundred books, and some games.

Now I want to strip down my physical possessions and start transferring some of this to digital storage (and keep purchasing that in the future).

Thus I would like some advice on the matter:

Books: Kindle - seems to be surprisingly functional, but with a small screen. Is it limited to the small screen size? Is it easy to get all sorts of books for it? What is the overall experience like?
(Bal this might be one for you)

Music: Iwotever - as much as I loathe the idea of giving Apple a single penny towards their pompous fashion-driven bollox, I am assuming that I-blah is the best portable digital music option. I had a look, the new Nano seems to be pretty cool. What sort of options are there for storing music on these? Are the lossless / high quality formats worthwhile? I'm used to CD quality in general.
What are the options for listening in a car with only a normal CD player? Again quality is an issue.
How easy would it be to transfer a fuckton of CDs? Are non-mainstream albums generally available for release?
(Friction this might be one for you)

Games: I assume Steam is fine for everything these days??

Cheers,
Sham x
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As A Victim Of My Own Ears, 
I confirm I clearly hear a difference. I know it's a puzzling subject and I'm in no way interested to feed another bias/myth/controversial dialog about it. The internet is already full of people claiming they can hear something, meanwhile others just come with the plain facts, a straight tech approach and the undisputable proof on paper that lossless is lossless. Tests and measurements have been run with the same results: zero difference. At least nothing conclusive. Yet, some people, me included, can hear it.

Maybe I should have been less upfront affirmative in my previous posts and report those facts in the first place as results of my own experimentation. 
Thanks Guys. 
Some of that is really useful (haven't read all the music format arguing yet tho ;)). 
 
"Yet, some people, me included, can hear it."

No, you believe you can hear it. You want to hear it, so you do. If it makes you happier, then keep doing what you're doing. It's no skin off anyone else's back but it would be good to stop telling people that it makes a difference when it doesn't.

Lossless is called lossless for a reason. 
I Went In This Thread To Help And Contribute 
Not to argue. My several blind tests were conclusive. I leave all the rest to your fine and open minded ability to tell what you know about me and other people in my case. Shambler, you're welcome. 
 
There's really no argument. Hell, I even said that if you hear a difference, that's great. Do whatever sounds good to you. 
Simply True 
 
Hmm, Lossless 
I'm no electronics guy, but in theory, at least on portable devices, there could be interferences? Very unlikely that you could hear them though (if they even exist). I'd say it's bullshit.

- Fuck all the i- shit
- Foobar2k for windows is awesome. It's missing one thing though: the notation of an album. You cannot write a script that checks if you have all tracks of an album (at least i never figured out how to do it), because all foobar knows are individual tracks. (Which have album/total tracks tags of course, but this is not the issue here).
- sansa clip+ is indeed nice -- but my phone jack broke, which is a known problem. :(
- managing a large library is really really hard, despite discogs tagging (foobar plugin!), etc.
- If you dl rips, ensure that none of the mp3s are broken. Depending on your source, a lot of stuff that's going around is either completely broken or has broken mp3 headers (foobar check integrity/fix headers)
- Don't get stuff below 192 (and i tend to avoid those).
- on a mobile device quality doesn't really mattress.
- use flac for lossless. Has anyone tried ape? very exotic though?
- use the tool vondur recommended for ripping. 
Foobar2000 - To Elaborate On The Album Issue 
It only knows about files -- which naturally can have all sorts of tags -- but all operations work on files. So if you filter on something, say, album == 'Apostrophe', it goes over all individual tracks (in isolation) and shows those that have the album tag set to that string.

Now try selecting all albums that are missing a song -- there's no check that can be run on a single track alone to achieve that. E.g. if track 12 is missing, you cannot deduce this from track 1-11, even if they have total tracks == 12 set. 
 
Speaking of music, what do you guys use to download music?

I use soulseek, and rarely pirate bay if there's a discog. But downloading one song and album at a time takes a lot of time on soulseek, and pirate bay pretty fkn useless unless it's a fairly mainstream artist.

In terms of programs... TagScanner is fantastic for fixing tags. I never automatically tag anything, I do it manually with TagScanner. And then I use AutomaticPlaylistCreator to create my playlists: http://www.necik.net/?obsah=obsah.htm&telo=download.htm

I only just recently found this - until which time I had been manually playlisting each and every folder. It would take me hours. Now I can do 1000 folder with just a few clicks. 
 
What kind of weird player do you use? For tagging I use http://easytag.sourceforge.net/

As for music, uhm, enjoy this shuffled list of sites I follow through feeds:

http://www.earthmantra.com/
http://www.archive.org/services/collection-rss.php?collection=ambient_collective
http://www.fresh-poulp.net/
http://sonicsquirrel.net/
http://www.ektoplazm.com/
http://archive.org/details/amorfus
http://www.mixotic.net/
http://www.musopen.org/
http://www.sublimeporte.net
http://nl.electrobel.org/
http://altusmusic.ca/
http://dubmissionrecords.blogspot.com/
http://melodica-netlabel.com/index.htm
http://www.dogmazic.net/music
http://www.clear-cut-records.com/
http://www.fature.net/
http://www.seriesmedia.org/
http://blog.pazarahm.com/feed/
http://gems.tumblr.com/
http://archive.org/details/netlabels
http://www.ideology.de/
http://www.ambientium.com/
http://be.electrobel.org/
http://totallyfreemusic.blogspot.de
http://www.ambienteer.com/
http://deepspace-blog.blogspot.com/
http://dubmood.wordpress.com/
http://www.upitup.com/
http://thekalle.blogspot.com/
http://www.justiceforaudio.org/feed/
http://www.jamendo.com/
http://philwilkerson.wordpress.com/
http://www.magnatune.com/
http://petecogle.com/blog/
http://www.broque.de/
http://www.planetterrorrecords.com/
http://www.kahvi.org/
http://line.alter-x.net/
http://www.digital-diamonds.com/
http://www.archive.org/services/collection-rss.php?collection=x-dump
http://netlabelism.com
http://freefloatingmusic.com/
http://netlabels.org/
http://materializm.webs.com/
http://blocsonic.com/
http://www.entity.be/entity/
http://www.mon0.de/
http://space.alter-x.net/ 
 
I just use winamp.

Feed sites are too time consuming as well. You can usually SLOWLY download 1 album at a time, and it's completely random what they decide to put up.

There must be some place where full archived discogs are traded? 
 
huh?
most of those are netlabels or single artists. all of them are free, creative commons or similar. since they are not brand new you can download all their previous releases if that is your way of discovery. most of them should easily saturate your downstream. the only thing time consuming would be finding music you like. but once you do, more similar stuff would be easy to discover.

these are sites/labels/artists I like, so I use feeds to follow their releases.

-----

doesn't Winamp have a media library nowadays? 
 
Windows explorer is my media library. I'm old skool hehe.

Oh I'm not talking about free stuff Spirit lol 
Yeah 
There's only one place (or type of place) that springs to mind when you talk about dloading discographys. And I wouldn't write the links here. 
 
Oh I'm not talking about free stuff Spirit lol
Why? There is free music of any genre or style. 
 
Spotify costs like $5 a month and you get access to basically everything. That's my main music source these days. 
Digitize My Pix 
Anyone knows about a good and free avatar maker (from a given shot)? 
Spotify 
Just want to also massage Spotify's balls and say that the �10/month I pay for Spotify Premium basically gives me the best music experience I can imagine.

Even when wandering about town, I can do a search on my smartphone and listen to basically any album at 320kbps. If I'm about to go on the underground, I can get that album to download for offline listening in only a few minutes.

If I'm at a computer then the apps on the desktop client are amazing. I browse the Guardian Music app or the Pitchfork app, etc, and if I see something that looks cool, it's one click to add the whole album as a playlist. One more click to download it for offline. Plus I love the whole social aspect... probably got 50 facebook friends whose playlists and favourite tracks I can check out from the app. Plus I can send them tracks or collaborate on a playlist with them.

Well worth the cost of one album / month in my opinion. Downside is that not much money goes to the artist (source: my flatmate with tracks on spotify) so still feel obliged to see live / buy merch from artists I really like. 
 
Nice tecnhnical analysis of the Sansa Clip+'s audio quality: http://nwavguy.blogspot.de/2011/02/sansa-clip-measured.html

I'm not aware of any other player, besides perhaps the larger Sansa Fuze, that can touch the Clip+ in terms of audio performance for anywhere near this low of price or offer similar features and performance in anywhere near as small of package.  
Do You Also Have Some Headphone Recommendations For Travel/commute/et? 
 
 
Anything with Dr.Dre's amazing Beats technology because you can really hear a difference. 
 
If anyone is in the market for new earphones, this set of reviews is bad ass. Hope he got his PhD for this:

http://www.head-fi.org/t/478568/multi-iem-review-237-iems-compared-akg-k3003i-added-05-07-12

TL;DR beats are the best and they make you look real cool 
Thanks A Bunch! 
that's most awesome 
And I Ordered.. 
Mp3 Player 
i went through digitizing my music colection last month and 320kbit mp3 + cowon audio9 + koss porta pro work just fine. i had some crappy low-cost teak player and i wanted something better. due to my attitude towards apple ianything wasn't an option. i'm no isheep :-).
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i love debates about flac/mp3/vorbiss/original cd/burned cd sound quality. i know people who claim they hear the difference between cd and flac on pc with onboard soundcard + genius speakers for 50$. i want to be that special too someday...
-
jakub (not a modder/mapper, just dedicated q1 freak) 
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