Martin, do you consider cd players and turntables “special systems”? These are the devices millions of people once used to listen to music. The suggestion that hoping digital music will eventually match their quality makes someone a snob is laughable.

The simple way is to get a USB turntable. There are several makes, all of which are adequate but certainly not audiophile standard. Just plug it in to a USB port, set up the recording software (usually Audacity) and off you go.

The hard way, to get better sound:
http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/1

I like the Goldwave sound editor for cleaning up the digital music after recording,
http://www.goldwave.com/

As a lover of music who also participates in karaoke, I can tell you that anytime someone is making a joyous noise, it’s worth listening to. I can’t stand people who lay claim to being TRUE Music Lovers™ but who deride other people’s taste out of hand, and usually without truly listening.

You are kidding yourself if you think there is less than 300gigs of listenable music in the world.

Hardly. There’s more worthwhile music out there than you will ever ever listen to in your lifetime. In classical and jazz alone I have several hundred albums worth of music, more than I really have time to listen to but all of it very good, and every month I discover some new Serbian folk singer or Brazilian pop group or whatever doing something a little different and interesting. And all that recorded music usually pales next to live performances and or simply the fun of playing myself. It must be nice to have such narrow taste.

A small percentage fell off the back of a truck and some is downloaded through iTunes (where I avoid stuff that isn’t iTunes Plus); most comes from my CD collection or those of my friends.

Compression is rarely a real issue for me with the stuff that has a permanent place on my computers. I’m just glad I got rid of all my cassettes.

There’s something about those that are exciting, probably from childhood conditioning in my case. Hear the crackle, anticipate something exciting.

On the other hand, digital noise lets you know you have the inferior version of something.

But for jazz, orchestral music and heavier pop and rock stuff a good home theatre system can make a world of difference – so if you’re into that, you need one and should stick to CDs.

Internet radio, especially dare I say at tolerable rates of compression, is a wonderful thing. And yes, sure, music is always better than no music, and anything that lets people listen to more is a good thing. I grew up listening to records on one of these things, http://www.mbzponton.org/n2awa/radio_Grundig_2440U_front.jpg
thank you very much.

Watson, I don’t know any other way than hooking up the turntable to the PC and doing the conversions yourself, which is cheap but labor-intensive. Even people who do digital conversions commercially usually won’t do lps because of copyright worries.

How many copies do we need and what is the cost of making, having, and keeping them?

This makes sense. There is a psycho-acoustical model running that will penalize noise, which is essentially what you’ve got with distorted guitars. If enough people cared, the model could be tuned for metal (as it probably already is for `rock’ guitar distortion).

One of the funny things about mp3s is that distorted guitars sound really shitty when compressed. The most bone-headed heavy-metal song stands to lose a good deal more than a piano solo at low sample rates.

I haven’t got all that much music on my computer, maybe 7 to 10 G. But it seems to be increasing pretty rapidly; a year ago I had almost none.