Digital/Physical media - it's a case-by-case

Braindance
1

Music:
So I’ve been trying to move away from streaming. I have apple music but on the music front I got the Sony NW-A306 from Japan a few weeks ago (I’ll write up some comments about it at some point). I had been converting a lot of cds to minidisc for a while. (Collecting minidisc stuff has been it’s own hardware frustration with just old hardware). This time around it took about 3 weeks to re-ripped my CDs to flac. Who knows what format they were last time I did that into itunes around itunes match days. Having over 500 albums of my music in my pocket on that new walkman so far has been totally worth it. Plus still browsing record stores for used cds is fucking rad.

TV & Movies:
For movies and tv I hate binge watching and I’ll watch maybe one thing a night period and then read or do something else. So all the streaming apps are a hassle for me because I take so long to get through a show. I’ve been buying dvd show box sets for a little while. Until super recently I didn’t have any 4k blu rays and just a few blu rays at all. I thought I would want to go down the NAS and plex/jellyfin route but I think really I don’t mind just putting a blu ray in. Having it “instantly” available to stream in my house isn’t a big deal. It’s not so instant when it takes a while to rip it and and set it up for your server. I can just pop in the disc and feels pretty instant for me. Now the problem here is there’s half-price books for finding stuff used local or a big box stores (which I avoid). I try not to buy amazon and best buy stopped selling them recently. So finding places to actually buy 4k blu rays that isn’t amazon might be a problem.

Games:
Yeah digital all the way. I don’t see anyway around that unless you’re into playing PS3/Xbox 360 and prior gens exclusively.

Seems physical media has kind of gotten a bump in the zeitgeist in the last few months. Where ya at?

3 Likes
2

These are interesting perspectives and thanks for sharing them! I kind of go back and forth on the DVD front myself and I know several people that use their video game console as a 4K player and media center (as do I). A while back I started going through some old DVD series that I had.

I think what it all boils down to in my case is having access to my library wherever I am in my house and not being locked into one place or device when I want to watch or listen to something. Of course, this doesn’t necessarily apply to games as they are kind of locked to a certain device by nature, but I feel other media shouldn’t be that way.

I’ll be interested to read your review of your MD player, and I know that a couple of other folks here will be also.