For random songs, I use the amazon store, which I am very happy with - the ability to download a plain old, DRM-free mp3 file is a consumer-friendly environment that I would not have predicted in this day and age.
However, if I want an album, I always buy and rip the CD to WAV/PCM. It's the real, unprocessed, uncompressed (lossy or lossless) bits of the CD, and I know of no other way to get those.
In my opinion, unless you have the PCM of the cd track, you will buy or rip that song again. This way you have it for good.
Why the hell would you rip it to WAV/PCM and not FLAC? You'll save on the order of 80% space without losing any quality; you can always convert the FLAC right back to WAV without anything being different.
However, there are other ways to get those as well. Bandcamp offers downloads in flac, mp3, ogg, and others. If the album isn't on bandcamp, or some other site that offers flac copies, then you can illegally pirate flac content from some-of-a-few audiophile websites.
I'm quite a fan of bandcamp and I'd highly recommend seeing if you can find good music there.
Not every use case involves a system that can play FLAC files, but just about everything can play a WAV file. For instance, one of my desktops is Irix on MIPS which I can play WAV files on, but not fancy things like FLAC.
Again, having the WAV file means I never have to touch that music again. Ever.
I used to play flac files on my Octane (300 MHz,1 CPU). Given how little load it caused, I'd expect it to work well on a O2 180mhz r5k. Perhaps you are using an older still iris machine though?
While just about any device can play .wav, many devices have so little storage that I find myself ripping on flac, the re-encoding to something lossy and lower bit rate to get a reasonable amount onto a mobile device.
> For instance, one of my desktops is Irix on MIPS which I can play WAV files on, but not fancy things like FLAC.
Why would that be? libFLAC has IRIX support since ~2002, and computational power certainly isn't the issue, there used to be (and may still be) devices with <100MHz ARM chips doing real-time FLAC decoding in software (using just libFLAC).
This is one thing that I really dislike about digital music stores - the fact that most of them don't offer a lossless option at all, and in the rare chance that they do, it usually costs extra, even though it really should come by default (because sheesh, it's what we've been getting on CDs for ages). Bandcamp is one of the few exceptions that get at least this thing right by offering a variety of options for a single price with lossless being one of them.
By the way, there's no reason to keep stuff around as WAV/PCM, it'll be just as lossless as FLACs (and thus can be further transcoded with no issue whatsoever) and you can actually tag the stuff like that too.
However, if I want an album, I always buy and rip the CD to WAV/PCM. It's the real, unprocessed, uncompressed (lossy or lossless) bits of the CD, and I know of no other way to get those.
In my opinion, unless you have the PCM of the cd track, you will buy or rip that song again. This way you have it for good.