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The CAPTCHA certainly helped on all the comment SPAM that was pouring in. Since I implemented the CAPTCHA scheme, not a single comment SPAM has been posted. Excellent. I know that it can be a pain in the ass, but I hope you can cope with it. Thanks to Edward Eliot for his PHP library.
And now for something completely unrelated.
When it comes to music, I’ve always bought CDs - never download only from any online stores. I enjoy having the CD, even if it’s not strictly necessary. It looks nice in my CD rack, but I haven’t used my CD player in almost two years now, I think. I buy the CD, rip it, transfer the songs to my laptops and to the iPod and put the CD in my collection.
As it is now, I guess it’s just a matter of time before I stop buying CDs and buy all my music online instead. The reason is the availability. Since I moved to Mac, I have to use iTunes as my music player and the iTunes store is dangerously easily available. For instance, I’ve been wanting to buy a couple of Alien Ant Farm for a while now and they are only a few clicks available for almost half the price of the price of a CD I buy in a record store.
There are, of course, obvious cons when buying music from the iTunes Store. First of all, the tracks can only be downloaded once, so I need to keep backups of all my music on CDs or DVDs anyway. The songs I download from the iTunes Store can only be played on iPods. But that’s not really a problem because I have an iPod and since I’m very please with it, my next portable music player will probably also be an iPod. If I, for some reason, want to transfer everything to another player, there are tools that will enable me to remove the DRM protection and convert the files to other formats if necessary.
Another con is the Norwegian iTunes Store’s somewhat limited selection of music. Take the previously mentioned band Alien Ant Farm, for instance. They have release three albums, but only two of them are available in the store; their latest release is missing.
Still, I guess it’ll soon be bye-bye for the beloved CD. It’s the technical evolution, I guess.
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