Sigur Rós members just released a new album, Circe.
Let’s take few minutes to realize the pain in the neck it is to live fully in a digital world.
Disclaimer: music has been dematerialized fully since almost two years. I admit, I was slow and I ended up destroying my Audio CDs. I did that yes, with a lot of emotion. So now, all my music is sitting on a few hard drives. Not I have a huge number of CDs, just having multiple backup, and yes, I keep them in their original quality and because I am (still) an Apple user, I went for the Apple Lossless format, long name for ALAC.
Digital purchasing experience, PhD in Computer Science required
So, I purchased the new album directly from Sigur Rós website and they nicely shot a email no later than few minutes ago with a link to download the album (btw the link is completely clear, no password, or session, or anything like that). Yeay! How wait, this is FLAC, a well know lossless format outside the Apple eco-system.
No ALAC. It’s quite common. I pick my favorite lossless converter XLD and this should be the matter of few seconds.
Well, no.
It is a shiny brand new album and the Sigur Rós team forgot to put the metadata in the FLAC so I was hopping the public database would have them already. Turns out they don’t.
Ok, let’s go manual then.
Sigur Ros website provides the artwork and title.
Well, not exactly.
They put uppercase title, not a CSS uppercase, a real uppercase. I can’t do a copy and paste. Music is a religious thing, this must be respected.
Wikipedia doesn’t have the page updated yet (are they so unpopular?) Fortunately our friends at Amazon.com got the title right. Copy and paste on the 14 tracks (for once I regret they were so productive :-)
Now ALAC files are ready, let’s move them to iTunes and start syncing the iDevices.
In the old days, how was it?
Well, I lived in the country side so I had to wait the next Saturday, or more, to get to the grocery store / supermarket and most of the time, they didn’t have the band I liked. So I ended up by waiting some uncle or cousin to get the original cassette or CD and make a copy.
Finally, the digital world is faster for sure, but also requires quite a lot of skills to take the full benefit of high audio quality. If you prefer the easy way, lots of digital store will give you a crappy MP3/AAC file with a lot of details missing.