Music

CD is the best answer IMO. I get why people like vinyl, but what they refer to as “warm tone” I hear as just static noise and pops. It’s a hell of a lot harder to rip tracks from vinyl to digital versions. Cassettes were always terrible, but they were portable. CDs sucked in cars or worse yet workouts, but being able to easily convert them to MP3 solves that nicely. CD is the best long term source storage, and like you said rerip them if your digital files get screwed up in some way.

minidisc is the right answer, but the world collectively said no to it.

Owning (physical): CD
Actually: FLAC
Actually: FLAC on a big HDD backed up 2 times.

Owning, CD. Then rip to mp3 and play through Plex via my local network.

I love the idea of vinyl, because that's what I grew up with. My father had hundreds of albums at home, and would play a lot of them quite regularly.

Realistically though, CD is better for most of my uses, and ripping them to mp3, or another format now that there's more support for smaller files, covers every use case that I have.

As Scrubbles suggested above though, vinyl wall art with NFC tags could be perfect for me. Maybe some CD artwork for the less influential releases too :)

I have a soft spot for cassettes, they were my main musical ... thing growing up well into high school. I cant remember the last time I actually listened to any of my old tapes but I keep them around to look at. Ive also got a cd collection, much smaller since I went basically right from tapes to downloading. These days i stream most music but I still purchase digital copies of albums (directly if I can to support the artists) and listen to mp3 on my desktop regularly

For me, I only keep digital music and in flac form if I can get it in high quality. I personally don't have any nostalgia for physical stuff.

I really like tapes, if only because they’re a very versatile and accessible format. The tech behind them is also simple in a way I really like. I enjoy world building and because tapes and their readers are so relatively simple, they fit in well with worlds where there is technology but no huge supply chains and economies of scale to make more complex things practical.

I also like mini disks because they’re so interesting in how they work.

Not much of this is relevant to the music I suppose, but it’s why I have these things and music on them.

Any of it is so much better than listening to an AM radio while I delivered newspapers.
Yesterday I heard a Red Rider song from an album that I had recorded on cassette off FM radio.
I converted whatever music I had into MP3s 20 years ago, When I was converting LPs to MP3 I did several concept albums which didn't have songs, so I set the length at 6 minutes or less. I was using MP3 Direct Cut which had a bar graph, I could visually chop up albums into songs without actually listening. Over some years I went through my collection & chopped up songs that were too long or have intros longer than 10 seconds, I may or maynot keep the originals. I use the comment field for tags to make it easier include/exclude long, duplicate, alternate versions I have more than a few copies of music files, including data cd's from 15 years ago, sata hdd, sd cards, nvme. every 6 months or so I renew a couple of the back ups

Digital (hard drive) > CD > Vinyl

lossless digital because it’s searchable, accessible and manipulable.

CD as archival storage. Slower to acess, high quality, lossless.

Vinyl for archival and playback. Something awesome and magical about analog.

Depends on band somewhat for me. I guess preference overall is digital, but I’ve always bought Wilco albums in vinyl for some reason and I’ve always bought Mountain Goats albums on tapes due to his history with the format