A week or so ago I bought all the albums by The Seatbelts off of eBay. With shipping/etc. the total came to ~$62, which is an awesome deal. The first group (6 of them, one of which was a re-release of one on one disc and a compilation of two others on the second disc, so actually 8) came on Tuseday? Wednesday? and the other group (CD-Box, which has 4 CDs and a little booklet that I can’t read because it’s mostly in Japanese) came on Thursday. So I’ve ripped all except CD-Box (gotta finish that up soon…) to my computer, and am listening to them as high quality .oggs now instead of pirated .mp3s.*
To go along with it, I got a new music player. XMMS has served me well for a long time, but I’ve really missed the ability to have playlists automatically generated by band/album/how much I like the song/etc. It also has a really annoying minimization problem. So now I’ve tried Rhythmbox and amaroK and I like both, and I think I’ll stay with amaroK. They both need a lot of work, neither of them is as good as they could be, but they’re more what I need than XMMS.
* That’s the main reason I don’t pirate much music. You can never get the format you want, and even when you do the metadata is in a billion different formats and you have to fix it yourself. In this case, though, they’re good enough that I had ~15-20 anyway. Oh, yeah–Take that, RIAA! Yet another testimonial of someone first getting pirated music to try it out (my friend told me about them), and then buying it! Not that this music was from the RIAA, I’d never actually support them.