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I also burned disks of downloads at first, thinking of them as the long term backup for the files I was playing.  But as my collection of ripped and downloaded files grew I moved toward a fully digital way of thinking and began backing up all my music to portable hard drives and lately multiple copies at more than one location of 1 TB micro sd cards.  One advantage of this arrangement is I can instantly dial up any record I own on multiple devices and also instantly bring up photos of the album covers and booklets.  This is particularly helpful in my case because visual disabilities make it near impossible for me to read most cd covers and booklets but I can read the photos when I blow them up on a good sized monitor.

I don't like downloads, but am certainly not going back to vinyl, so have started buying them for items where CD's are either not available or priced in the stratosphere.  But I'm so physical product-collector oriented that I actually burn the downloads to CD-R, print off copies of the front and back covers, stick them in a thinline jewel case, and store them on my shelves along with my CD's.

Originally I didn't like downloads much and was particularly puzzled by the habit younger people have of downloading single songs. Having grown up on 78s, 45s, and albums the single download seemed like a step backward.  Not to mention the loss of album front and back cover.  I was also turned off after a while by mp3s.   It's probably all in my head but I fancy I can tell the difference between cd quality (and better) and mp3s. But then a number of things changed my mind about downloads.  First of all, I have a lot of cds and box sets and I'm having trouble storing it all. I live in a tiny cabin at the moment. They end up residing in a storage unit and I play the files ripped from them.  Another thing that happened is the advent of widely available cd qual or better downloads and the simultaneous proliferation of music database sites such as Discogs, MusicBrainz, AllMusic, Internet Archive, etc.  The discography and often photos of album covers is now available electronically and for free for most releases.  So I was already listening to lossless files I ripped from my cds and keeping photos of their covers and booklets.  It occurred to me that commercially available cd quality (and above) downloads combined with digital photos of the covers and booklets available online were exactly the same formats I was using at home!  Why not just buy the cheaper downloads and quit storing hard copies in a storage unit?

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