In any format? I prefer to buy video games physically and have a respectable book, VHS and vinyl record collection. Though the majority of my music and video-based entertainment are digital.
Only vinyls because I think its fun to collect. Movies/shows are streamed from my server. Games are all on steam. Books I sometimes get but I also read a lot on my eink android tablet. And I get Spotify through my work so I listen to that when I’m out
Just books
Yuppers, my kids have a huge DVD and VHS collection of various kids movies and nature docs. I believe it promotes agency and choice better than picking through a never ending void of selection of media on streaming services. Plus we live like kings at flea markets, usually a dollar a tape or DVD.
I prefer buying CDs for music & physical games for my consoles when I can (physical games on PC is kind of a distant dream now…). For TV, I think the only option to actually own your media is through BluRay/DVD. The digital stores (like Amazon, Vudu i think?) only let you watch on their platform & don’t give you any files.
I do have a small number of vinyls & cassettes, but that’s more for novelty than any practicality.
Physical backup media. Hot mount SATA spinning drives and also USB 3 spinning drives. Some times software on flash drives. Flash drives for emegencey boot media. I sometimes transport files on flash drives too.
I think nowadays MP3s are physical media.
(And technically they’re stored on a physical medium in your possession).I guess it’s no different to a CD really. Just a smaller file on a bigger storage medium.
Well, MP3s are lossy compression so from a technical standpoint they’re very different from CDs.
If anything, FLAC files are closer to CDs than MP3s are because those are lossless, and of course WAV rips are raw, uncompressed rips similar to what you’d get with DAT.
No, but MP3s are closer to MDs or DCCs in that those are also lossy compression, with literally being an evolution of the codec DCC used (MP1) while MD used Sony’s homegrown ATRAC codec, than they are to CDs, while FLAC is lossless so it should be the same as a CD with WAV or AIFF rips literally being an uncompressed copy of said CD.
Yeah that’s my bad. You are literally correct. I was meaning more figuratively and going with MP3 as a general term rather than the format specifically.
That’s fine, I’m just nerding out.
The idea of classifying DVDs or videogames carts as “physical media” is twisting my brain. It’s physical storage but the data is still digital.
That said, I do prefer to backup my media physically, even if I downloaded it initially, and primarily use my own library instead of streaming.
I do have a small collection of vinyl and a huge collection of books. I still have all my old CDs, too, but most artists seem to sell new albums as vinyl-with-digital-download-code these days and that’s what I usually do.
Yeah so like if I put all my games on a HDD is that now physical?
The storage is physical, the media is digital.
Yes. Computer games have always been digital data on physical media. These days many people have access from someone else’s physical media, but if you own the media then I guess it counts.
Like actually use?
No, not anymore, though I do prefer to purchase media (movies, albums and the like) on physical media. It then gets ripped to digital and the originals stored against future need.
I’ve had my trust broken a few too many times.
Nope, that ship has sailed years ago.
When or ifever I end up buying music, it’s going to be physical where possible because legal download sites are going on delisting sprees now, eg. like 7Digital’s been doing for a while now.
At least with physical CDs, I can do my own FLAC rips and not worry about losing the physical copy unlike with legal download sites where if it’s delisted, it’s completely gone even for downloads you already bought.
Vinyl also technically can be ripped to FLAC, but since you’re digitizing an analog format, it’s a real-time process so you gotta sit through an entire side of an LP unlike with CDs which can be ripped quickly, plus you’d need to manually split the raw waveform up into individual tracks, and manually input metadata, digitizing analog formats like vinyl, open-reel, or cassette is a very long, drawn-out, and manual process vs. ripping CDs, but it’s something I’d still recommend doing especially as vinyl physically wears down every time it’s played back as is its nature being a mechanical format read by a stylus, so digitizing an album to FLAC for future playback and then putting the physical album back on the shelf can prolong its life, especially for any particularly valuable albums.
This goes for tape formats too although since they’re read by a magnet, they don’t wear down every time they’re played back in the same way vinyl does, but they still degrade.
Another perk to all this especially for digitizing vinyl in particular, is you’d have a FLAC ‘master file’ you could then transcode to Opus or some other lossy codec for listening on space-limited devices like a lot of lower-end mobile devices, but that also applies to FLAC rips of CDs or even digitized tape albums too; keep the FLACs at home while putting the Opus rips on your phone if your phone is space-limited (even 510kbit/s Opus rips are smaller than the FLAC input file while having no audible degradation).
I have a few physical books left to read and I have a lot of DVDs to watch. I would’ve liked to have had a few video game consoles and the amount of games I’d want to have per console, but the used video games market has been broken for a while now.
Music remains digital, I just outgrew CDs entirely.
I’m still resolutely offline when it comes to books. I also have a lot of DVDs and Blu-rays. I sometimes even still buy some. I also still have a box of music CDs in the basement but I only listen to MP3 (no streaming).
I read a lot of physical books. Everything else is digital for me at this point. I pirate everything. In a world where media can be endlessly distributed essentially for free, it feels somewhat wasteful to insist on physical copies of that media.
As much as I love collecting books, I’ve decided now my shelf is so full, my next reading purchase will be a kobo instead.
I’ll always prefer physical media over streaming for things I like.
It’s mainly Bluray nowadays, but also some older DVDs.
Records and books mostly. But I just moved my CDs out of my storage space.
