I’ve been buying a lot of CDs lately…

Up to now I’ve always used a proxy service when buying from Amazon Japan. They do offer a lot of direct shipping, but only for a limited set of categories. Recently I found out that galge OSTs and light novels can ship direct now, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

Ruri Yakushi (薬師るり) is a singer I was kind of curious about. First off, her singing is actually solid — at least on CD it is, and without much obvious pitch-correction smeared over it. She switches styles freely too: she can sing just about anything. No-holds-barred stuff, hentai anime stuff, totally shameless stuff, tear-jerking stuff, plain love songs, denpa songs — she covers basically everything. From what I read, she still works as a pharmacist on the side, which is why she took the stage name “Yakushi Ruri” (yakushi being the word for pharmacist). Anyway, the music’s good, so I picked up the new album. Apparently first-press orders came with a signed copy — except I can’t read a damn thing on this signature besides “ありがとう”…

Overseas shopping is nothing new—I’ve seen people buy from Japan, the US, and the UK, but rarely from Taiwan. Some discs are only released in Taiwan, and there doesn’t seem to be a direct way to buy them; most people go through Taobao proxies, which is a real pain. But there’s finally a way: I found Rock Records’ official online store, so at least I can buy albums from a lot of artists I like. When ordering, it explicitly says it supports mainland China, and even supports Alipay payment—though I still used a credit card.

Normally I couldn’t care less about made-up shopping holidays like Double Twelve or Double Eleven. Most of what I follow is electronics, and electronics prices are already transparent as hell, so these so-called shopping festivals rarely throw out anything tempting. Nothing worth buying, in other words.

JD had a sale recently, so I bought a pile of CDs that had been sitting in my cart. Obviously I’m not going to actually listen to the discs — I’ll rip them and throw the files onto my MP3 player. And since I might want to share them, I’ll rip to whole-disc WAV first, share the archive, then compress to FLAC for myself. How to rip CDs on Linux as elegantly as EAC on Windows — I thought about this for a long time and looked up some software. The best-known one is rubyripper, and the moment I opened it I saw the official site, where the author says, “It’s the age of streaming music! Only an idiot rips CDs! So this project is done for!” So I flipped through the Wiki and realized I really am an idiot — the command line is enough for ripping.