I got the new Franz Ferdinand album for my birthday. I’ve only listened to it maybe four times even though my 29th year is down by one month. The reason for this isn’t necessarily the quality of that album but is almost solely due to the fact that it is a “Dual Disc” (I originally mistyped that as “Duel Disc,” which is probably more appropriate—as you’ll see in a minute).
Minus the marketese, what that means is that the disc is a CD on one side and a DVD on the other which allows it to include both a 5.1 surround mix of the album plus some bonus video footage. It’s a nice idea, I readily grant you that. In fact the album comes in a traditional CD-only format and when I saw that the gift was the more feature-rich version I was pretty amped. That would be a short-lived reaction.
The CD plays just fine in Nikki’s car, which is where I heard it a few times on a fairly lengthy car drive. She had left it (wrapped) on the front seat for me. When I got home I did what I always do first thing when I get a new CD: I went to rip it to iTunes.
There are two reasons to rip all CDs I have. One is that I love digital music. The flexibility of it to have every song in one big list or mix it up with themes or clever correlations; the portability with iPods (and iPod-style devices) and the fact that you can burn mp3-only discs which lots of new CD players can interpret which gives you roughly 80 songs per disc and so on. The other reason is that—having iTunes, AirPort Express and a smallish apartment—I hardly ever never listen to CDs at home anymore. But I do listen to them at work and in the car (listening to the iPod in the car is a sort of adventure… potentially its own post so I’ll spare you today) yet transporting CDs is a risky game. I’ve ruined several CDs; some of my longtime favorites have had to be replaced several times over the years. With digital tunes I can burn copies of CDs and carry around cheap, replaceable discs without worrying about it.
Of course when I put the new Franz Ferdinand disc in, it acted goofy. Specifically, it acted like it wasn’t sure what to do with the disc. This was odd because, being a disc drive, that’s pretty much its only function. After several minutes of whirring and chirping and clicking away, the disc slid out as if the system were saying, “Ew.” I tried in vain for quite some time to get it to work, trying to trick the system or the disc into working together, for the betterment of my music library. Alas, failure eventually overtook me.
My next thought was actually rather enticing: For once, I had a legitimate use for Peer-to-Peer software! Here I had a perfectly legitimate copy of a CD which simply wasn’t working the way I wanted in terms of getting a digital backup. There was no legal problem with me downloading the songs from Bittorrent or whatever because it was an honest backup being downloaded. Even if the FBI kicked in my door and witnessed the download in progress they could do nothing: I had every right to download that album. Brilliant.
Of course despite the album being only a few months old it was remarkably difficult to find a full and compete copy of it online. The fact remains that most people who download stuff do so either illegally or quasi-legally (at best), depending on who you talk to. So in order to avoid trouble there is a cartoonish game going on at all times between the content owners who want to catch the downloaders and the downloaders who want to keep doing what they’re doing without consequence. It reminds me of those scenes in Looney Tunes where Bugs Bunny runs into and out of several (seemingly) unconnected rooms while being pursued by another character who can never quite seem to get the combination of doors and rooms and staircases quite right. The side effect of this is that people who are sort of outside the game (like me) have to futz around to an excessive degree to get what they want.
Eventually I found two torrents that theoretically had what I was looking for: One had an “Advance” copy in mp3 format, the other was a regular ripped version in FLAC, an obscure mp3 alternative that iTunes doesn’t understand (and whose file size is a bit large for my tastes). Unfortunately the “Advance” copy had a lot of seeds and downloaded quickly; but the files themselves were either corrupt or something else had been done to them because my tests revealed that they played only the sounds of silence. The FLAC version had no seeds, only two peers and took me almost three days to finish downloading. When I finally got it I found out that iTunes can’t cope with FLAC so I went about trying to convert them to mp3s.
The process of going from FLAC to mp3 on OS X may be as simple as the click of one button. But that’s not what I did. Instead I downloaded three seperate utilities, converted the files into at least four intermediary formats (three of which ended up being useless conversions) and was only finally able to get the results I wanted by downloading an application that had a 30-track or 30-day decoding/encoding limit, of which I used twice as many as I should have because my first attempt failed miserably. Of course.
Most frustrating about the whole thing is that I’m fairly confident that there was something screwy about the original CD. I’ve put all kinds of wacked CDs and DVDs into the Mac drive and never had a problem with it not recognizing the media as being what it is. The forced necessity of going online to find a copy of a CD that should have just been ripped in five minutes got me to thinking about all the problems people have had with Windows and purchased CDs that have included copy protection schemes and DRM insanity (which are conveniently ignored for the most part by Macs, but that could easily be a short-lived luxury) and I realized that this is why the music industry is so reviled online. I want to buy my music legitimately; I want to support the artists that I like monetarily; I want to have acceptable options for digital distribution and consumption (iTunes is pretty close, but it has no real competition and its DRM scheme is pretty good, but still potentially annoying). I want what the recording industry wants me to want, and yet they still manage to stymie my efforts to simply enjoy my music the way I’d like.
After all this, it better be album of the year.
