Continuing with CDs?

Also, I may want to rip at a higher bitrate later once hd prices come down.

yeah i thought about that. A couple weeks ago I embarked on digitizing my collection, starting with albums I didn't like that much; I ripped ~ 30 cds @ 320 which is fine for those but my main collection I'm probably gonna want to do in flac or whatever for posterity but i haven't done the math on what i'll need for space. I got 2 500G drives on black friday and I was gonna send one back but maybe I won't. than again i've been latched to rhapsody pretty hard lately and soon even the mp3s might be ancillary to how i'm listening to music. so much up in the air.

soon as I'm satisfied with backing up, and keeping the habit, I'm selling all my CDs. I need the space and I need the money.

i've sold all of my cds. still buy vinyl, which i also sell sometimes. while it's impractical, it retains its value better (and escalates in value far more often) and is more 'fun'. sue me

I keep the price stickers on my CDs, and it amazes me just how much I was paying for music in the 90s. £15 - £16 for some CDs was not unusual.

We still quite frequently pay $25-$35 AUD for some CD albums in this country. And they wonder why ppl use torrents.

resolved, did you just rip your CDs into FLAC format and keep them on your hard drive or something?

i ripped the ones that deserved it to FLAC + mp3 (for ipod), most of them just to variable rate mp3. and then a lot i just sold without bothering.

Will you bother trying now to sell off your existing CDs?

maybe. next year I might be compelled to "monetize" my vinyl collection.

Will you leave them as a record of 80s/90s to early 00s buying?

hate to say it but after sitting there unplayed for awhile they just take up space.

Will you continuing buying CDs selectively alongside downloading, for reasons of completing certain artists or genres?

Barely. I stream music on my computer, listen to old CDs less & less often. CDs/itunes I buy as gifts.

First off, CDs are still the primary way i listen to music, and I don't download very often.

1.) I'll hang onto my CDs for a long, long time, until they rot away (none of them have). I stopped selling back CDs a few years ago, because I tend to regret it later on. I used to regularly purge my collection of stuff if I hadn't played it in awhile, but there are too many CDs that I'm kicking myself now for selling then.

Plus, it always killed me when I tried to sell stuff that I knew was of really high musical quality or that someone would love to have, and the clerk would offer a pathetic couple of bucks (usually less!) for it. Most used stores never offer very much for CDs, and now when I think about it, the best offer I've ever received (about $3 for a CD, not common at all) is just not worth it to me. I'd rather hang on to the album, sorry, then take your 50 cents.

2. I'll keep my CDs as much more than just a record of this particular time, as they have fucking music on them!!

3. I'll probably buy CDs for quite a while. As others have mentioned, there are so many good finds on used CDs right now, it's great. So much stuff that I would never expect to find in used shops. It's only going to get better over the next few years, too.

Newbury Comics usually gives about $3 per CD.

1) No - mainly because CDs are not worth much now, particularly when trying to trade them in at a record store.

2) Most of the CDs I listen to regularly have been ripped now, but I'll keep them as a backup and also because of the possibilty of ripping in higher quality formats/higher bitrates later.

3) I still buy CDs sometimes but nowhere near as often as I used to - I've gone from half a dozen a week in 2001 to a couple a month now. But if I see a box set at a cheap price I'll probably buy it.

Those of you who sell off your CDs, someday your hard drive is gonna fail. If you're lucky, you'll have it backed up to another drive. But then that one could fail as you're trying to dump it to your new hard drive. Then I will point and laugh.

I've never had a hard drive die on me ever before. Meanwhile in that time a lot of my records and CDs got damaged in a flood. Life's funneee.

I wonder how homeowner's insurance would cover a hard drive filled with burned FLACs. Are you just screwed or could you reasonably claim the full value of replacing them on iTunes or whatever?

i sold them on amazon btw, the run of the mill ones at least. you get a lot more money that way if you're prepared to go to spend an hour going packing/going to the post office every few days.

x-post
but when your hd dies it's all gone. and the probability is much higher than all your cds being destroyed at once...

word. i'm still reeling from getting over £30 for a tatty Sasha & Digweed CD. xp

what is with you hd-failure doomsayers? you have to fuck a hd up pretty bad before the data on it is completely irretrievable.

Oh I'm just curious from an insurance standpoint. Like what if someone broke into your house and stole your HD. Can you only claim the HD or could you reasonably claim the cost of replacing the MP3s (I just talked to my boss-a former underwriter--and he's gonna find out for me)?

once i had a hd which seemed perfectly ok. but suddenly it crashed. it had been formatted a couple of megabytes too high. when i reached the limit it was all over.

presumably it might differ according to the original source of the mp3s. like if you've bought them from digital sources in the first place you'll have the receipts etc to demonstrate this. if you've just ripped your cd collection i assume you'd be shit out of luck.

The downloading thread is bad for music. People need to see an entire album as an artistic statement, and not just pick single tracks.

The only positive thing is that people are at least less fixated on singles, able to see that there may be good tracks that aren't hit singles too. But generally, downloading is bad bad bad bad!

BAD!

Bad?

bad bad bad bad

On the insurance thing, pretty sure the only things that would be insurable would be receipted downloads, as you don't actually legally "own" the ripped mp3s if the CD is gone, thus they have no insurable value.

xpost

People need to see an entire hamburger as an artistic statement, and not just pick off the pickles or eat the grilled onions.

http://www.baronbob.com/hamburgercdholder.jpg

Snacking is destroying the meal preparation industry

home cooking is destroying the fast food industry.

The hamburger analogy isn't so hot. I prefer to think of an album as very much like a box of chocolates.

yes, yes, and yes i guess. the last few times I went to sell stuff back i didn't get a whole lot, and with 800+ CDs still it's kind of a pain to drag them up to amoeba and then back home. BUT, I did sell more stuff recently, and got more money for them than I'd expected; might have just been because I had a new buyer. I also sold off a ton of rare stuff on ebay because this stuff is never going to be worth more than it is right now. But there are things I still can't see myself getting rid of, and I'll still buy CDs from time to time, of artists I like, who pay attention to packaging

Geir you assume no one downloads whole albums, then? Oh wait why am I even arguing.

Mark Clemente OTM on all counts. Same for me.

you have to fuck a hd up pretty bad before the data on it is completely irretrievable.

That's not entirely true. I've had an external (Maxtor) drive fail that wasn't fucked with at all, and internal (IBM) drive that, well, it was involved with Microsoft products, so I guess was doomed to fail. (Back on a Mac, thnx Bill.)

Secondly, have you ever paid to have your data retrieved? I did, once, for 40GB worth of data - and paid about $1K/10GB (aka $4K). Now I've got two external drives, backing up my backup of my backup. But I would guess that, for example, $4K to retrieve one's digital library would, by cost alone, define "irretrievable."

Youch. I had no idea. That's crazy expensive.

when you say fail do you mean it was completely beyond repair/no way to salvage at all?

Geir you assume no one downloads whole albums, then?

Some do, but way too few. We need to get back to the early to mid 70s where typical album acts such as Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Yes and Genesis dominated absolutely everything.

i've had a few drives fail; i'm not sure what the problem was, but it had to do with the b-tree something or other getting corrupted, and no operating system (windows, mac, dos) could read certain sectors. I'm relatively positive running norton on the drive made it worse actually.

"We need to get back to the early to mid 70s where typical album acts such as Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Yes and Genesis dominated absolutely everything."

Geir you should go back in time Terminator-stylee and kill Malcolm McClaren's mother or something.

People need to see an entire album as an artistic statement, and not just pick single tracks.

so funny. geir's far from the only person who thinks this, and i shake my head sadly at every one of them

anyway

Will you bother trying now to sell off your existing CDs? - possibly, but it may end up being too much effort
Will you leave them as a record of 80s/90s to early 00s buying? - some of them i might, but there's not really any need
Will you continuing buying CDs selectively alongside downloading, for reasons of completing certain artists or genres? - kinda.. i like having the disc if i'm a big fan, mainly for liners & pics. i couldn't give two hoots about the "extra quality" of a cd vs mp3 (which is pretty hypocritical of me considering i am obsessed by the difference with regards to my own recordings)

http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php

if disk warrior fails, use that.

We need to get back to the early to mid 70s where typical album acts such as Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Yes and Genesis dominated absolutely everything.

Christ you sound like my boyfriend haha.

i used something called stellar phoenix succesfully as well, but it only works on FAT formatted drives

I've got a room with racks on almost all the walls (except the one with a couch on it). My CD collection is a bit of a changing art collage of spines, when I had it in the same room as my PC I almost memorized the color flows.

The volume of my racks is the limit of CDs I'll own, about 4500 or so. I try to purge 100 or so every year but the inflow is still greater than the outflow and all the truly horrible albums have long since been sold. I'm now at the Ned Point, where I'm ripping and selling albums that aren't bad but simply never grabbed me. I figure I'll have reached my limit in 3-5 years.

But, yeah, I have fetishized the physical. I love getting a CD in the mail, or tracking down something hard to find even if I've already downloaded it. But I also want to make my own rips because almost no one sells high-quality VBR's of the stuff I buy.

They may end up in boxes one day after I've ripped them all and we decide to repurpose the music room.

when you say fail do you mean it was completely beyond repair/no way to salvage at all?

I had the internal drive repaired out of apparent necessity (it held all of my class notes/outlines and crashed a week ahead of my first year law school exams). I only say "apparent" b/c, well, it didn't seem to improve my grades much (sigh).

The external drive, as I still had (and have!) a vast majority of my music on CD, I didn't look into salvaging b/c it just didn't have a pulse (i.e., it'd turn on sometimes, but usually not, or wouldn't get recognized by any of my PCs/Macs) and given the aforementioned expense and lack of the necessity above, just wasn't worth saving.

People need to see an entire album as an artistic statement, and not just pick single tracks.

I wholeheartedly agree and it's the single greatest driver of my continued purchasing of CDs. I think the only thing that sabotages the argument is artists that don't deliberately set out to make an album per se (and are, by design singles artists). But then, I rarely find myself impressed by such singles artists and even less frequently cite them as influential either in my continued study (as it were) of music or their impact on their peers.

1. No
2. Some, yes
3. Definitely

I won't buy anything with DRM though. That's already ballsed up a couple of my artist collections.

1. No, never have have, don't think I'll start now. I'll always have the nagging feeling that just one day I might be dying to hear Miranda Sex Garden's first album at 2AM

2. Yes, being a relatively nostalgic person, browsing my collection always reminds me of my musical phases. Also, and mostly, for me a CD collection is a relatively social thing, whereby guests can check out what I have, pick sth out to put it on or borrow it. Obviously, you could also do that by browsing my iTunes library but that strikes me as somewhat unsociable

3. Yes, but like said upthread, these days I usually dowload first and then buy what I really like. Somehow, psychologically, I can only engage seriously with a song or an album if I have it on CD. Old fashioned, I know.

Can I be the only person who buys music from itunes?

those who are ripping and selling may want to take a look at this thread:

The Data Migration Thread

Anyway,

1. Probably not very many more, I sold or traded around 200 about a year ago.

2. I will leave them, not so much as a record of buying, but as a more reliable data backup than some hard drive or DVD-R.

3. yes, as long as stuff continues to come out in CD-only formats and not on vinyl.

Can I be the only person who buys music from itunes?

With the rise of Amazon's DRM-free, higher bit-rate downloads?

You might rabbit. You might.

as someone who loves buying vinyl, it's really disheartening to walk into almost every record store now and see nothing i want to buy for the money they're asking. it's akin to the baseball card boom circa the late '80s/early '90s, when the new cards for suddenly hot-shit players were going for $50 apiece, and sports card dealers were starting to only deal w/collector scum or price speculating newbies. i'm not saying you won't get more bang for your buck from a Lana Del Rey record vs a David Justice rookie card, but i feel like it's making a lot of people quit the game in the same way, what you get from the hobby isn't worth the cost anymore. and therefore CDs are the cheap and frequently higher quality path to hearing so much music.

however i've got rules, there are some things i'm always and forever buying on vinyl.

used vinyl in many stores isn't worth the trouble, but new stuff from indie labels still falls somewhere from $14 to the low twenties, so that's what I buy (and used CDs, where they have them). I don't touch the (mostly major label) new stuff that's over $30 for a single lp.

I listen to vinyl because I like the way 50s and 60s records sound on vinyl.

The new stuff scares me, though. I saw a Kiss hits record at WalMart for 30 bucks. I wouldn't sit through an entire Kiss record on vinyl, CD or anything. I'm a singles/ mixes person.

I buy a decent number of CDs these days, and it feels funny that the reasons are the exact same ones I started buying some vinyl in the 90s. It's a cheap way to access stuff that's non-available or stupidly expensive on streaming/vinyl. (It'd be cheaper and easier to do a digital archive, I know, but I worry if I started I'd have the urge to stockpile every last thing I'd ever liked, and that's not what I want. I want to patronize stores and find things I care about and have them sitting out reminding me they exist.) Instead of old vinyl in the bottom bin costing 10-20% of what a new CD did, now the old CDs down there cost a tenth of what new vinyl does. Instead of records opening up a world of 60s/70s albums that never really hit any other format (exotica! forgotten funk!), now CDs open up something similar for the 90s/00s (IDM compilations! forgotten experimental!). Even the process of looking through used CDs in a store feels like looking at records used to, where everything's basically just a few dollars and you never know what treasure you'll find -- whereas over in the vinyl bins the excitement of finding something fun tends to be immediately deflated by looking at the price. I still buy both, but if I want something for listening purposes and the record is $50, I would absolutely rather take ten $5 CDs, I'm ... not not an idiot, but still

Just went to give the +/- 180 CDs to the book shop with the vinyl-only music section, but the owner wasn't there at the moment. Will try again tomorrow.

But as a CD nerd, I'm excited that I'm going to roughly double their selection, and instantly giving them a whole quite decent CD selection, preparing for the coming Gen Z music geeks who dig CDs because vinyl has become a stupid expensive gimmick as per posts above...

My Target sells the Swift stuff that omar little mentioned plus a few archival vinyl things like Abbey Road, The Dark Side of the Moon, and, of course, Rumours (maybe the most popular of all).

i'm glad i live somewhere where used vinyl is still affordable! all my pals who have stores have awesome prices. well, byron has crazy prices but he's selling crazy stuff. even he has really great used CD prices and even bargains in his new arrivals. i sell a lot of CDs. in my store and online. i've been lucky to have a good source for the last couple of years. i feel like i've always sold a lot of used CDs and i've been around for 15 years. new vinyl. yeah, what are you gonna do? just support labels and bands you like online. buy their vinyl on bandcamp or on their websites. that way they get all the money.

if I want something for listening purposes and the record is $50, I would absolutely rather take ten $5 CDs

NABISCO OTM

Isn't a lot of stuff that's on Criterion in the US on some other imprint, like Arrow, in the UK?

― Instead of create and send out, it pull back and consume (unperson), Monday, 29 April 2024 18:58 (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

BFI release a good bit of it.

Arrow do great sales a couple of times a year, too. In fact I picked up a few things in their Easter sale a few weeks ago.

By the by, 4K Blu-rays are region-free, which makes collecting a whole lot easier.

did anybody here ever order from cheap-cds.com (maybe without the dash) in the 90s?

I bought a lot of CDs from that site, one of the first online stores I ever used

I'm really trying to stock up on a lot of electronic music I like before they're no longer available anywhere. Nabisco otm about that genre, there are so many compilations and DJ mixes which have zero presence in the world except on used cds, if you're lucky enough to find them, or maybe a YouTube video upload, which may or may not stay up there forever.

Pulled me up short to think back and realise that the only physical CD I’ve bought in the last 2 years was a small/local thing from a shop in Tokyo, March 2023. I haven’t been 12 months without buying a CD since 1987.

One upshot about expensive vinyl is that it’s made it easier to buy nice gifts for people. There was a long stretch where getting music for anyone I know wasn’t going to be met with an enthusiastic response, but now I can just buy a brand-new reissue of an album they like that they otherwise coveted but didn’t want to splurge on.

just to give you an idea of the allovertheplaceness of what i sell online when it comes to CDs. these are some from this week. all $10 and under except for the KLF which was $35.

Ken Nordine - Colors: A Sensuous Listening Experience

Jontavious Willis - Spectacular Class

Catherine Russell - Inside This Heart Of Mine

Adrian Belew - Op Zop Too Wah

Roberta Flack - First Take

Stratovarius - Elements Pt.2

Meredith Monk - Turtle Dreams

Bob Martin - Midwest Farm Disaster

The KLF - Chill Out

Turtle Dreams is so good, almost as good as Dolmen Music

That Ken Nordine is classic!