Finally embraced online music...

...by which I mean building my music collection in MP3 format without accreting any corresponding CDs. It has been a long time since I've been a collector of music. After moving house nearly a year ago, I put all of my CDs (except box sets and other curios) into CD "wallets" (each one holding 120 discs and their covers) and dispensed with the jewel cases. It felt so much better for the several hundred CDs to fit neatly on one shelf, arranged neatly in genre and alphabetical order. The downside was that, having spent so much time perfecting this arrangement, I pretty much stopped buying CDs. What's more, I pretty much stopped listening to them.

I knew I needed to embrace the more convenient world of a computerised music library, but still felt an attachment to the cumbersome CDs. I liked poring over the album notes and looking at the photos. Data on a hard drive felt such a sterile alternative to a tangible collection.

I use the past tense above ("liked" and "felt") because such sentiments have very quickly been buried. Those CD wallets now look and act like photo albums; the focus of my music collection is on the computer; and I am (very) actively collecting again.

It started on my birthday a few months ago. My BH (better half) and I were in town, I wanted to buy a CD (Schubert Piano Trios, if you must know) and she was offering to pay. The store (Sydney's only dedicated classical music store that I'm aware of) didn't have the CD I was after, and have not received it in the intervening months despite putting in an order that day. My patience quickly gave way and my friend Harry offered to grab some of that music through his emusic account. I put two and two together and decided it was time I gave the world of online music a go. It's been great.

Two factors have made it great: emusic and MediaMonkey. The first is an online service for acquiring music; the second is software for playing it on your computer and managing your library. Both are alternatives to the irritating iTunes, which plays both roles. Emusic is a subscription service: I pay about A$15 a month for the right to download 50 tracks. It doesn't roll over; it's "use it or lose it". It has an enormous catalogue but it's exlusively smaller-label stuff. So there's no Britney Spears, but there's no Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan either. There are already 29 albums on my "Saved for later" list, so the catalogue is not a problem. The tracks are DRM-free and are high-quality rips. At $4.00 for an album (of 10 songs), I have broken free of the sentimental attachment to physical goods, and I am willing to risk my 4 bucks on unfamiliar material. I've burned through my 50 tracks this month and have to wait a week for the quota to reset, but I've downloaded two great albums, by Gillian Welch (Time) and Ornette Coleman (Sound Grammar). Both were artists I'd been wanting to listen to for a while but never got around to buying on CD.

For comparison's sake, an album on iTunes costs upwards of $15.

MediaMonkey is the other key to the puzzle. I've never felt really comfortable with other music-playing-and-management software in the past. This one pushes all the right buttons. It's designed with large collections in mind, and facilitates navigation and segmentation (e.g. Classical, Jazz, Rock...) It provides a lot more convenience and control when it comes to ripping music than I've experienced before. And it is scriptable; many users have created excellent extensions to the software. Some of these provide features just as valuable as anything the software itself does (e.g. regular expression search and replace of track data). Altogether, this is software that makes me feel confident that I can manage my large and growing collection into the future.

It's been a quick turnaround. After dabbling years ago, and thinking about making the switch on and off ever since, I was hooked immediately. It's like my mother said when she finally got a digital camera after years of deliberation: "I wish I'd done this ages ago."