Quote Originally Posted by Viper187 View Post
It's like iTunes. The music on iTunes isn't even CD quality! It's lossy, DRM-infested crap, but people buy it because they either don't know any better or don't care. Offer up some nice, unmolested FLAC/WAV files and I'll happily buy them digitally. Otherwise, I'll buy a used CD for $2 and rip it to my HDD in the format I prefer to listen to.
Itunes is DRM free. It is also offered as 256kbps ABR files, which are going to be transparent to virtually everyone. Have you ABX'd AAC encoded songs at this bitrate compared to WAV?*

I also buy the physical CD, but only so I can rip to lossless, then encode how I see fit. It's also so I can scan the CD cover and keep that archived as well. I have purchased a few lossless releases (NIN in particular) and I have no complaints about them.

I agree that if Itunes decided to release the lossless versions of files, I might consider it. They actually have all the lossless encodes on their internal servers, since they require submissions in that format. It's just a matter of them "flipping the switch" and having the bandwidth to support 50MB per track file transfers.


*I have and I can't hear the difference (I have ~50% accuracy, which are the odds of guessing).