Poll: How do you get music on to your phone? (connect, system)

[TheGrandK-Man]

Phones and digital music players have become the prevalent way to listen to music on the go. But exactly how do you get the music on your device?

[sholomar]

I compressed my music collection to OPUS format at around 100K bitrate for use on my phone. To my ears it sounds fairly transparent. It's a highly efficient codec and no other codec I've used sounds as good at around bitrates of 80k VBR. I use android so I just drag and drop. None of that having to go through itunes nonsense.

[TheGrandK-Man]

Well!

Only two days left to this poll, and it has gone exactly opposite from the way I predicted! So quality, and possession of a physical file(vs in the cloud or a streaming service) do matter to people.

And I agree 110% with stockwiz regarding intermediary software between mobile devices and the music files on a desktop. iTunes can, and will, depending on what is hooked up to it, decide what songs it 'sees' and will make available to what device. That is unacceptable, and will no doubt lead many music fans to defect from Apple, its software, and its no doubt ergonomic and quite intuitive device user interface. Try turning off auto-correct for the keyboard on an Android OS device - if you can find the submenu where such functionality is located! smh

[Redraven]

My cell phone is simply that: a phone.
I do not text, I do not play games on it, I do not take pictures with it, and it contains no music (except for ring tones).

[Hemlock140]

Mine has too many more important uses such as photos, news, and email to take up a lot of space and battery power with music. I have a few favorite songs bought from Apple for 99 cents but I use Internet radio at work, Sirius in the car, FM at home. I have resisted the temptation to become the apparent zombies walking around with headphones all over Seattle.

[Peregrine]

I chose all 3 options.

[Tek_Freek]

I found Muzecast in another thread on CD and am testing it. So far it's been excellent. All music is on the server and Muzecast connects to my Android devices. 32,204 songs. Easy install and setup.

[Sydney123]

I use iTunes and play it through my car radio via Bluetooth. I don't care about all the technical goobly ****... I just want to listen to my music. Sounds great through my Bose System.
If I want to hear a particular song I jus say, Hey Siri... play such and such.

[TheGrandK-Man]

In order of quality as a priority my sources are:

1. CD rips & Vinyl to digital: I know what I'm getting because I control the quality of the source. Especially with legacy artists(before 1990). With a stream source or Siri, who knows what I'm getting - a dynamically compressed, loudened 'remaster'? My CD collection has largely become remaster-free over time, so with the earlier CD releases I'm confident I'm getting sound closer to what those artists had in mind in the sessions.

2. Legal downloads: Amazon, especially, allows me to preview several instances of a rare song I cannot find the CD for. Typically I will select a quieter version, because it is less likely to have suffered the effects of 'remastering': squash-&-louden!

3. YouTube or other stream, for preview purposes, to get an idea of how a new modern track sounds before I buy either the CD or digital downloads of specific songs from it.

With servers I cannot be confident that the source used is not a remaster of a remaster of a remaster, or if the streaming service applies processing - other than volume matching - to its stream sound.

Yes, quality matters that much.

[Malloric]

All of the above. Mostly streaming, but I have my collection of older music mostly from when I was in high school/college. Spotify @320kb/s is more than good enough if I wanted to go all the way up there and eat bandwidth.