My friend Greg and I once went on a grand quest: To find Bruce Dickinson’s latest album. This would’ve been around 1993 or 1994, in our adventures together. It is a seminal journey that we took, because back then, if you wanted music, you had to go the record store and buy it by the vinyl or cassette or CD. There was no Napster. There was no iTunes Store. There was no Amazon Prime. And there was no Spotify, or anything like it on the Internet. Dial-up was just too slow to deliver rich content just yet, so when it came to Dickinson’s last album, we were on a noble quest. We visited practically every record store in Indiana and Kentucky, looking for that long-sought-after prize. When Greg finally found it — at the Ear-X-Tacy records out on Shelbybille road — a good twenty miles from either of our homes — I found something too: Oingo-Boingo’s sought-after first album, and Danny Elfman’s first solo album “The Dark At the End of the Tunnel.” And I love and cherish both albums today, though nowadays I keep them on digital, so they can never become encrusted with “passenger-seat floor butt-crud,” as Greg called it. But y’know, I think we lost something in the transition from physical media over to digital. And what we lost was: The epic beauty of fold-out artwork; the smell of the new CD in your hands; breaking the plastic jewel case to get the damned thing open; and a million other subtle, sensory nuances — not to mention epic quests to record stores on the hunt for some gem you wanted! — in the process. We lost, I think, part of the soul of music and video, and that part of its soul we lost is, I think, the physical connection we shared with our accumulated libraries. The feeling that you had actually accomplished a feat If you came home with what you were looking for; and the rush of finding it at long last. Not to mention all the fun conversation on the way there, wherever there might be . . . because you never knew: That album you wanted so badly might be lurking just around the corner at Sam Goody’s . . . or it might be stacked in the corner of a used record shop. There was the thrill of the hunt, of the chase, and the journey on the way there. There was a vitality to finally acquiring this or that piece of physical media; a triumph of the soul that’s somewhat lost when you can just go on YouTube.com, and find whatever you want instantly.

Indeed, the digital age has brought us great bounty and has borne great fruit. But it has also robbed us of a vital part of the musical process . . . and that is the thrill of the hunt, the triumph at its climax, and the wonder of popping an album into your CD player to see if it was really worth all the trouble you’d gone to to procure it.

Just something to think about with your morning coffee. Digital might be awesome in its scope and variety . . . but it has also taken something feral and raw from the human experience: The journey to get there.