You're conflating my intentions with wanting to replace streaming or what you carry on the go. I do not want to replace streaming with CD's. I want to replace owning my own music with streaming and I don't like that the most prevalent option for purchasing physical copies of music is CD's and vinyls - both of which have drawbacks in my eyes.

So I'm day dreaming about a new format that is essentially a cool SD or thumb drive in disguise that could host an album or an artist and be accessible via my phone in a way that vinyl and CDs are not.

You're writing a lot about a topic I'm not talking about. CD's are coming back, I don't love CD's, wouldn't it be cool if there was a better version of physical music we could buy. That's the whole Convo.

[–] Asetru@feddit.org 1 points 1 month ago

I still don't get it. If you want a small device to physically store your music, why don't you copy your music to a small sd card or thumb drive? If that's inconvenient you could just buy it digitally and move it to a drive without having to rip it first, there are a bunch of providers for drm free high res music files.

Physical media had their time when read only media could be produced much cheaper than writeable storage. With people routinely buying thumb drives that could store their entire music collection and having data plans that could transfer said collection within half an hour, I fail to see where physical media (beyond what's already there) would have any advantage. That doesn't mean I don't see any appeal. Having a small case for a bunch of sd cards you could just insert into your phone to listen to some music would offer a tactile experience. But with the cheap and available rewriteable media you could just do it yourself while I guess few to no people would be willing to spend 20 bucks on a 500 MB thumb drive just because it has a tiny album artwork printed on it.

I stand by my point that the MD was peak physical media and the CD offers all the quality humans could possibly need. If you're so keen on physical media but want to be able to literally insert them into your phone, there are USB-c drives that are barely bigger than your phone's port. Get one, put your music on it and plug it in. I still don't see who would buy single albums on overpriced thumb drives instead of getting a single one for the price of two or three albums and putting enough FLAC files on it to keep them listening until they're pushing daisies.