What is really the purpose of streaming??


What is really the main purpose on streaming?? Is it just a big convenience to have music and artists at your fingertips? Is it that you get a better sound than cds? What if you have a cd player with an exceptional DAC built in like the Rega Saturn R . To me when cds came out i never looked back on my LPs. I thought cd playback was the best. Now i hear alot of streaming talk. Can someone clarify this to me ? 
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Think about streaming like this…. You head out to your fav CD & LP retailer and grabbing a buggy, you just start loading it up with discs and records. No matter who, or which. Roll it over to a corner of the room and begin spinning them all one by one on your private end point…. And you still won’t be approaching the catalog size streaming can provide you. nor will it approach the flexibility for playback, skipping from one artist to some other, or one genre to another instantly.

Then, ya gotta put ‘em all back or buy them later.

What appears to be an immense library at the CD store is actually not nearly as large as is what can arrive from having a couple subscriptions to ‘streaming’ services, as the store has double, triple and quadruple redundancy amongst its inventory, so the actual number of individual albums is less than what is physically there in sheer numbers.

I’d offer one acquire more than merely one straming service, even if the streaming quality is not CD or above, purely for variety sake.

Hearing new music often stimulates me to purchase this or that album for my own library which I’ll rip to a NAS, and or load onto what ever device when traveling.

Streaming has made burning complilations a thing of the past, unless its as a gift.

In fact, many folks now are more savvy with personal confusers so I’ll merely paste files onto thumb drives and forgoe the burning process entirely.

Data backups today belong on HDDs. Possibly high density BR discs. Depending. Almost entirely for images and documents, not audio or video media archiving. Except for personal libraries inventories where the exact format or content can not be acquired readily otherwise.

It truly is a Brave New World, Mr. Huxley.


My analogy is that of the difference between your own personal library of thousands of books, and access to a large university library with millions. Of course, you don't own those millions, but you have unlimited access.
Having the world of music at my fingertips is not something I need. I don't listen to most of what's available anyway. My tastes run radically different from what's offered by streaming services. To be honest, internet radio holds more interest to me than any streaming service and I only listen to it while at my computer, if then.

If I like something, I'll buy it. Sometime in the future, I may consider installing all my music on a server with a built in DAC and listen that way. But then, that's me. 😄

All the best,
Nonoise
Streaming is about having access to millions of albums in all genres that you can listen to for what at this time is pocket change. 

It makes you much more adventurous in your listening habits. No need to stick with the tried and true. You can find a lot of really good albums that you never would have heard if you had to buy them before listening to them. If you like an album so much that you don’t want to take a chance on ever being without it, you can buy the cd, vinyl or download.   You don’t end up with a pile of cds that you don’t want but can only sell for pocket change.

On radio you can hear one song from an album. With streaming you can listen to the whole album anytime you want. If there are tracks you don’t like, you can make a playlist of the ones you do like and save it. Then you can add tracks to that playlist from other albums that fit the feeling. You can save single tracks if you only like one track from an album and there are a lot of those.

Streaming offers many advantages for the music lover.