How do you listen to music?

Youtube. Mainly to learn a song, (then get chords) and next for enjoyment, entertainment and actual artistic appreciation. :shock:

It would have been nice to be able to tick all that applied. I listen to the radio, play CDs in the car, use my iPod on public transport and stream/ download heaps from the internet, but I was only allowed to tick one option.

So I didn't bother.

I'm with Alan. I don't have one source - I go to sleep with the radio on, listen to MP3s, to CD, youtube, even the music channels via satellite.

I've got a variety of sources as well. If I'm sitting at my computer I listen via the PC. In the living room, where I do much of my serious listening I tune in to the CD player. At work and out and about I've got a cheapo MP3 player.

I'm a heavy user of Pandora radio. If you've not experienced it yet, go to Pandora.com, or download the free app from either the AppStore on iOS or the Marketplace on Android.

Pandora is revolutionary to me. The concept is simple. Create a new station by entering a song or artist you like. Pandora will use its database to find stuff it thinks you will like based on this. As you listen, you can help refine your custom station by clicking thumbs up or thumbs down on songs as they are streamed to you. Now that my stations are tuned, I almost never hear anything I don't like. I can't say that about traditional radio. Plus, I'm discovering a ton of music I do like that I've not been exposed to. Awesome!

We have a number of sources like that over here, sky.fm, 181.fm and Last.fm being the three I've got bookmarked. Pandora are US only so we haven't got them as a comparison.

I listen to Pandora to find new music and grooveshark.com to listen to songs if I'm trying to learn something I don't own on CD. Mostly I listen to CD's though. It's a pain to find what I'm looking for in my CD collection, not much organization.

It wouldn't let me pick more than one choice.

I listen to mp3s in the car, LPs and CDs in the home, the radio in the car and home, and also on the computer. Plus I listen to myself whenever I practice or gig.

Insights and incites by Notes ♫

I usually use my PC to listen to music while working either youtube, online radio or my song collections. I use my mp3/Ipod outside the house...

Dynaudios in the studio.

Headphones, if I want "nothing missed/critical listening":

Beyer PRO 770...5Hz to 35kHz...best if you cup your hands over them so you get them pretty much sucked into yer ear 'oles!
/
Cat

My preferred order:

1. Live
2. on vinyl
3. on magnetic tape
4. on CD
5. on mp3 players

The longer I've listened, the better my ears have gotten to certain things. And the better they've gotten, the more jarring I find certain 'artifacts' from digital compression.

Most recently, my sister gave me a Christmas present last week: a boxed DVD set of James Levine conducting the Metropolitan Opera in Wagner's ring cycle. Wagner's four operas in the cycle comprise a truly massive work - about 15-1/2 hours in performance. Last Sunday I watched the first one (Das Rheingold). Great costumes, GREAT lighting, excellent music and performances... but in spots, I could hear the compression on the vocals as they squeezed it down to make it fit (Rheingold runs 2:43, the shortest of the four - all the others are over 4 hours). Pack that all onto a single disk, add some other stuff like bonus features and subtitles available in four languages, and there's simply too much data.

I can't say it ruined the opera, because it didn't. And I really enjoyed seeing the staging. And the compression wasn't throughout, and they did seem to consider (for the most part) when to apply it - on recit passages rather than arias. As far as the music is concerned, I greatly prefer other formats. I'm hoping the others will be better - Rheingold is the only one that's a single disk in the set.

When I'm listening at home, no matter what format, I'm just about always using decent headphones. Even though I've got really good speakers, I still prefer to immerse myself when I have time.

I'm with Note Boat with a couple of additions
1. Live
2. on vinyl
3. I would insert on magnetic tape here (reel to reel) - but count this out because my R2R died and I sold it for parts
4. on CD
5. on mp3 players
6. on the Internet (sometimes you have to, but there is even more compression there)
7. on cassette tape (I'd rather not but I have some cassettes that are no longer available any other way)

And while I prefer vinyl over CDs, often time I'll do CDs for convenience. CDs (in the words of one of the inventors of the format) "have severe quantization errors". They make Stan Getz's tone sound more like Zoot Sims, they put extra edge on violins, and do not truly represent the tone of anything. But they are easy to play and do not have the surface noise of an LP. So it depends on which form of distortion you prefer.

Notes

it depends on which form of distortion you prefer.

True enough. Skips and pops for me - I'd rather hear the tones in analog.

it depends on which form of distortion you prefer.

True enough. Skips and pops for me - I'd rather hear the tones in analog.

So would I. Surface noise to me is less offensive than the change in tonal color.