Downloads? Good enough?

Today, it was announced on radio and television that the amount of media, that's to say music, video and games people bought directly by downloading on to their many digital devices such as music and video players,games machines, music and computers now accounts for approximately 22% of all sales of these products.
You don't have to be an avid collector of movies or music to have noticed the demise of traditional record stores in many neighbourhoods and the increasingly limited stock carried by those still around including in the case of those resident in the UK, the HMV flagship store on Oxford Street, London.
It is true that niche markets such as specialty cds sought out for exceptional  sound quality still have a following as well as vinyl lps that are finding favour with youngsters as well as those of us who grew up with them who like the whole feel of owning something that can fully display the album art apart from those who feel cd just isn't as satisfying as sound.
One reason for this certainly all those gadgets we have, taking them with us which have freed us from the dependency of having to make copies in real time of our favourite music to listen out of our homes. Indeed quite a number of devices such as tablet computers allow you to buy music or films outdoors and listen to them  on the spot! Electronic book readers are very popular for this reason.
But there is something controversial in audio circles that has aided it.
When Apple launched it's first music player in 2003 - the iPod - a few years after the very first Mp3 portable players came out, the quality of the connection you had to the internet was often poor and really slow as most people didn't have broadband.
This meant when Apple started the iTunes Music Store as it was first called, they had to make the files this music was stored in quite small as otherwise it would of taken ages to get your music.
Apple also used a different way of altering the digital sound in the form a cd would normally use to a smaller file called Aac otherwise known as M4A, that stood for Advanced Audio Codec that sounded better than the older Mp3 early downloaders especially those who downloaded stuff for free used.
It helped make the ipod in many ways the replacement for portable cassette tape players as you could carry a lot of music about with you without lugged pockets full of tapes but while it was convenient and wasn't bad as sound goes it didn't really equal the best cassette players or the so 90's MiniDisc player for sound.
In time Apple have improved the sound quality by allowing more detail to be captured by decreasing the amount of sounds the device that converts a regular cd to a Aac file to be removed (all so-called lossy digital formats like Mp3 and Aac work by removing sounds tests showed we didn't really hear).
All of this is helped by people having more reliable and faster broadband internet connects that make downloading bigger higher quality files quicker
In addition, recently some albums are being polished (aka Mastered) by Apple themselves from sources they specify to a set standard one of which is tracks cannot be so loud they may cause poor sound on the loudest moments on the device that encodes the file you, as an iTunes store customer buy.
These albums have the phrase "Mastered for ITunes" by them and some audio fans have found their can be more of a difference between the quietest and loudest moments of a song in these versions than the high street cd!
At one site I visited, many people remarked on how well some of these tracks sounded compared to the many cd versions they own and so I did the unthinkable and got an iTunes store account.
I was really quite taken back by just how good some of the albums you can buy on Itunes really are when played on expensive home stereo system being gobsmacked to hear two out of print Temptations albums sounding at least as good as cds and I'm a fussy so and so as far as sound quality goes.
I got many of the new Led Zeppelin releases that have been "Mastered for iTunes" only to amazed with how good they were.
Some people from day one liked services like the iTunes store for the ability to buy odd tracks they liked but when as a jaded by bad sounding cds person like me can be amazed by this, isn't the case that perhaps for anyone other than a total perfectionist  downloads aren't not only convenient but actually so good that for everyday purposes they need not concern themselves with cds and their storage?
Plus a good number of titles can't be found on in print cds but are  available as downloads at the iTunes stores as well as Amazon's and 7Digital's Mp3 stores.
I'll tell this much folks, my aversion to downloads anything other than stuff not being on cd just died last week.

For those who aren't using an iPod or the iTunes player.
Sometimes  you'll find in the iTunes store a track is marked as album only meaning to get the song, you have to buy an entire album. This works by marking the track with a slightly different file extension which is accepted on an iPod or the iTunes player.
I did find some other players like WinAmp couldn't see them meaning they wouldn't play  but this can be fixed.
If you open up the iTunes folder on a PC and navigate the individual album in  a folder marked iTunes media you'll see each song has a file name like this:
all you need is love.m4a
above the artist info.
The tracks that are specially marked to prevent non album play read like this:
rockandroll.m4p
The p  stands for protected which in the early days of iTunes all the tracks were.
To fix it right click rename  and just change the p on the file extension .m4p to read .m4a and save.