beggars can't be choosers

[HibyPrime]

So now that I'm listening to an abundance of french music, I'm finding it harder and harder to find the songs I'm looking for on limewire/BT.

Downloading music is fine for any mainstream, north-american genre, but international music does not fall into that catagory. The little bits of music I am able to find are all below CD quality music. Most of the songs are encoded at 128kbps or higher, but they are most definatley NOT cd quality - people seem to get a kick of encoding low-quality files at high bitrates... And no, it's not my speakers.

After going through iTunes and figuring out how much it would cost to get all of the music I want, I came to a figure of ~$200 (178 USD). This is downloaded from iTunes, not the discs themselves.

I'm at a loss of what I should do here, paying for MP3's just seems stupid, but to buy the physical discs would cost ~$400 (356 USD...)

Do I wait until the extra money is there (should be ~2 years) to buy the discs? By that point the price would have raised to ~$1000... Thats a large cash outlay all at once. Not to mention the time spent ripping the discs to MP3 format.

And ideas? I miss the days when there were hundreds of listings for the songs I was looking for...