Music pricing: physical product vs. downloads

Today I was putting away a batch of CDs that I had recently ripped to my iMac, and picking out some others to upload (Apple Lossless-style, of course), when I noticed my Leonard Cohen CDs sitting there, neglected.

The only CD by Cohen that I’ve ripped so far is Cohen Live, which is one that has not, to the best of my knowledge, been remastered. I also have the original CD versions of Songs of Leonard Cohen, Songs from a Room, New Skin for the Old Ceremony, Songs of Love and Hate, and The Future. The first four of these were remastered in 2007, and I have yet to pick them up. However, I’ve been waiting to load any more Cohen into iTunes until I do buy them, because the difference in quality should be remarkable.

Anyone familiar with Cohen’s first several albums knows that the music does not suffer from high levels of compression. His voice often sounds naked and imperfect, even when he’s singing through a mountain of reverb (Songs of Love and Hate). When he’s almost whispering, he’s difficult to hear, and when he shouts, it’s right there in your ear. Whereas the dynamics in much of todays music are artificial creations, many albums from that time period, particularly by singer-songwriters, have a sonic honesty and purity that is compelling to someone like myself.

With that in mind, I am very interested in hearing these albums in their remastered forms.

Currently, I don’t have a lot of cash to throw at re-buying these albums. I suppose that I could, and I likely wouldn’t suffer. However, while I have relatively strong personal beliefs about paying for music**, I have always had a difficult time throwing my money at music for myself. I think this is because I know that it’s very easy for me to fill a shopping basket with music in five minutes… so I control my addiction by stifling my shopping habits (for the good of my wallet).

You could say, “Dude! you know you want them, because you already have the originals, and you obviously like him, so buy them!” And you’d be correct. I’m just a little neurotic and over-analytical when it comes to music purchases though, so thanks for understanding!

Moving along… knowing that Cohen’s first few CDs retail at $7.99 (regular price) on Amazon.com, I checked out the prices of the albums on iTunes. I was unsurprised (but still irritated) by the fact that the iTunes prices were a dollar or two more than the physical product.

I’ve talked before about how I’m loading music onto this computer in the Apple Lossless format, since I have the hard drive space. I’ve downloaded several songs from iTunes in situations where I only like one tune from an album, but for the most part everything else is at the highest fidelity possible.

There’s a catch to all of that: I have a nice chunk of a balance from an iTunes gift card that I got for Christmas, and so I considered just snagging the Cohen remasters on iTunes if they were priced right. That way, there’d be no out-of-pocket expense, and I could enjoy some Leonard Cohen again, likely without having to crank the volume just to hear the music whenever one of his songs came on.

So now I have this little conundrum: suck it up and buy the physical albums at a lower price with cash, or suck it up and “pay” more for the albums on iTunes, even though it will cost me nothing out of pocket at the moment.

I’m leaning toward the first option. Here’s why: this computer will be obsolete in five years, and I’ll probably buy another at that time. Unless I keep this computer on a network and continue to stream music from it on other computers in the house, those albums won’t be easily transferrable if I don’t have physical copies. As music isn’t a disposable commodity to me, I won’t be happy about having to re-download them or purchase physical copies later on. So I’ll probably just buy the CDs.

(I guess I figured out the solution by myself.)

However, I am still disappointed about the apparent blindness that Apple, along with other companies that offer downloadable music, seems to have with regard to market pricing. (Amazon lists the Songs of Leonard Cohen CD at $7.99, but the MP3 album is listed at $9.99 right below it.) In my opinion, the convenience of buying “catalog” does not outweigh the values of physical product: its reusability, collectibility, and other intangibles that come with owning your own copy.

* * * * *

Conclusions? I’m neither old-school nor hip. I guess I’m a little bit of both. I like to hold a record, cassette (yes, cassette), or CD in my hand, but I also like the convenience of downloadable music from time to time (I just downloaded Eddie Vedder’s new song from the upcoming Eat Pray Love soundtrack yesterday). I just feel that downloadable music should be priced appropriately. I applaud the fact that new albums are often $9.99 (or less when they’re on sale), which beats the physical price more times than not. I also like the “99 cent-per-song” model that is prevalent. However, pricing a download higher than the list price of the physical equivalent is short-sighted.

**I believe artists should be paid for their product. Therefore, I almost never buy used music, and I never download it “illegally,” although I respect the fact that people can make their own decisions about it, so I don’t preach what I practice.

Half-Life 2 (OS X); of mice and Macs

Half-Life 2 (OS X)!

I read on gameinformer.com yesterday that Half-life 2 (OS X) would be released today via Steam – an idea that excites me, as I played Half-Life on a PC, but only got through some of Half-Life 2 on the 360. I was particularly curious to see what the price point would be, and if they would make the episodes available as well.

As of early this afternoon, all three games are available, and at acceptable prices.

Half-Life 2 – $9.99 (on sale for $6.99)

Episode 1 – $7.99 (on sale for $5.59)

Episode 2 – same as Episode 1

Yeah… I’ll totally be downloading them!

Anyway, I was reading about it on GI.com last night. It’s a short article, so I watched the trailer, and then began to peruse the comments.

Comment QQ (by me)

It’s interesting to see the comments that people leave sometimes. It seems that, with more attention being paid to Mac gaming these days, every time new titles are announced for Mac, there’s an asshat who says something like what I read yesterday:

“All you Mac users out there, have fun playing an FPS with only one mouse button.”

Which irritates me to some extent, because… in this particular instance, I checked the guy’s GI.com profile. He lists his occupation as Contract Game Tester, and game design as one of his hobbies. He has a few blog posts and a game review, which are written fairly intelligently, and describes himself as a hardcore gamer.

So why would someone like that assume that all Mac users are using the mouse that Apple provides (and make derisive comments to that effect)?

Is that type of comment motivated by the desire to ridicule Mac users, due to a perceived elitist attitude that all Mac users must have? Is there a maturity issue here? Or do people really think that a Mac gamer who is interested in playing an FPS would fumble around for hours, trying to play a game that they just spent their hard-earned money on, without a) trying to make adjustments in the Preferences section, or b) going out and getting a new mouse?

A short history of my experience with mice and Macs (super boring, btw!)

When I started playing WoW, I immediately ran into problems with the Apple mouse. So I went out and got a wireless Logitech mouse, which worked, but not too well. At some point I got frustrated with it, and borrowed a Dell mouse from a friend… and that worked alright, although it never satisfied me.

Early last fall, I plunked down $50 or so for the Razer DeathAdder 3G for Mac. I ordered it from Amazon, and when it arrived a couple of days later, I was in heaven. Here was a mouse that was smooth and precise, comfortable, and allowed for very high tracking speed if desired. It also came with two mappable thumb-buttons, which I found very useful at times. As someone who never mapped all of his abilities to his keyboard, like I apparently should have, this was great because it gave me much better control with minimal hand movement.

And the mouse didn’t fail. Ever. The network or server would fail occasionally, but never the mouse. It has been a dream to use, to this day.

In addition to gaming, this mouse works very well for everything else that I want to do on my Mac, for all of the same reasons. It’s apparently not available anymore, but in reality there are several excellent mice, even those that aren’t made specifically for Macs, that would perform similarly.

Conclusions

• I think that the Apple mice, which have always been somewhat gimmicky, would suffice in many casual gaming situations, but any Mac user with a need and an opportunity to pick up a more appropriate mouse will probably do so.
• If nothing else, owners of MacBooks will pick up a mouse if they plan on gaming or doing other mouse-heavy tasks. No owner of a Mac made in the past five-plus years is limited to only buying an Apple mouse.
• I suppose that the source of my irritation is a low tolerance for derisive/unconstructive dialogue, which is admittedly one of my personal failings.
• On the other hand, while I prefer to use a Mac, I respect those who use PCs. There may be a Mac vs. PC war that’s been going on for years now on TV, but it doesn’t mean that using one or the other is indicative of a person’s intelligence.
• Half-Life 2 for Mac! Woo hoo!

Steam for Mac goes live with free Portal download

On Wednesday afternoon (May 12), Steam for Mac went live, much to my delight.

In celebration of this new opportunity To promote the upcoming Portal 2 release, Steam is currently running an offer through May 24th where you can download the full original Portal for free for PC and Mac.

I already have a copy of Portal as part of the Half-Life 2: Orange Box collection on Xbox 360. However, the opportunity to play Portal on my computer instead, for the price of a few clicks and the download time, was too good to pass up. I downloaded it this evening, and after dinner I spent a half-hour playing through several of the puzzles to get a feel for it.

The port from PC to Mac seems to be flawless. The game looks great, and is extremely easy to control “right out of the box.” I’m excited to have something to play on my computer (other than playing “blogger,” “Facebook,” “check email,” and “catch up on feed reader”) while I’m in the midst of moving and adjusting to a WoW-free lifestyle.

I’ve been waiting for Steam for Mac to go live since they announced it, and am already salivating at the possibilities. Torchlight is on sale for $9.99 until Monday, and I’m already grappling with whether or not I want to snag that one. Braid is available for Mac, as is World of Goo. I’m curious to see what kinds of games are released for Mac via Steam in the near future, and wondering if more of the bigger titles that are available for PC are going to be ported to Mac.

All in all, it’s an exciting time for gamers with Macs. The potential for a greater variety of titles and genres is encouraging, and I’m looking forward to seeing how this effects my gaming habits this year.

Update on my iMac, new faster Macbook Pros available

The hot new Macbook line

The new Macbook Pro laptops are now available from Apple. I got an email yesterday notifying me that I can now order an I5- or I7-equipped Macbook Pro, which is good news for people who have been waiting to have a Macbook with quad-core processing.

Not that I’ll be ordering one. This beast is going to have to last me a few years!

I was disheartened, however, to see that the core of the exterior design is still the aluminum enclosure. I say this because when I was shopping for my iMac, which included looking at Macbooks as an option, I did read customer comments regarding the issue of heat.

I ended up getting the 27″ iMac last December, and I love it. I know that I had promised that I would write more about it, and I haven’t. It’s fast, efficient, has plenty of hard drive space, and sweet graphics. Music sounds great on it, WoW plays very well at maximum graphic levels, it multi-tasks flawlessly… The one issue that I have with it is how hot it gets.

The iMac’s one-piece aluminum enclosure conducts heat extremely well – that is, to say, it conducts heat at a somewhat alarming level. I’ve been running iTunes and Safari for the past couple of hours, and if I close my hand over the top edge of the screen, the aluminum feels almost uncomfortable to touch. When I’m running Ventrilo, WoW and Safari during raids, the aluminum most definitely is uncomfortable to touch.

I downloaded iStat this afternoon, and it says my hard drive is running at 124°F, and the power supply is holding steady at 153°F.  iStat doesn’t measure the temperature of the outer shell (although it does give the “ambient” temperature as 81°F currently), but with several components running above 140°F, and an aluminum enclosure, it’s no wonder that I have a mini space heater on my desk.

This leads me to my concern with these Macbooks. Knowing how hot my iMac gets, and even considering that there may be some type of temperature mitigation in place in the laptops, I wonder how comfortable it would be to use a Macbook on a plane, a couch, student lounge, or other situation where the computer is on a person’s lap. I’ve used other laptops, and while they get warm, the heat is nowhere as intense as it is with my machine.

Apple seems married to aluminum bodies, and I suppose that using a laptop on a table would not be as much of an issue. However, I can say that, when it’s time for me to purchase another Mac, I hope that they will have decided to use a different material for the exterior of their products. I’m not too excited about how comfortable I’m going to be in front of my computer during the upcoming summer months.

Beginning the lossless project

Happy New Year!

On Christmas Day, after we opened presents, I began loading some of my music, both gifts and older music, onto the new iMac. As I think I have said before, I came to the conclusion that I would like to selectively load music onto the new machine in the Apple Lossless format, which does not compress music files like MP3 or ACC formats do. This, of course, means that the files take up much more space, so I figured that, by selecting only songs that I know I like, I can put a decent amount of music on the 1TB drive without filling it up.

Today I am throwing a few more albums on. So far, I am only choosing artists/albums where I know I like everything.

Some of the first albums that I chose:

1. Vince Guaraldi – A Charlie Brown Christmas
2. Nick Drake – Pink Moon
3. Miles Davis – Kind Of Blue
4. R.E.M. – Accelerate
5. Pearl Jam – Ten (2009 Brendan O’Brien Remix)
6. Loreena McKennitt – Live In paris And Toronto (Disc 1)
7. Eric Clapton – Sessions For Robert J
8. The Nightwatchman – One Man Revolution
9. Lou Reed – Perfect Night Live In London
10. Pink Floyd – Dark Side Of The Moon
11. Nirvana – Bleach (2009 Remastered/Expanded edition)
12. Blind Faith – Blind Faith

One of the things that I’ve realized, over the course of looking at my CD collection, is that I’m going to have to buy some of these CDs again. Early CDs released in the 1980s of groups from the 60s and 70s had poor fidelity. Of course, some of my favorite releases are from that time period, so what music I have from bands such as Cream, The Doors, Led Zeppelin, etc. are poor quality versions. Since I was in high school and college when I bought them, I got many of them from record clubs and used stores anyway, so I have no qualms about buying the remastered/expanded editions over again.

Downloading them from iTunes is not an option, since they do not offer them in the lossless format. I prefer getting the CD anyway, so I will probably be ordering a few new ones pretty soon, starting with Cream.

Tonight: the setup

8:45pm

I’m in the middle (ok, the middle of the beginning) of installing World of Warcraft on my new iMac. It’s going to be a while, so I’m chilling on vent with my guildmates, kind of bored, and figured I’d write a little while bit about my first impressions of this beast.

First of all, this screen is HUGE!! I’ve always played WoW in a window anyway on my 17″ screen, but with this machine, I’ll be able to have the game open, along with a full web page and vent visible at the same time.

The screen is beautiful. I haven’t run the game yet or watched any other video, but I do have WoW running on my old iMac to the right of where I’m sitting. The old screen pales in comparison… I know that’s a cliche, but it’s absolutely true in this instance. It looks like it’s dark outside, on my old computer screen, no matter what I’m looking at, now that I’ve seen the new display. I’ve been to a few web sites this evening, and everything looks clean and vibrant. I’m enjoying even typing this blog, visually.

I have very little other experience with it. The keyboard is flat and feels great, although I don’t know if I will use it for raiding, at least initially. I already know I’m not using the Magic Mouse for WoW, because I haven’t had good success with wireless peripherals with that game. I’m sticking with my Razer DeathAdder for now.

…

So it’s 10:55 pm now, and I’m downloading patches for WoW. This is going to take a while, and I don’t think that there will be much more that I have to add to this post. So I’ll sign off. As I said, I’m sure I’ll have updates in the near future.

Lunch break with my new pal, the iMac box

I’m sitting here on my lunch break, quietly eating my sandwich. My new iMac rests comfortably in its HUGE box next to me. It’s too bad I have to be back at work in 15 minutes, because I’d love to tear this thing open and get going!

So they delivered it two days earlier than I thought, which is awesome! I’ll have more details and maybe some photos over the next couple of days, as I get it set up and start configuring it, etc.

Update: status on the new iMac

I checked Fedex’s website today, and it looks like my new iMac arrived in Tennessee this morning. It lists an estimated arrival time of 10:30am on Wednesday. I can’t wait (well, I can, because I have to, but…) until then – it’s my next day off, and I’ll have most of the day to spend a few hours kicking the tires, loading WoW, downloading some stuff, and rearranging my desk area to make room for it. I’m excited – the wait is almost over!

New iMacs!

So I came home for lunch today to find that the new Macs have been announced! In November, they will be available with quad-cores, more memory and 1TB hard drives at reasonable prices! YES!!!

I’m so glad I waited to upgrade. I’ve been having more and more problems with lag in WoW, as well as an increased inability to run it at the same time as iTunes, Safari, etc. I’m definitely looking forward to being able to run all of the applications I want to run with ease, along with using more add-ons in WoW without worrying about it crashing all the time.

I’ve been research my options concerning what I’ll do with my music once I get the new computer. It looks like I can use my iPod’s hard drive to transfer the music from the old computer to the new one, so if I decide to go that way, I should be fine. However, I have been more and more seriously toying with the idea of starting from scratch, re-loading all of my music using Apple Lossless for higher fidelity. If that’s the case, I won’t worry about transferring the old music since I’ll be replacing it anyway.

At this point, I’m still stuck with my old iMac for another month or two. However, I’m definitely excited about today’s reveal. If I had pulled the trigger a couple of weeks ago, I know that I would have been very disappointed!

Where have all the ferals gone?

It’s been a couple of days since I posted anything, and I have to admit that I’ve felt uninspired. I’m tired and I haven’t done a lot worth mentioning. I’ve worked a lot – Sunday ends up being my only day off this week – and Thursday I was up early for an inventory and late for a 10-man Trial of the Crusader run. We’re having cold, rainy weather for a few days here, so Thursday’s planned walk was a no-go. It seemed like a good day to veg out and play some WoW..

After I got home from work at noon Thursday, I played WoW for about four hours, and then totally failed at taking a nap. So I got out of bed and worked on researching my options for buying a new Mac. It occurred to me that, while I wait (for what seems like could be forever) for Apple to announce their expected fall refresh, I should look into refurbished iMacs and Macbook Pros. It looks like you can save some nice money on certified Apple refurbs, and dropping $1600 on a $2000 computer with a Core 2 Duo processor might be easier to swallow for the time being. In the meantime, I’m sitting still for the time being (meaning that I am not buying a new Mac this week!). I really want quad-cores! The Mac Pro towers have them, and there are rumors that the new Mac Pros will have six-core processors in Q1 2010, so it makes sense (to me!) that the iMacs could slide right in behind the Mac Pros with quad-cores. That’s just my view, anyway.

By 8pm I was back playing WoW, since the Daily Heroic was Trial of the Champion and my guild mates needed a tank (and I need the Triumphs). We finished that up in 15 minutes after the jousting, so I logged off Anacrusa, did some laundry, and spent some time before TotCr working on my 72 pally, Abenadari. I’ll probably never raid with her, but she’s my alchemist, so I’m trying to get her leveled up (elixir-master) in order to be able to make Flasks of Endless Rage for Anacrusa. I mainly go dps in raids, since that’s my main spec, except for 10-man Onyxia, where I off-tank whelps in my cat spec (bear form, of course) in Phase 2… but I do have a bear spec for heroics. I don’t think I have the mindset to be a raid tank, but I’m quite comfortable running people through heroics or off-tanking in Naxx.

Anyway, the point of all that was that I blow through the Endless Rage, and it’s expensive.

It’s funny, but four months ago our guild was really suffering for healers and swollen with dps. We had major problems having enough capable healers to run two 10-man Ulduar teams each week. Now, we have plenty of everything, but I seem to still have no problem getting into raids and stuff. Heroics are easy, because I tank 90% of the time. However, even though the general perception is that dps toons are a dime a dozen, I almost never get rejected for raids, both pugs and in-guild. Perhaps it’s the buff – I swear, it has been three or four months since I ran up against another kitty in 25-man TotCr, both VoAs, Onyxia, OS, or any other raids I’ve been a part of… for as much as I hear about how overpopulated the game is with druids, I don’t see kitties around much.

The best part is that I am usually at or near the top for damage, even with geared and skilled mages, warlocks, and/or hunters in the group. There is a rogue in our guild who absolutely destroys everyone else in dps, which is how it should be, but I haven’t raided with her in a while. However, druid is a hybrid class, and so I wasn’t expecting to be top damage like I was Wednesday night against Korolon in 10-man VoA. And it wasn’t a bad group either – we literally blew through the place and then one-shotted Onyxia.

By the way, I’m certainly not complaining about kicking ass! I do play my spec well, and I enjoy the versatility that comes with being feral. I’m simply pointing out two things: a) I’m happy to be holding my own with the pure dps classes, and b) I don’t know where all the ferals went – are they all trees and boomchickens now?

Trial of the Crusader was fine. We one-shotted everything in normal mode, and regrouped for our weekly attempt at heroic mode. It went like it usually does: we got completely spanked and called it a night after three failed attempts, which was fine with me because I had been up for 19 hours by that point. It has been slow looting for me the past couple of weeks in there, but the 15 Triumphs will definitely help get me to my goal of 115 by Halloween, when I pick up my two Tier 9 pieces (for the 4-piece set bonus) and the Dextrous Brightstone Ring, which I plan to buy and equip simultaneously. I’m definitely looking forward to the set bonus and the nice Agility increase!

That’s enough of my ramblings for tonight. It’s funny, I hope that nobody is finding my blog with hopes that I can help them play better, because this blog gives no insight into how to play, gear, spec, etc. However, much of my info has come from the resources listed in the World of Warcraft section to the right, so feel free to pay these fine people a visit and check out what they have to say about tanking, shredding, and (in some cases) healing – I highly recommend them!