Mostly, though, it’s about predictability—knowing the music I’ve chosen to store locally will work anywhere—and about making an economic statement. As I said in the post, I’m trying to get away from having to manage my own music collection, so 99% of the music I listen to is streamed over the web. When I want to play music untethered, I have a portable device I think of as a sort of Rhapsody cache, i.e., I don’t use it for permanent storage of anything, just for temporary offline storage of the tracks I consider “favorites” at any given moment (and that changes over time).

I refuse to buy CDs anymore, because that rewards an outdated business model. At least buying music from the legitimate online music stores rewards the direction I hope the music industry goes, but I don’t want to reward the platform providers for trying to lock me in in the process, which is why I remove the DRM before I store the track. All else being equal, I reward Rhapsody, because I think they have the right model.

Personally, anytime I store a track locally I think of that as a stopgap. For example, the right solution for listening to my music collection on my TiVO is to have a TiVO interface that streams music from Rhapsody rather than from local storage. That doesn’t exist today, so I have to have a workaround. Rhapsody on Linux and Rhapsody on portable devices do exist today, though there is a lot of room for improvement in both cases.

Not that I think it matters really, it’s just that so many in the Linux community are so anti-microsoft that they wouldn’t think of touching any Windows software, period.

Personally, I’m for software I like and that works. I dual boot Windows XP and Linux. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

With regard to the DRM mess, I’m not sure what the answer is. The boycott idea is quite popular, but then it also deprives one of their favorite music.

Since I spend most of my time in Linux I’ve found the only practical thing to do is what I did 20 years ago. – I buy actual CDs. Then I can do as I please with my music (even an occassional DRM-encumbered CD if I want it badly enough. Besides the DRM on those only works if burning under Windows).

Or you could always use a CD-RW :-)