When will "Physical Media" Sales Stabilize?

Yes. they not only work well, but are smaller than the last generation of 2.5" drives. Even though money is tighter these days, I coudn't pass up on paying $199.99 for these guys. I know they'll eventualy be considerably cheaper, and probably $139 at Costco, but I don't want to wait. Btw, this price is from Best Buy and it's $75 less than at Amazon. That's pretty unusual, and it's hard to say how long this price will last. They just came in last week as I am constantly looking for them.

Part of my issue is I use these USB Powered drives in my car system, and it's a drag to only have a subset of my music available. Granted 1.5TB is a lot of music, but it's very hard for me to decide what to not include. 2TB is still not enough to cover my whole collection, but it gets the bulk of it. The rest I can put on a second drive if I ever feel the need to have it all.

I buy these drives in pairs and always have a backup ready to put into service. In fact, when I get new music, I put it on the backup and install that in the car. Now the drive I had in the car becomes the backup, etc.

Keep in mind that I just use these 2.0's for my portable music. I also have many 3TB external drives which have all my digital files and I keep several offsite at different locations. I also have yet to do the bulk of my needledropping, which will take at least another few TB's depending on how many we get to. We're still dialing in the procedure, and want to make sure we only have to do these one time since we have many thousands of LPs. What we've come up with so far is pretty darn amazing sounding. Fortunately my partner in this is not economically challenged to the degree that I am.

Yes, I feel pretty darn bulletproof, and having my music with me whenever I want is just one of my long term dreams which has come true. Fortunately for me, many of my dreams have come true.

 

All jazz CDs that aren't otherwise discounted are 40% off at Barnes & Noble (in-store only). Some CDs are priced $18.99, but the regular price for most titles is much less, so there are deals to be found. I picked up the Bill Evans California Here I Come CD for $6 with the 40% discount plus my 10% member discount.

 

The whole chain could be gone in 3-5 years. I read last week that Barnes & Noble has been pondering the sale of its Nook business. If that happens, then what's left to keep them afloat? I suppose they could sell other brands of e-readers, but there is a lot of competition. At least the Nook is their brand and the only brand they carry at present.

 

That's because Amazon is killing them in this space - B&N was banking on the Nook line, it's very obvious every time I go in the store. And they keep trying to one-up the Kindle but I don't think they're going to last.

What really bothers me about this is that Kindle e-books cannot be read on other e-readers because of the DRM layer. It should be like MP3's as much as I dislike lossy -- standardize the format and then compete over the hardware itself. But if the Nook fails, you should be able to transfer your books over to the Kindle and vice-versa. Being that you can't (legally) do this, and someone had to choose between the Nook and the Kindle, what would most people pick at this point? Amazon clearly dominates, much like Apple does in the tablet space.

 

In accurate statement on both parties

 

Amazon is killing Barnes & Noble in every space. As far as being a brick-and-mortar is concerned, the Nook is really the only thing that Barnes & Noble has going for it, and that will not be enough to sustain them.

I agree that e-books should be transferrable. If I were looking to buy an e-reader, I would probably buy a tablet instead. Then it would between the Kindle Fire and the iPad.

 

On the other hand, things are looking up for Barnes & Noble and Nook:

http://money.cnn.com/2012/04/30/technology/microsoft-nook/index.htm?hpt=hp_t3

I wonder if this is a prelude to Microsoft eventually buying Nook from Barnes & Noble outright.

 

Thanks Keith, I may stop by a local B&N tonight and see what they have...it's been years...

 

Interesting.

 

I've been doing everything I can lately to de-stablize downward trending sales. I can't stop buying cd's, new and pre-owned. How's that for being PC.

There are only 2 decent places I know of here to search for good stuff and I dread the day they shut their doors. I like Amazon and Ebay as additional choices, I just don't want my choices lessened.

Oh....and of course, the marketplace here !

 

How do you DJ with the music on pocket harddrives in flac (or create playlists live, for that matter)? What kind of organisational / folder structure and software do you recommend for fast access including a preview of the album cover before opening a file? Thanks for info.

 

Apple put a partial damper on this, forcing B&N and Amazon to redo their app so that it is a pure reader - that is - users could not purchase new books through the respective Nook/Kindle app, requiring them to purchase through the B&N/Amazon web sites.

The reason - to drive direct sales to Apple's iBook store.

 

Well I use Squeezeboxes which can do all of those things. I can also use Foobar, WinAmp, and any number of players as long as they can directly play flac files.

I'm sure there are plenty of other ways to do this. As for DJ use, I have no clue what software is out there, but anything should be able to access these files.

As for my structure, I have my music broken down into categories, such as Jazz, Pop, Classical, Comps, HD files (with it's own sub structure), and so on. Under each of those I have all the individual albums, or sub folders for multi volulme sets. It's really easy to navigate through.

 

I'm obviously no DJ, but I was thinking that maybe you only meant "how do you choose and play tracks?" So in that spirit (sorry if I'm wrong and not answering the question):

I use more than one tool for the job. One of them is Plex. You can view the cover as you browse.

 

Media player software that is going to give you fast access and fast searching is going to be organized in a database rather than having you browse folders. All the music would be in the database where it can be searched and sorted and displayed in many different ways. The fields in the database will be read from the tags in the files and not dependent on the actual folder structure. You don't need to even see the folder structure because it is no longer that important. You can even spread the library across multiple drives or directory trees and the database can combine everything into one cohesive library.

JRiver Media Center is an example of a program that organizes the music like that. Squeezebox is another.

There are media players designed for DJ use. I don't DJ so have never used one. They do have features that are convenient for DJs.

You can do some things in JRiver Media Center that can be handy for DJ use. For example, JRiver can handle multiple zones. Each zone connected to a different sound card. Plug two audio interfaces in. Set one zone as what gets played to the audience. Set the other zone as what the DJ can play to himself over headphones to preview tracks. Find the track you want then move it over to the playlist for the other zone.