I am pretty much referring to music that you actually own in one way or another, not music from Spotify, Deezer, SoundCloud, YT (Music) or whatever provider you use to stream music.
I am a bit old-fashioned and I prefer to have actual ownership of the music. I have a bunch of vinyls, some physical CDs that I use for backup (basically I rip them again if I ever have a problem with the already ripped files on my PC - also saves time because I can skip the albums that I own on CD when backing up my computer) and that I also buy because they’re cheaper, and finally I source the music from wherever I can find (mostly on Bandcamp when I can buy it). My rule of thumb is to keep .flac files on my PC and .mp3 on my phone, as the storage is lower - but sometimes the formats in which songs are available vary.
How are you keeping your music? Is it a digital or physical/analog environment? If it’s digital, which is the format of your choice? Why did you find it better for yourself than the rest?
(Sorry if this might not be the appropriate community for this question)
CD is the best answer IMO. I get why people like vinyl, but what they refer to as “warm tone” I hear as just static noise and pops. It’s a hell of a lot harder to rip tracks from vinyl to digital versions. Cassettes were always terrible, but they were portable. CDs sucked in cars or worse yet workouts, but being able to easily convert them to MP3 solves that nicely. CD is the best long term source storage, and like you said rerip them if your digital files get screwed up in some way.
@invertedspear So are you storing the (ripped) files in .mp3? Why not other format? 😁
Transferability, and I have some hearing issues so the loss of quality vs lossless audio is unnoticeable to me.