Putting the theory and science aside for the moment, I’ll take the mobility offered by 160GBs of a lossless encoded HDCD music library on my iPod with a nice set of earbuds over vinyl any day.

What I think the issue here is what is considered “good enough”? For most people it is going to be iTunes and some form of Apple device. If they don’t like Apple, they will use a different device and method for ripping and playing music.

As far as ripping and then disposing of the media, it is an issue of license. As long as you maintain the original media, vinyl or CD, you maintain your license to listen to it. Get rid of the original and you also lose that license. There is no fair use here, keep it or lose it.

We maintain a large cabinet of CDs which are all transferred to iTunes for our listening pleasure. iTunes makes it easy to find and play the music. The cabinet ensures we maintain our license to play the music.

It is not so much about disposal of the original media, as it is about providing an opportunity to store them away. Having a archive on a detachable hard drive can be useful as well. There is a bigger picture here about strategies involving long term preservation and arhiving techniques involving disaster recovery situations. This was more about the means of preservation, not the ends.

The only sharing involved has been within the household via home sharing, but that was not the point of this article.

@DL: If you’re a true audiophile, why would you convert the music and then burn it again to a CD-R? Why not just keep the original disc and play that? That was the point of my question.

@Jeff: for gifting you can give gift certificates on iTunes, which I don’t think would be a problem as pretty much everybody uses a digital device for music playback these days. Also, sharing your music is illegal, which I doubt was part of the scope of this article.

Also, I don’t know about you but if I cared enough about somebody to give them a gift I certainly wouldn’t be so cheap as to burn a CD on a $0.10 disc. I’d at least buy them the CD, and wrap it too. :P

For the first, it is all about re-rpoducing as exact a copy of the original Music CD as possible. And as far as I can tell, that is not possible with XLD on a Mac. That is only possible via Toast (as outlined above). With EAC on a PC, I would secure rip to a single WAV+CUE file, and use EAC’s CD-R capabilities to burn as true of a reproduction as possible. I have not yet found a reliable means of burning the same WAV+CUE file back onto a CD-R natively on a Mac.

Keeping the second goal in mind, I will want to play back the music in a modern player. iTunes from my Mac, an Apple TV, an iOS device or an iPod. For connivence sake, I will also be tagging the decode files and adding album art. At which time I have altered the original format already. I might as well choose a Lossless format that offers compression and supports tagging. I can still maintain the original sound quality. Since all of my players are Apple products, I choose Apple Lossless over FLAC and WavPac.