Once you have established a wireless multi-room music system, you will need to collect the music to play over the system. This article considers the alternatives to the main download services available and compares them to the usual suspects.
Introduction
Many people associate digital music with downloaded music, available from iTunes or Amazon, which I have described in a previous article. However, most downloaded music is of lower quality than that available from music ripped from your CDs using uncompressed or lossless formats, and if you have already have a large library of CDs, then this is available for ripping at no further cost.
Why Still Buy CDs?
With all the downloading services available, CDs may seem very old fashioned. However, CDs still offer advantages. They can be ripped using a variety of codecs to provide a much higher audio quality using lossless or uncompressed formats. If you download a track in a compressed format then improve your system later, this may simply reveal the limitations of the compressed format. Even if you rip your CDs to compressed MP3 formats, you can always go back later and obtain a new version in a higher resolution to get the best results out of your improved system. If your hard disk or NAS box should become faulty, then you have an automatic backup in the original CD.
CD rippers will match iTunes or Amazon for reliably extracting metadata. Ripping CDs for home use is possibly still technically illegal in many countries, but provided you keep the original disks, is generally regarded as making a backup of your music. Provided you buy whole albums, CDs can often work out cheaper than the downloaded equivalents, especially for aging hippies like me who are interested in back catalogue disks.
High Quality Downloads
The highest quality music of all is available as downloads from specialist audiophile labels including Linn and Naim in the UK and Chesky in the USA. They offer downloads at qualities significantly superior to CD. Resolutions of up to 192khz at 24bit are available compared to CD at 44.1khz and 16bit using the FLAC lossless codec, matching the best high resolution disk formats such as SACD.
Only limited catalogues are available, file sizes are large, and prices reflect their superior sound quality. But it's almost certainly the best sound quality you can achieve at home. It seems perverse that at a time when we have the best and most cost effective audio replay equipment we have ever had, we are using it to play music in highly compressed formats such as MP3.
Internet Radio
Finally, don't forget the huge amount of music available from Internet radio stations. The availability of stations dedicated to very narrow genres or even single artists make Internet radio a very viable alternative source of music, much of which is free.
Stations can be accessed directly through your browser or through music players in software such as iTunes, Windows Media Player, or Songbird, or through dedicated systems such as those from Sonos or Squeezebox.