2 hours? You’ve obviously never built a C-90 compilation from vinyl (neccessitating a test and re-set of the recording level for every damn track) with snatches of dialogue from your video collection effortlessly segued in between the songs. Did I say effortlessly? Make that “effortfully”. I’ve spent entire bank holiday weekends doing a single tape. Only to play it back and discover that track 7 on side two doesn’t really fit in the rest of the vibe.

All that effort, and she still didn’t shag me!

When MD was a popular format in Japan you could go into a MD JUKEBOX enabled store, pop in a blank and buy tracks one at a time..I guess today’s equiv may well be a USB pen, SD card or something but I agree, the real deal artwork and packaging is sorely missed.

One point which has surely been made a thousand times before is, as the purchase of music becomes more and more flexible, the existence of the “album” is threatenend which is unfortunate…consider also the home compilation cassette, once upon a time building a compilation was a 2 hour affair where one would spend a good bit of time choosing the tracks and the running order…a playlist is too damn easy and how often do you really bother giving one of those any thought?…..

Regarding your USB machine idea, why don’t the shops simply sell pre-populated USB sticks containing the full album?

As you’ve said, they cost jack sh!t these days, and you could still pack ‘em in a wee plastic box with accompanying artwork / lyric sheet – which is what I miss most about downloads as a format.

Nothing paricularly new with this idea:

Barenaked Ladies had a go as far back as 2005, but were looking to charge $30 for it. Keane released a USB single last year for less than £4. But as the hardware grows ever cheaper, I think there’s merit in USB Stick as a more widespread music format.

For maximum flexibility you’d need a new(-ish) generation of mp3 players that feature USB host capabilities so you can simply plug in the stick and upload the album to your portable device, but that’s hardly a huge leap.

Getting the bean counters and their nerdy mates in the music biz to once and for all abandon DRM as a sh!tty idea whose time is now gone might be the more difficult push.

As to your other main point – I believe that emusic.com will let you re-download anything you’ve previously purchased for no additional cost. And with prices from 15p a track for mp3s unencumbered by DRM, what’s not to like? all 100% legal too. Note – if yer gonna sign up here, let me recommend you so we can both benefit.

Finally, it’s received wisdom in digital circles these days to always rip yer CDs in an uncompressed form – you can always re-compress if you want to load ‘em onto yer portable device, but you can never uncompress an already compressed choon. Anything less than 192kbs sounds horrible on my hi-fi, but even at 192 or 224, there’s still a significant difference between that and the actual CD.

Bet you didn’t do that. No, neither did I (90GB and growing – all ripped at 192kbs).