Continuing with CDs?

1. Oh, sure. I keep trying to reduce using the rule of 'if I get another CD I sell at least one back if not more.' It helps that I always get some credit at Amoeba, sometimes a surprising amount.

2. I guess? A lot of stuff that would serve as a very honest record is long since purged.

3. Yup, but via taking advantage of their nearly-flat value. Amoeba again is very good for this -- their clearance section is always stuffed with good finds amid the crud, I can pick up an armload for a song (almost literally in some cases).

1) Nope or at least not more than I ever did.

2) Uh not exactly.

3) I don't download very much and I still buy CDs and the occassional piece of vinyl.

am getting it down to about 150 left which i guess i'll keep on shelves for a while before just donating them. they never get played once ripped.

I picture Ned strolling into Amoeba, reciting a few bars of "Englande" and the guys behind the counter just give him a shopping cart and say "go for it."

Selling them all seems like a daunting and infuriating task, so I'll probably keep them, but only out of laziness.

yeah, i've got a few boxes of old stuff in the closet that i can't bear to sell for pennies, yet i'm sick of taking them somewhere to have them cherry pick a couple good ones and refuse the rest.

i'm keeping mine just in case a neutron bomb comes along and fries everyone's hard drives. (but, uh, not the cd players)

also, it's good to have cds around to loan to friends. it's easier than zipping up and uploading an entire album, and while sharing entire hard drives is in theory the best thing to do, it doesn't happen that often

i've never sold cds, so i won't be starting now.

i still buy cds.

(a) Too much trouble.
(b) I suppose, but they serve more of a function than that.
(c) Yes.

While downloading is invariably simpler, quicker, cheaper, etc., I'm still a sucker for the tactile artifact. I like liner notes, lyrics, cover art, all that. I'll download stuff I'm curious about, but if I really like it, I'll still buy the disc.

i'd love to get rid of everything, but i'm just not good enough at backing shit up to trust it.

i wouldn't really part with them unless i had one of those fancy things that lets you use your mp3s on a good stereo, but it's like i just picked u a real nice old NAD cd player for only $30 off craigslist so why bother.

plus yeah like ned said it's gonna be sweet in the next few years, lots of crewsh older stuff for dirt cheap.

although...it is weird seems like some CDs are really picking up in value on ebay, out of print stuff...

Yeah I don't see anything that indicates that rare CDs are any less valuable then they ever were.

I am keeping my cds because I want backups in case I have hard drive failure. Even with two hard drive copies of my music, I prefer to have the backup. Also, I may want to rip at a higher bitrate later once hd prices come down.

I'm going to keep my CD's in case I ever need to build a fortress of solitude out of them, Jor-El stylee

a) no, except for ones i get sick of.
b) no
c) i download tracks and sometimes albums, but if i really like what i'm hearing i'll buy it in CD or vinyl form. artwork, liner notes, etc.

i'll never say never though, because maybe someday in the distant future i'll sell everything and have it all digitized.

I'm keeping my CDs.

I'm too lazy to sell and also I have a suspicion that some kind of new digital format will emerge (MP5?) that will make MP3s sound tinny and useless, and that I'll want to re-rip my CDs.

I still buy cds and vinyl. I will keep them all unless I needed the money.
I barely download now, but like always, I still try to buy what I downloaded as long as I liked it.

im continuing! cd's are beautiful

1. No, never.
2. I will keep them as the art objects/media that they are.
3. Until I can buy whole albums from iTunes or Amazon as .wav files, I will continue buying essential CDs.

A lot of good reasons to hang onto CDs in this thread. I still enjoy cases and liner notes and having a good thing around to throw my disposable income at. In a lot of ways, I also find them easier to store and maintain than digital music, where you need at least two forms of backup and need to keep an organized file/folder structure together if you're going to find stuff easily. Finally, I still can hear the difference between reasonably good-quality CDs and mp3s, and with formats, storage methods, etc. changing frequently keeping CDs around seems like less of a long-term headache.

I'll still buy a lot, taking advantage of the lower cost and because I like having the little cardboard boxes from Caiman in the post to look forward to after returning from work.

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.

ridic

its like 12 bux tops for me now. unless its brand new and too good

I'll continue keeping 100s of cds in a sock drawer which I occasionally pull out for a car ride. I wont sell them. But I oughta clean them all. I hate when a cd skips and I hate how I lost some of my cds even though I dont listen to any of my cds much. But I did lose Roxy Music - The Early Years and Tangerine Dream - Rubycon. I broke Thrakattak. And I can't remember what else at the moment. Kinda sucks. Kinda not.

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 hate that too, captain -- i'm actually making a list of CD's i have that are too scratched up/missing. i replace a few ever year

it's like i just realized how to properly take care of a cd.

Fastnbulbous accurate enough, which is why the CDs I sell back are the ones I never listen to, or have only heard once and thought, "Nice" and never went back to at all. Ergo, why keep 'em around?

I moved into a new place two months ago and never bothered taking my CDs out of their boxes. I have a few lying around that I've bought recently, but there's no real reason for me to have them out, since the majority are on my iTunes/iPod, anyway.

Back when I started to download albums, I told myself that if I really liked something I downloaded I'd buy it on CD. But then it just seemed silly to go to the trouble of buying it, only to put it on a shelf and forget about it as soon as it was out of its shrink wrap.

Now the albums I buy are the ones I simply can't find online. I don't use p2p, but I can find most major new indie releases on a couple of choice websites or through friends. So what I buy ends up being not necessarily indicative of what I'm really excited about. A lot of times this amounts to used CDs I stumble across and take a chance on.

Those of you who sell off your CDs, someday your hard drive is gonna fail.
This is exactly right — CDs have become nothing more than backup.

http://www.sevenoaksart.co.uk/images/record1.gif

1) nah, I'm the kind of person who saves everything
2) ???
3) I never exclusively bought CDs, it was always a mix of vinyl, cassette (back in the day), or mp3 formats. I see no reason why this will change for me in the near future.

1) too lazy really - and they're not worth that much anyway
2) never completely stopped buying vinyl, so it's not even an accurate record
3) I''ve bought maybe 6 cds this year and maybe 300 LPs (and some cassettes, second hand for the car)

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.

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

i have been thinking about a big purge lately, but i find it really difficult to part with archives. like others here i still enjoy the physical artifact though organizing and moving it all is a chore and not nearly as exciting as it once was. i think the best way to purge is just to continuously edit. i am sure that eventually i will convert everything to flacs and be done with the physical objects.

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

maybe. it is fun to find random half-remembered boxes of media.

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

yes, but i am not a completist except in very rare cases. i use a few digital music shops and i use p2p. anything i really like that i freely download off the net i buy or try to buy, either on cd or vinyl, from an actual physical shop or any of the good online shops of esteemed record stores from around the world. with mp3 i also go the other way where i will buy vinyl and then download a digital copy off p2p.

god i wish we had amazon mp3 store in the UK

have bought some DRM tracks out of impatience. i lived with low-bitrate mp3s for years so a few more won't really hurt altho the big general 'under-192kbps' purge continues and i've deleted thousands of mp3s in the last 2 years having replaced them with better rips (inc. many from 2nd hand CDs).

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

the man who put the 'I' in 'itunes'

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).

That kind of artist doesn't deserve to be popular.

hahahaha

"That kind of artist doesn't deserve to be popular."

Yeah how dare they release brilliance in three minute spurts. If a musician can't produce an entire 7 or 8 albums of pure unadulterated melodic genius then I SHALL CLOSE MY EARS TO THEM.

lol@people still falling for "Geir"

He's still FUNNY!

That kind of artist doesn't deserve to be popular.

As Stephen Colbert might say, "nailed it!"

If a musician can't produce an entire 7 or 8 albums of pure unadulterated melodic genius then I SHALL CLOSE MY EARS TO THEM.

Ditto.

Perhaps I shouldn't have, so late in the evening, "wholeheartedly" agreed with the sentiment that ...people need to see an entire album as an artistic statement, and not just pick single tracks. People don't "need" to do anything; in some/many ways I'm glad most of the music I buy is unpopular, album-oriented, fill-a-CD-oriented music.

However, in my view, it's unfortunate that people in general, i.e., measured in terms of record and/or MP3 sales, tend to reward the immediate, one-hit, here-today, gone-tomorrow artists (Fergie, anyone?) to the exclusion of those that demonstrate the creative prowess required to bundle together a collection of eight or more songs over the course of one album (versus over the course of a career). It's the sustained attention an album requires that requires 45 or so minutes of a listener's undivided attention that appears to be going further by the wayside.

Of course some singles-driven artists return to popularity (i.e., the top of charts) with regularity, but the disposable nature of their product and, in my view, people's gravitation away from album driven artists (or, really, albums themselves) isn't, in my view, a positive development (assuming, it's still a "development"). But then I can't imagine artists with a nascent or established penchant for albums, versus those predisposed to singles, will tailor their decisions according to what people want or will buy.

Put another way (and, admittedly, as the most patently obivous/obviously lazy example): would The Beatles have been as demonstrably influential had their career ended with "Help!"?

do not tempt me with such visions

Put another way (and, admittedly, as the most patently obivous/obviously lazy example): would The Beatles have been as demonstrably influential had their career had started with "Help!"?

one-hit, here-today, gone-tomorrow artists (Fergie, anyone?)

Fergie just saw her fifth straight single from The Dutchess go top 5, which no one's done since Mariah Carey in 1990-91. So she's hardly "one-hit." Not sure how you can be so sure that she'll be "gone tomorrow," either, unless you know something I don't.

This is all I know.

For those losing the same battle with inference deficit disorder: "gone tomorrow" could be interperted (and or meant) literally, or figuratively.

But maybe that's a semantic debate for a different thread.

I know that you don't literally mean she's going to die, but poor reviews don't necessarily kill off careers, especially not when the object of said reviews is lighting up radio airplay and iTunes sales.

Um yeah, I think five Top 5 hits pretty much means that we're going to be hearing from Fergie for a little while longer.

(Corporate) radio airplay as counterpoint?

I equate "gone tomorrow" with career longevity beyond one album of five hits ("London Bridge," truly today's "Eleanor Rigby"). In the unfortunate and likely event Fergalicious enjoys fame and fortune beyond "The Dutchess" it'll only reinforce my suspicion that the public's attention span parallels its appreciation for disposable commodities (aka waste).

Btw, Fergie is the first solo female artist since Toni Braxton (93-94) to pull five top 40 hits from a debut album.

Toni who??????

Put another way (and, admittedly, as the most patently obivous/obviously lazy example): would The Beatles have been as demonstrably influential had their career started with "Help!"?

Subtle; touché.

That came out wrong, what I meant to say was,

In the unfortunate and likely event Fergalicious enjoys fame and fortune beyond "The Dutchess" it'll only reinforce my suspicion that the public's attention span is inversely proportional to its appetite for disposable commodities (aka waste).

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

Nope and likely never. I recently bought a hi-fi CD player that's given my collection new life.

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

My CD collection is a record of most of the music I've ever liked; mostly I maintain it now with thought of handing it down to my kid(s).

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

I occasionally download to preview but until downloads provide audio quality equal to CDs (i.e., consistently and legally), I'll continue to rip 320kbps/LAME MP3s for the iPod, but keep listening to my discs at home.

And in further effort to get this thread back on topic, I read an interesting "special report" in the latest Rolling Stone (aka the Yearbook 2007 issue) last night, relevant to reason why some folks that poo-poo the downloading have a superiority complex.

The article is "The Death of High Fidelity" by Robert Levine (and until this blogger gets a takedown notice from said periodical, you can read it here.

http://img516.imageshack.us/img516/2835/im003778qr4.jpg

Will you bother trying now to sell off your existing CDs?
Absolutely not. I'm no more likely to sell all my books and buy a Kindle. I think it's ridiculous.

Will you leave them as a record of 80s/90s to early 00s buying?
No, I'll keep buying them as I come across stuff I want. As pointed out above; they have music on! They're not ornaments.

Will you continuing buying CDs selectively alongside downloading, for reasons of completing certain artists or genres?
No. I don't really download and I'm not particularly completist about individual artists / genres etc. I'll keep buying them because they're my favoured method for listening to music.

A CD arrived in the post on Friday. I've just ordered another two new CDs. I'll probably receive a handful for Christmas, too. I love music and my primary method for listening is through very good a hi-fi; I don't use an iPod anymore as I don't commute on the train anymore. When I'm choosing what to listen to I like to be able to see all my music together with images to prompt my memory. I like the idea of 'albums' where songs are ordered deliberately. I like to be able to look at artwork and credits in a CD case as I listen to an album. I like that we've got shelves in the livingroom with 1,500 or so CDs on them. The harddrive on our MacBook died a week or so ago, and we've lost a lot of files and photos of stuff we never got round to backing up. I like the tangibility of a physical object with music on it; I think losing the physical object can cause you to lose some... respect, or love, for music, lose some sense of its value. It just becomes lists of data to be collected and never listened to, tagged, ordered, and ignored. I did the downloading thing and didn't enjoy it. (Link.) I want to listen to music because I enjoy it, not because I feel obliged or compelled to form an opinion or to be able to say "I have listened".

I would have taken you for a vinyl fetishist.

Too young! Plus there's never been a decent place to buy new vinyl in Exeter since I got into music.

"Do you have many CDs?" That was the first, and refreshingly insightful question, the owner-slash-salesman of the local hi-fi shoppe asked me when I began my search for an upgrade to my crap-to-begin-with carousel. The implication being that if I hadn't, maybe there'd be no point in making such an investment. Fwiw, I went with a Rega Apollo.

The Turn Me Up! organization, referenced in the article I cited above, has an interesting goal and Web site; I'm curious to see what becomes of their objective(s), "to make the choice for a more dynamic record an option for artists."

Btw, Turn Me Up! hearts the Nick Southall piece, Imperfect Sound Forever, under the "Music Dynamics In The News" header at the bottom third of its homepage.

I sold of a bunch of CDs recently, but it was mostly stuff that I'm just not into all that much anymore and haven't listened to in years. My flow of incoming CDs hasn't really abated all that much, save for budgetary reasons. Other than that, I don't really see much reason to dispose of what I've got. I take a lot more pleasure in going down to the record store and finding an unexpected used copy of something that I'm interested in than I do in just going online and downloading the files.

Plus, I always seem to forget what music I've got on my computer. It's much easier to keep track of the physical CD's, even if I do have to lug them all around whenever I move. I will admit, though, being unable to properly keep track of my digital music does indeed lead to some enjoyable moments of (re-)discovery of its own.

mac data recovery worked pretty well for me in this case as well along with prosoft's data rescue.

I'm quite anal retentive about how I organise my file tree/tag individual mp3s/etc.--but that's dealing largely with music ripped from my own CDs, and will be for as long as physical media is sold. CDs/LPs may be largely "archival" functionally, but I'll never plunk down money for a download in my lifetime, if I can help it. Mp3s and hard-drives are great conveniences, but I trust them very little to hold up.

So more to the questions, no, not selling off physical media in my life, outside the occasional purge of lesser material.

Always buy physical media because it's solid, real, sounds good, and is durable, and gets me into shops. The thought of completism wouldn't enter into it.

I still buy CD's. Over 6 fatal computer crashes in my lifetime have told me it's worth the $4 extra dollars you pay - plus you get a physical CD, case, and artwork. And it gives you a reason to go to the record store... all pluses for me.

Though admittedly if all record companies began offering "free" mp3 downloads in addition to vinyl I would easily stop buying CD's for that reason. I really don't do much with CD's aside from drive them home and admire the artwork every once in a while.

Used CDs are generally cheaper than downloads and last a lot longer, so yeah. Go CDs, go

i buy more vinyl, but weirdly now the whole market is reversed from the 90s when i used to pick up classic 60s and 70s stuff on vinyl cuz it was cheaper...lots of great deals on super sounding reissue CDs in rock, jazz, etc now, i picked up the reissue of On the Corner by miles for like $5 a while back....even stuff i used to think of as "common" vinyl records are like $20 and up now, rolling stones and beatles stuff

i'm thinking of starting to buy more CDs again--in addition to downloads--but, man, i wonder how long the record stores in my area will continue to be around

not that they stock a lot of the metal i've been getting into recently -- i guess i'll just be using Amazon much more than i already am

I generally have a problem with the thought of going for anything else than CDs. I do a few download purchases (mainly stuff for the mainstream hit compilations that I regularly make to keep up with what's in the pop charts), but generally I am an albums guy. Plus having a couple thousand CDs would probably take months to turn them into mp3s and stock them in a mobile mp3 player.

Record stores, as in physical ones, may be on the way out, but there are still online stores.

Used CDs are generally cheaper than downloads and last a lot longer, so yeah. Go CDs, go

^^^^^^^^

it's getting to the point where new CD prices are also insanely low. High On Fire's new record was $5.99 when it came out

same deal with Julian Casablancas's solo record that came out last year

another thing w/ getting a lot of your music through downloads is, i think it'll eventually come to be seen as a waste of time to have your own personal archives of files, at least for the more popular stuff, because it'll all be available on streaming services, and you'll be able to access a lot of your music in really high-quality from a bunch of different devices

that's still some ways off though

same deal with Julian Casablancas's solo record that came out last year

This one actually cost me $0.00, and should've cost you the same if you chose to avoid it, also.

The record store I work at uses Amazon to price our used items, which is the majority of our business (no "used section" our whole store is basically a used section). So basically most things are extremely cheap, though OOP titles can get pretty high in price. I feel like it is lazy and dangerous to just blindly slap 7.99 on every used item. Plus the online presence allows us to sell items on our floor to people who live across the world. I honestly don't know how any record store besides the Other Musics out there can survive mainly on new items, since you barely make any profit. If more independent stores adopted this used item model they wouldn't be suffering so badly.
So if there were any incentive to buy a CD over a download, it would be because you might be able to buy it from us for the price of 2 or 3 songs on iTunes. If you just illegally download music than there is always the tangible item incentive.
(So if any of you are anywhere near Hoboken, NJ, stop by "Tunes")

ha, i was going to ask if it was tunes. i'll always remember buying an ash ra tempel cd in their 5 for $3 bin and then seeing another album by them for $29.99 used.

Haha yeah thats the nature of the Amazon pricing. We don't have a 5 for 3 bin anymore, but there is always a cheapo bin with all kinds of gems. If anything is mainly selling for below $1.99 on Amazon we cheapo them. Its my favorite part of the store.

I don't know if there's a more recent thread than this one on this topic but I couldn't find one if there is.

I'm currently experiencing something of a dilemma regarding physical CDs; I virtually ceased buying them a few years ago in favour of lossless downloads but am starting to have second thoughts about moving away from physical media entirely (and, before we go down that road, I think the "vinyl resurgence" is mystifying and kind of awful).

I'm even contemplating re-purchasing certain things on CD that I've already bought FLAC downloads of, just so I have some kind of permanent, tangible copy of that music that will stick around even in the event of catastrophic data loss or some other calamity.

What say you, ILM? Anyone else feeling torn about such things?

i don't really understand why you'd want to buy a CD.

I guess at one point I found CDs an attractive format - kind of shiny and futuristic-looking and I liked how you could skip tracks etc but that was a long time ago. There's nothing attractive or useful about the big pile of decaying jewel cases gathering dust behind the sofa in our living room. I can't quite bear to part with them though - I might want to go through all those Beach Boys twofers and read the inlays again one day.

I'm with you. I sold almost all of my CD collection when I moved to the UK in 2008 because I simply couldn't take them all with me. Now I wish I had the physical things and have started buying them again (which is actually OK in one sense because many of the albums I used to own have since been remastered and re-released...).

i am in a fortunate position where i have room to hide the cds away, as given my experience with technology, i would never ever want to trust a totally digital solution.
i know re backups/archives etc, but it's always when you really need to revert to a backup when you find out its been failing for the last 6 months, but you never realised.
and yeah, with a lot of the reissues/boxsets etc, once i have ripped etc, i will on a quiet afternoon sit down and read the liner notes.

People who went the full digital route are missing out on their kids grabbing CDs from the shelf and throwing them around.

I wonder if a lot of digital only people will just "grow out" of music (obviously not talking about ilxors but punters in general) and wont have any cds/lps to get nostalgic for nor have the impulse to follow artists new releases to "complete collection" that lots do, albeit in many cases just a few artists.

I can't quite bear to part with them though - I might want to go through all those Beach Boys twofers and read the inlays again one day.

haha this precise reasoning runs through my head too, those are like the gold standard of cd reissue liner notes imo

i like CDs

Me too.

i can't give up on physical media altogether, though i try to keep my collection to albums i know i love and do most of my investigating through streaming. i'd love to have vinyl copies of everything but used cds are pretty cheap these days

I think the "vinyl resurgence" is mystifying and kind of awful

OK, I'll take the bait, why? I love buying vinyl these days, can't imagine why I'd buy a CD for the life of me.

CDs are so cheap right now, a great deal most of the time. I found two of the Galaxie 500 remasters with bonus tracks for $2 each the other day.

Then again, like mark e, I have the room for all this stuff

When someone says the vinyl resurgence is "awful" I feel all they're really saying is that they can't imagine why they would ever participate. Just my theory, since I can't think of what would annoy someone otherwise, unless it's an environmental concern or something.

Well, the pricing of vinyl is LOL outrageous for one thing. And the sound quality of vinyl manufactured during the "resurgence" is questionable. Anecdotally there are a lot of skips and jumps on brand-new records. The covers, inserts etc are of high quality but then again the prices are fucking stupid.

And of course the music is largely available for free or very little so then the question of how much is fueled by conspicuous consumption/personal branding/lifestyle and all that.

i buy a little bit of new vinyl these days, but i always find it hard to justify sometimes paying twice the $$$ as the CD version. i got into vinyl when i was a kid because it was cheap.

Yeah screw these prices, I feel like 5 years ago or so you could still buy brand new 2xLPs by high profile indie bands (whatever that means) at decent prices (around $15) now everything is $25 and it's probably sourced from the CD anyway.

The local HMV here is hilarious. The main part of the store is filled with Sons of Anarchy dogbowls, Reservoir Dogs blankets and the like, then the back of the store is CDs and DVDs either priced really high or marked down to next-to-nothing. Then there's a single rack of vinyl where you can get 180gram copies of things like the Stones "Some Girls" or the latest Arcade Fire for $45+, bundled with a special frame to put it in for an extra $20.

The pricing of vinyl is pretty much the same as inflation, really.

LPs sold For £5 in 1980 or thereabouts, £10 in 1995, between £17 and £25 nowadays.

compare that to the cost of.a pint of milk. Or beer, maybe...

And of course the music is largely available for free or very little so then the question of how much is fueled by conspicuous consumption/personal branding/lifestyle and all that.

― everything,

so because you can get music free or stream from spotify you shouldnt reward the artist by buying it on the format you like? Some people do buy music on a particular format because that is how they like it.

everyone should listen to music in the way that they enjoy it the most. i listen to vinyl, digital, CDs, etc.

OK that's true there are plenty of questionable pressings. It's up to the collector to be savvy.

while on a utilitarian level spotify is more than enough music to last me til the end of time, there are still gaps and the economy of streaming is still extremely shaky and dubious. I never did the CD-for-MP3 purge because I didn't like the idea of potential of losing my stuff when a server i own craps out or becomes outmoded - I'm not going to do the the CD-for-streaming purge because this time I don't even OWN the server, or decide what stays on it. So I keep albums I know I like, though mostly cheap used copies. If I ever go up a tax bracket i might start buying nice clean new vinyl for a better stereo system, but it's not really cost-effective.

there's definitely a sense that my cd collection is going to be an antiquated relic even sooner than my lp collection - at the moment i rarely if ever play one. but i got room for it, it's cheap to add to, so why toss it

i like buying both and will do so. if i have an artists albums on CD i'll keep buying cds and same with lps. I also find download coads with lps very handy and I subscribe to spotify premium. Horses for courses imo and see no point in limiting myself to streaming only (esp as albums can disappear anytime) plus I like the fact the artists gets my money, esp when i order direct from them.

used cds are a crazy good deal rn

one time i was a little buzzed at amoeba and was like "i already own every berry-era REM CD but maybe I should buy them all again for under 30 bucks just cuz i can"

yeah, ive been hoovering up cheap ones on discogs lately to complete gaps in collections
xp

I've been enjoying how cheap some of the CD packaging has become. I picked up 12 Horace Silver albums on 6 CDs for $20; also got 15 Donald Byrd albums on 8 CDs for $25.

funnily enough that included a couple of galaxie 500 remasters

thats a great score nicky

I wish cd's were as cheap here in the UK

Here's the Horace Silver on UKebay:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/HORACE-SILVER-12-CLASSIC-ALBUMS-1953-1962-NEW-CD-/351371586390?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_15&hash=item51cf60eb56

I think I'm ok with keeping up what I started with CDs as long as I'm savvier about it now, rather than buying £15 for a new album in 1998 or whatever

I personally need to keep it up, I don't trust my listening attitudes and habits without physical product.

not bad but shipping could be a killer

sorry about that. I posted the wrong one. This one ships from UK

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Horace-Silver-12-Classic-Albums-1953-1962-NEW-CD-BOX-SET/351338959459?_trksid=p2047675.c100005.m1851&_trkparms=aid%3D222007%26algo%3DSIC.MBE%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D20140122125356%26meid%3D26144e5c1ef14acab5bb119acd4cb34f%26pid%3D100005%26rk%3D1%26rkt%3D6%26sd%3D351371586390&rt=nc

ok that is a good deal

Since artwork is rarely mentioned, do most downloads include all the sleeve art? For certain genres the art is a big appeal.

I still haven't got an mp3 player so I've never bought many digital downloads. I'm scared of all this stuff about "loss" files, don't understand it.
I've got a kindle and use it constantly but never read books on it (also worried about drm shit), so I'm doubting I'll buy mp3s much unless I have no other choice or it's way way cheaper.

Do albums disappear from a server often?

I've been piling up boxes like the Horace Silver one mentioned upthread (have that, and another one like it gathering 12 Bill Evans albums on 6 CDs) and the 5CD "Original Album Series"/"Original Album Classics" sets (5 albums for like $20), and even the slightly more deluxe sets like the one with all six Van Halen albums (there are only six), the first 10 ZZ Top albums, etc., etc. This is a fucking golden age for budget CD reissues, especially if you're into 70s rock like I am. And I still buy new albums on CD from time to time. Going to Target on Friday, planning to pick up the new Dwight Yoakam (the Target version has 3 bonus tracks).

Will you bother trying now to sell off your existing CDs?
Will you leave them as a record of 80s/90s to early 00s buying?
Will you continuing buying CDs selectively alongside downloading, for reasons of completing certain artists or genres?

1) No.
2) I keep them and play them often.
3) I buy CDs new and used all the time.

the vinyl resurgence is so awesome: cds cost like 50c now.

I don't think the vinyl resurgence and the drop in used CD prices are related

"resurgence" should be in scare-quotes anyway, we're talking about a tiny fraction of the music sales market (still)

No, CD price drop is correlated to the rise of digital.

Vinyl resurgence is compensation for the need for a tangible/own-able product after digital dominated the convenience side.

^^^

CDs sound bad and suck to carry around but I've no intention of uploading my entire collection to hard drive when those fuckers crash all the time (otoh I'm less attached to things these days, the art of losing isn't hard to master and all that; if I lose music it's no big deal). Still buy new ones too. Still burn CD-Rs with that season's killer singles and album tracks.

the college radio station I advise still receives 95 percent of its material on CD too, I suppose because there's no way upload watermarked copies to Megaseg.

That aspect of the vinyl market that is comprised of $45 prestige box editions of single-disc albums, etc., is totally gross conspicuous-consumption noise as described upthread. The aspect that just keeps putting out "reasonably" priced editions of everything is pretty great, even though I also agree that there's less guarantee of a quality sound on a new record than there was 10-15 years ago, when if you were putting out a vinyl release you probably gave a shit.

What's annoying is that the price of a "basic" record has drifted up in that period quite a bit, though I can't really put a bead on how much of that is just inflation. I feel like in 2000/2001 when I first really started collecting, a straightforward single LP from Kill Rock Stars (say) would be like, $10-12 bucks. Inflation calculator says that should now be $13.25-$15.90, and if you go to their website, they do in fact sell tons of records right at $15, with download included, and some at $12 - though perhaps some of those are things that have literally been in stock the entire time. But I see a lot more stuff in stores in the like $18-23 range which just doesn't feel like what a record costs, even if I try to remember to include the inflation facts in my head.

The only circumstance in which I could imagine buying a CD at this point would be at a show if that's all they have. I never really had much affection for the format, and I bindered what was left of my collection years ago, risking scratches and stuff in order to no longer have a billion godawful jewel cases taking up space. CD really feels just about as disposable and forgettable as streaming, like even if I see a stack at a garage sale for cheap it just feels like, why bother; sure I can get thirty albums for a couple bucks but I could also just stream them if I cared. Whereas with a record I've never shaken the notion (however misbegotten) that I'm getting something I want, in addition to the music, for my money. God damn they take up space though.

I buy vinyl mostly, because I like it and CDs seem so disposable etc. It just looks better in the flat.

I like physical media because having it makes you play something and leave it alone till it finishes. You get on with something else and stop tinkering. If I play stuff on Spotify I'm always skipping to another album by track 6. Also, I can't be bothered to play the same albums on Spotify over and over. I'm always looking for something new. I like having new records or CDs next to the stereo, which makes you play them more and more. It's sort of lazy: it's next to the stereo, so you put it on, get on with doing what you're doing, and before you know it you've listened to a new album 20 times or something. I like the feeling of listening to the same thing 20 times. I get more out of that than listening to 20 albums once.

Probably the reason I buy physical stuff is the same reason people get gym memberships. You ought to be able to get fit just bobbing around, having sex, dancing, running for the bus etc. It doesn't happen enough though. You need discipline.

So I buy vinyl mostly and am happiest when it comes with a free CD of the album rather than a download. Then, I have to admit, I mostly just play the CD and the vinyl never gets played. I'm happy with that. But I buy CDs too, if an album has a shit cover or I don't expect to want to play it much beyond a month or two. Or if I'm just being stingy.

Cheap used CDs and the fact that my car doesn't have an aux port are the only things that keep me using CDs. I still have a ton of them though and won't get rid of them unless it becomes impossible to rip CDs onto a hard drive.

Will you bother trying now to sell off your existing CDs?
Will you leave them as a record of 80s/90s to early 00s buying?
Will you continuing buying CDs selectively alongside downloading, for reasons of completing certain artists or genres?

Well, I still buy CDs, mainly. I buy lps as tangible own things, but they are mostly second hand.

I've logged all the lps into Discogs, so I know where it all is now. Alphabetical order? Do me a favour.

Of course, I can now put the ones I don't play any more up for sale, and that helps me work towards a maximum cool collection, or something.

Funny, the comments about "The kids don't care about vinyl" as Alice (15) prefers to get lps rather than CDs nowadays. I guess if she went for CDs she'd have loads by now but she's selective about it. She's often talked about harvesting my collection, but never brings herself to take any. She's been a couple times to Oxfam Records, but her selections have been strange: Muddy Waters at Newport last time, and two Count Basie lps this time. I have no idea why.

Oh yeah, the question..

I should log the CDs into discogs and do the same way, hut there's tons of them and the majority wouldn't go for 50p.

Muddy Waters at Newport last time, and two Count Basie lps this time. I have no idea why.

because she has good taste?

She's working towards it, sure.

The muddy, they'd talked about it in school.

The Basie, she was working through the jazz section and decided he must be good as there were two lps there.

I will never, ever understand people's affection for vinyl, especially not people younger than me. I'm 43, so I was already buying music before CDs were introduced, and I fucking hated records as a kid. If they didn't get scratched enough to skip, they still sounded like ass, all crackly and getting a little worse every time you played them; if your turntable was shitty (like mine was), the speed wavered so the singer's voice slowed down and sped up...plus they took up so much space and my room was tiny already...a fucking terrible format. I preferred tapes to vinyl, for all of the aforementioned reasons plus portability (I was never without my walkman starting in about eighth grade), and when CDs came out I was all about that shit, and have never looked back. Now, I do 90 percent of my listening on my iPod, but I still buy and rip CDs, and every once in a while will actually throw something on the stereo and lay on the couch and listen to it.

I don't understand the cassette revival. Yeah, they're as portable as CDs but sound like shit plus they lack the artwork of vinyl releases if you're into that sort of thing. The worst format ever save for the 8-track and I have no idea why hipsters thought it would be a good idea to bring them back.

I don't understand the minidisc revival!

i don't understand "cd vs. digital". uh, cds _are_ digital?

Don't vinyls also require a lot of maintenance? They seem to warp in the heat easily.
There's a big thread about audio file maintenance/collecting, all this crap about lossy/lossless files I need to learn. So I feel comfortable with cds because I never scratch them and very rarely have problems playing them.

i don't understand "cd vs. digital". uh, cds _are_ digital?

― rushomancy, Wednesday, April 22, 2015 8:19 PM (24 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The distinction is about physical not sound quality.

getting ready to move and I've put aside about a thousand CDs to try and sell, knowing that I'll probably have to leave them in the street and should have done this 13 years ago. (haven't estimated how many are going into storage yet.)

OK that's true there are plenty of questionable pressings. It's up to the collector to be savvy.

this is an insane attitude.

currently in the process of cataloging on discogs and ripping all my CDs - well, re-ripping the majority at higher bitrate - and sticking them away into archive boxes. this'll clear out both a corner of my bedroom where I'd stuffed the old CD racks and made half of them a pain to access, and also free up the cabinet in the main room that currently has a boombox and piles of CDs strewn all over (and inside) it. not particularly interested in the streaming services so have gone with a sonos box to route everything through the amp that I also run my turntables through.

I'll still buy CDs though - it's not like I've run at the 4-5 new ones a week that I was amassing them at from '02-05 anyway. well, other than a recent eno reissue binge.

I am going to try and schlep off a pile of about 50 that a) don't interest me any more b) might actually go for something second-hand. which is an OK retention rate for roughly 1k in the collection.

my experience with an mp3 player/aux port in the car is that the signal from the mp3 is very weak, where you've got to nearly max out the volume on the portable player to get substantial sound. i've only used Sony or Sandisk-brand players, so that may be a factor in the signal weakness.

the convenience of the CD is its best quality, and there's a lot of specialised (EAI, electronic, weird jazz etc.) that isn't even printed on vinyl. CD-RWs are nice to test out new stuff on the stereo, but the cd-r still seems like a cheap/not 'true' medium for audio files. that's just a mental/aesthetic quip, i suppose.

i recently visited with friends who have a lot of interest in high quality amp/receiver/turntable setups, and while it seems a bit silly (and expensive) to me, there's something endearing about a room full of afficionados putting on something like sea change and really basking in/believing in the increased warmth/clarity/whatever such a setup/medium allows. these are mostly new/alt-country, 'easy listening' type chaps.

the cassette revival is annoying because people are putting out shoddy dubs on normal bias tapes, and while it's punk/novel/creative or whatever, i believe these people should re-examine their standards for audio quality. i'm all for high-bias audio cassette listening experiences, though the metal bias tapes are hard to come by. anything more than a limited run is unrealistic. tape is nice because you can't just up and skip ahead, without some difficulty. I think that limitation improves the listening experience. Also, mix tapes are still fun to make.. you're definitely spending more time with the audio material, which improves the sequence of tracks and the material you choose to include. unfortunately, most people don't really appreciate the process, or have the means to play it, nowadays.

my experience with an mp3 player/aux port in the car is that the signal from the mp3 is very weak, where you've got to nearly max out the volume on the portable player to get substantial sound. i've only used Sony or Sandisk-brand players, so that may be a factor in the signal weakness.

When I plug my iPod into my car stereo, I can control the volume via the iPod or the car stereo. And yeah, I have to turn it up louder than I would if I had headphones on, but not that much louder.

I think the "vinyl resurgence" is mystifying and kind of awful

OK, I'll take the bait, why? I love buying vinyl these days, can't imagine why I'd buy a CD for the life of me.

This sums it up, pretty much (though I'm about ten years younger):

[q]I will never, ever understand people's affection for vinyl, especially not people younger than me. I'm 43, so I was already buying music before CDs were introduced, and I fucking hated records as a kid. If they didn't get scratched enough to skip, they still sounded like ass, all crackly and getting a little worse every time you played them...(snip)...a fucking terrible format. I preferred tapes to vinyl, for all of the aforementioned reasons plus portability (I was never without my walkman starting in about eighth grade), and when CDs came out I was all about that shit, and have never looked back.[q]

CDs aren't perfect but that they're still the physical format with the least disadvantages.

I understand the aesthetic appeal of LP album artwork but from a sonic perspective CDs are easily superior for the most part (much better signal-to-noise ratio, none of the consistency problems due to different pressings, worn-out stampers, etc.) In any event, almost all new vinyl is pressed from digital files these days. Plenty of people I know and respect are very passionate about new vinyl releases but I just find the whole thing faintly ludicrous and (to use a very hackneyed phrase) a triumph of style over substance.

Buying new vinl2015 strike me, to use a hackneyed phrase, as a triumph of style over substance. Plenty of people I know and respect are really into it, I just think it's silly.

Ugh, formatting blues. Take 2:

I think the "vinyl resurgence" is mystifying and kind of awful

OK, I'll take the bait, why? I love buying vinyl these days, can't imagine why I'd buy a CD for the life of me.

This sums it up, pretty much (though I'm about ten years younger):

I will never, ever understand people's affection for vinyl, especially not people younger than me. I'm 43, so I was already buying music before CDs were introduced, and I fucking hated records as a kid. If they didn't get scratched enough to skip, they still sounded like ass, all crackly and getting a little worse every time you played them...(snip)...a fucking terrible format. I preferred tapes to vinyl, for all of the aforementioned reasons plus portability (I was never without my walkman starting in about eighth grade), and when CDs came out I was all about that shit, and have never looked back.

CDs aren't perfect but I think they're still the physical format with the least disadvantages.

I understand the aesthetic appeal of LP album artwork but from a sonic perspective CDs are easily superior for the most part (much better signal-to-noise ratio, none of the consistency problems due to different pressings, worn-out stampers, etc.) In any event, almost all new vinyl is pressed from digital files these days. Plenty of people I know and respect are very passionate about new vinyl releases but I just find the whole thing faintly ludicrous and (to use a very hackneyed phrase) a triumph of style over substance.

- lots of old music still hasn't been properly mastered to cd, but i say that every week around here.

- lots of new music isn't pressed on cd, period. i don't know about rock music but new techno vinyl still sounds pretty good.

- yeah it sucks having to spend 20 seconds cleaning a record. but it does actually prevent the whole "sounded like ass, all crackly and getting a little worse every time you played them" thing.

- seriously, though, it does suck having to spend $100 every 5-10 years for a new stylus

- cds are cool

good breakdown imo

like, deep purple in rock, the 1995 remaster that's out there sounds so bad. i'd have to find a 1980s out of print edition, one of those $50 out of print audio fidelity edition, or *GASP! HIPSTER! UNCLEAN!* some 70s vinyl edition to fully get my rock on

i bet the friday music lp reissue of in rock sounds awesome. that's a label whose vinyl pressings really sound great. no crackle or nothing, honest!!

maybe these 00s japan cd issues are worthwhile..

so, in conclusion, everybody's wrong and everybody's right. this court is adjourned *pounds gavel*

- lots of old music still hasn't been properly mastered to cd, but i say that every week around here.

- lots of new music isn't pressed on cd, period. i don't know about rock music but new techno vinyl still sounds pretty good.

- yeah it sucks having to spend 20 seconds cleaning a record. but it does actually prevent the whole "sounded like ass, all crackly and getting a little worse every time you played them" thing.

Thanks for adding this so I don't have to. I also like the format, I like that I can watch it play and handle records when DJing. I accept the fact that there is a resurgence of vinyl and have read about the quality issues that have stemmed from that demand, but I haven't personally had that experience. I download music for many genres and if there's a nice vinyl release, then I will purchase that.

Actually I don't even own a CD player, except in my old Mac. That said, I'd sooner get a cassette player these days.

haha great posts brimstead

I bought a cassette a couple of weeks ago, I just rip them to digital like LPs, no big deal.

Yeah, there's the occasional cassette where I think that it would be cool to own it with the artwork as the official release and listen to it that way as well.

I feel less like a persecuted minority after this thread. CDs are fine by me, although I sometimes wish the brittleness and unnecessarily generous depth of the standard jewel case had been resolved in some other way early on. When it comes to storage they're not really all that compact.

I have plenty of vinyl but can't imagine any situation where I'd buy it new unless it was cheaper than the corresponding CD. Given the cost of used CDs these days, this situation doesn't seem to arise. Downloads too are comparatively expensive, especially lossless, and frankly I find it too easy to skip around a collection of soft copies, thereby failing to really listen properly. I came to the latter conclusion after doing precisely that for a decade.

One area where where I suspect there's little chance of a major vinyl revival is with classical audiences. There seems to be an expectation that both new recordings and reissues of older recordings should be filled out (often twofer style, in effect) to near the capacity of a CD. Makes the prospect of listening to 4 sides of vinyl to hear, say, one Bruckner symphony seem a tad archaic.

I haven't bought CDs since my whole collection was stolen in 2008. I can't say I miss them at all.

Buying second-hand CDs benefits the artists even less than streaming. My main issue with CDs is that a whole wall full of cases looks fucking ugly, especially once they get past a certain age, they're just not nice as an artefact and they mostly look cheap and shitty. A wall full of vinyl looks cool, a wall full of books looks cool, a wall full of CDs looks like a 90s student bedroom.

as someone who has been through traumatic hard drive crashes, the "u might lose ur entire collection!!!!!!1111" fear is really misplaced. the only things impossible to find again are the ones never available in physical form in the first place (rip all my grime mp3s). and as someone who still owns boxes of old CDs that i still haven't got round to ripping or selling, it's also my experience that it's often easier, when i suddenly think of an old album/song i know i own on CD and want to hear years later, to grab it off the internet than root around in those horrible boxes.

i feel like society moving away from physical possessions is only a mark of progress. unnecessary physical possessions = clutter and dust and a terrible time when you move house. begone.

(lol @ anyone who argues that buying vinyl isn't a lifestyle signifier. it's a perfectly valid one of course but c'mon!)

might start a project to knit jewel case cosies to make them look nicer, get the innocent smoothy generation on board, hey people we can do this

I haven't bought CDs since my whole collection was stolen in 2008. I can't say I miss them at all.

Yeah, my CD collection just look depressing and hideous. For me, a prevailing image of the late 90s/early 00s is that of hundreds of cracked jewel cases with ugly minimalist inlays chucked in an Our Price cut out bin.

I like my CD collection. It doesn't look hideous.

Panoramic shot of my CD collection in my office:

https://scontent-lga.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpf1/v/t1.0-9/s720x720/1452014_10153555178025597_159051485_n.jpg?oh=9fa8f1b73ffb84ff21e065c423df66f0&oe=55A1F36F

I just bought a new CD shelf that is in the living room as I have no room anymore.

I don't think it looks hideous.

no it looks nice.

I like how my HD looks:
http://www.wexphotographic.com/webcontent/product_images/large/142/1552330.jpg

(lol @ anyone who argues that buying vinyl isn't a lifestyle signifier. it's a perfectly valid one of course but c'mon!)

I wouldn't necessarily argue it isn't, but music consumption is somehow always about lifestyle signifiers. Not sure what you're getting at, unless you're suggesting it's elitist to purchase vinyl? I dunno, maybe it is, but I don't find it expensive, I don't have a problem with sound quality, I like that it's a way to support artists and get their music in often the only format that it's officially released in, I like that it's not skippable in the same way as digital, I like the physicality of it, and the artwork. And it does feel nice having an actual release of something fairly limited as well (recently like Mood Hut or the Workshop releases). I supposed I have a bit of a post-digital investment with vinyl in that respect.

Of course it also helps that there's interesting record stores like Rush Hour nearby with a great selection of stuff as well, and that I'm into house and techno, for instance, where vinyl is still a key format anyway.

I should say as well that I don't begrudge people being into CDs either. I just couldn't see myself in general buying them in light of MP3s.

"Cheap"/"disposable" re CDs seems a common sentiment amongst vinyl fanciers. Which is interesting given vinyl-plus-sleeve = not terribly dissimilar set of basic materials. :)

That HD looks like a solar powered dingy.

It's vvverry bouncy. Floats in water too.

Actually the other day I was looking at friend's copy of the new Aphex Twin CD and the Designer's Republic really did an exceptional job on that. It was the first time for ages that I considered getting the CD.

Cd's all the way for me although I do buy FLAC's occasionally. CD's sometimes have a bit of re-sell value on discogs plus they're small enough to hide away if necessary. And the art work can be innovative(see above). I look at vinyl prices in record shops and my stock response is: "you are having a fucking laugh...?!"

Although I do agree with this:

i feel like society moving away from physical possessions is only a mark of progress.
― lex pretend

Mmmm, I like less clutter, but I also miss going to people's houses and making snap judgments about them based on their bookshelves and CD libraries.

I managed to get everything restored from my last couple of hard drive crashes but that's made me more assiduous about backing up, and the price and storage of cloud services has got to the point where it's relatively easy to back up an entire digital music and photo collection. Profoundly un-rock and roll obviously.

Technically I should have got rid of every book I've already read and just keep one at a time, but there's a reason I don't. Somewhere between 'It looks nice on my shelf' and 'I have read and absorbed this - it is a part of me, and while I don't intend to re-read it I feel reminded of it when I see the spine'. Same with records and CDs - being able to flick through album covers feels natural and I feel as though I can ascribe more to an album if I have a visual/tangible stimulus to go along with the music. Digital is very useful and tidy, but looking at a long list of folders and artist names just isn't as appealing. My eyes get used to seeing the same list each time and I often automatically skip over some folders out of habit. Later I'll find myself in a record shop and see an album from my HD folder that I haven't played in years and suddenly get an itch to listen to it - something I don't generally get from the 'detail' view in a windows folder.

"Cheap"/"disposable" re CDs seems a common sentiment amongst vinyl fanciers.

The cheapness/disposability of CDs to me comes partly from how many junk CDs there are in the world, and in my flat specifically. Free magazine CDs, installation CDs for random software hardware, stacks of blank CDs that will never now be used, things that look like blank CDs that turn out to contain my shitty demos from 2002, or someone else's shitty demos, or random bits of porn. I hate it all. If home vinyl pressing had ever been a thing I would have now at the back of a cupboard dozens of discs containing loads of terrible 90s bands' live performances recorded off the TV, and I certainly wouldn't be buying any fresh stuff.

i'm kind of on board with lex here too. when people talk about music formats i think about the transition to a post-scarcity economy.

because most of my youth was spent trying to gain access to recordings that were mythologized but unavailable, so when downloading became a thing i hoovered down everything i could get my hands on, under the assumption that any minute now THE FEDZ would swoop in and it would all be shut off.

except that never happened, and as it didn't happen i became more and more comfortable about the notion of not "possessing" or "owning" music. an album isn't "my" album unless i made it myself, and even then the point is debatable. music is now attaining the status of unsubsidized public good. which is bad for the musicians, but good for everyone else.

i still download instead of streaming, but if i was 20 years younger i'd definitely be streaming.

Illuminating, Eyeball Kicks! Turns out that deep down I 'get' this more than I thought I did.

Hoovering up music comes with it's own unique set of issues though. Other than filesharing and streaming being 'bad' for musicians, there's the fact that everything collapses into flatness and excess, attention itself become scarce, while a whole bunch of new ways of measuring and monetizing user behaviors through networks have been put in place - hardly what I would describe as an unsubsidized public good.

I have a folder on my HD called 'John Cale - Everything he's ever done'. Have I listened to more than one album from it yet? No. One day maybe. I guess it's like having the collected works of Shakespeare sitting around at home.

(lol @ anyone who argues that buying vinyl isn't a lifestyle signifier. it's a perfectly valid one of course but c'mon!)

I disagree because I grew up buying vinyl and never stopped even when I was 15 and got a CD player i still bought vinyl and by the early-mid 90s i was buying vinyl as much as cd. i still have 2x the amount of cds than vinyl tho. up until 5 or 6 years ago vinyl was cheaper.

I have a similar folder w/Bob Dylan stuff. Still haven't unzipped any of it.

wait... what's a lifestyle signifier?

I occasionally think about moving the CDs to binders - keeping the discs and the art/liner notes, but freeing up a lot of the space currently being occupied by shatter-prone clear plastic and dead air. My wife is resistant.

I doubt she's bought a CD in at least 5 years, and I don't think she's listened to a CD in months. But I guess she finds the neatly alphabetized array of cases on a shelf soothing, and necessary as a way affirms her vision of her self and her taste and her personal history, in a way that hidden binders would not.

Plus, as sic notes above, visitors get a sense of you from what you have on the shelf (just as with books). All those spines present you as a mixture of who you are but also who you would like to be seen as. As a person with eclectic taste, as a person with "cool" taste, as a person with guilty pleasures, as a person with surprising lapses in judgment. As, in summary, a person with a particular train of 20th century allegiances and infatuations and obsessions, dragging behind you like a long scaly tail.

If I think she's being silly to want the CD shelves out there for mere social display, I would have to examine how I approach bookshelves. We have perhaps a thousand books up on shelves, most of which we will never re-read or refer to, but which we keep because they show us (and our visitors) who we think we are.

um, I think I meant "necessary as a way of affirming"

CD's disintegrate quick. If you have a CD from the 80s you will know about this. Old CD's go quiet. But a CD is much better sound quality than the highest MP3 and and even better than flac. Yes there is a large difference between the quality of 320kbps and CD. Basses are richer, highs are more existent.

My personal favourite aurally is old FM/AM radio and tape. For me these give the nicest, fullest, warmest sound. Vinyls I discount because theyre only for the rich.

The interesting part for me is how the shift to MP3 and Youtube has effected the music we get. Most people under 20 may not have any experience of listening to music on a CD or tape, they may literally never have heard or be accustomed certain frequencies in music. Therfore they might begin to prefer what they know. MP3s and youtube are certainly more limiting to the range. But as ppl get used to that the music will move away from certain freqs, I wonder.

xp What do you mean "disintegrate?" You mean oxidize? Peel? Are rendered useless?

Buying second-hand CDs benefits the artists even less than streaming. My main issue with CDs is that a whole wall full of cases looks fucking ugly, especially once they get past a certain age, they're just not nice as an artefact and they mostly look cheap and shitty. A wall full of vinyl looks cool, a wall full of books looks cool, a wall full of CDs looks like a 90s student bedroom.

― Matt DC, Thursday, April 23, 2015 5:13 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

True enough that artists don't see money from used CD sales (and neither do labels -- which is why majors tried to stamp out used CD sales/stores in the early 90s). But unless the cool-looking wall of vinyl was all purchased new, little of what was spent on that went to the artists.

Haven't bought a CD in many years. I still have a bunch, that I keep in a couple of boxes similar to this: http://www.amazon.com/Aluminum-Storage-Holder-Hanger-Sleeves/dp/B00CDWQK7A/

But I haven't opened those boxes in like 5 years. Should I just get rid of them? They certainly don't have much resale value, especially without the artwork/cases. But just throwing them out seems wasteful.

I would get rid of every single book that we own too, since I will never read them. But I don't think Carl will let me do that, since most of the remaining ones are hers.

CD's disintegrate quick. If you have a CD from the 80s you will know about this.

The other day I listened to the first CD I ever bought, an Italian bootleg of a 1968 Who show that I got in 1988. Still sounded perfect (and loud).

I will never, ever understand people's affection for vinyl, especially not people younger than me. I'm 43, so I was already buying music before CDs were introduced, and I fucking hated records as a kid. If they didn't get scratched enough to skip, they still sounded like ass, all crackly and getting a little worse every time you played them; if your turntable was shitty (like mine was), the speed wavered so the singer's voice slowed down and sped up...plus they took up so much space and my room was tiny already...a fucking terrible format. I preferred tapes to vinyl, for all of the aforementioned reasons plus portability (I was never without my walkman starting in about eighth grade), and when CDs came out I was all about that shit, and have never looked back. Now, I do 90 percent of my listening on my iPod, but I still buy and rip CDs, and every once in a while will actually throw something on the stereo and lay on the couch and listen to it.

― the top man in the language department (誤訳侮辱), Wednesday, April 22, 2015 7:48 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I agree with much of this, except I remember being almost as annoyed with cassettes as I was with vinyl; the high-end always had a swooshing sound, walkmen always broke/died, and unless you remembered to clean your heads/pinch rollers, tapes would get eaten. And, as Dave Marsh wrote, "rewinding is the longest distance between any two points."

i feel that if you're going to transfer all your CDs to a binder you may as well just rip em and chuck em.

CDs don't get quieter with age u mad? they oxidise sometimes... the surface of my copy of SAWII looks like a rock pool.

- yeah it sucks having to spend 20 seconds cleaning a record. but it does actually prevent the whole "sounded like ass, all crackly and getting a little worse every time you played them" thing.

Except, there's usually more involved that using a cleaning or anti-static brush over a few revolutions of the record.

It's still staticy.

"Try rubbing alcohol, with the record laid flat on a lint-free cloth, and..."

Wow, hm, OK, let me write this down...

"Or, you could use that Spin-Clean machine."

Is that expensive?

"Nope, only $80! But you have to make sure you get the combination of distilled water and cleaning solution right."

That actually sounds a little complicated...

"Well, there's a bunch of other record-cleaning machines, usually starting around $400."

Yeah, no. Any other methods?

"Yeah, you can spread wood glue all over the LP, make sure you let it dry enough, then peel-"

[leaves, puts on CD]

i don't see that the hefty uprise in vinyl pricing has owt to do with inflation tbh. longform vhs vidoes were 9.99 in 1989 and you can get a decent DVD or Blu Ray for much the same if not less today and the quality is 5x as good. so.. you know.

One of the main reasons I like having a record player now (and yes I had records when I was younger too), is I'm not tempted to distract myself by staring at my computer or my phone or pressing skip or shuffling to a new album the second my attention wonders.
All that stuff is useful to have, but increasingly I found that so much of my music listening was spent soundtracking idle Facebook sessions. I'd spend hours making pointless playlists that I'd never listen to in full and just delete. It was wasting my time. With a record I can switch off the computer and read a book or just do something else, but with digital I find staring at the internet just too tempting.

xp What do you mean "disintegrate?" You mean oxidize? Peel? Are rendered useless?

― Jimmywine Dyspeptic, Thursday, April 23, 2015 2:37 PM (33 minutes ago)

Yes, and they get quieter, no matter how loud you set your speakers.

The other day I listened to the first CD I ever bought, an Italian bootleg of a 1968 Who show that I got in 1988. Still sounded perfect (and loud).

― Montgomery Burns' Jazz (Tarfumes The Escape Goat), Thursday, April 23, 2015 2:40 PM

That's good for you, but it is not the case for many CDs. It will depend on a lot of factors how much they disintegrate, including play counts. But it's unavoidable. It depends on how the CD was made and dyed, humidity, and light and coating layer that was used to make them.

I semi-share the "physical possessions begone" optimism but on the other side these possessions still exist they're just possessed by corporate monoliths we rent them from

at least you always own the physical product.

That's good for you, but it is not the case for many CDs. It will depend on a lot of factors how much they disintegrate, including play counts. But it's unavoidable. It depends on how the CD was made and dyed, humidity, and light and coating layer that was used to make them.

― Arctic Noon Auk, Thursday, April 23, 2015 10:20 AM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

There were a handful of plants in the 80s (possibly until 1990) that didn't use the best, or entirely correct, processes for manufacturing CDs. A Polydor West German plant was the most notorious. The overwhelming majority of rotting/disintegrating CDs can be traced to these plants.

i like compact discs. when they sound good they can sound awesome. i find their sound just as variable as vinyl though. good/great/terrible/okay. i like records too. i don't like new records too much though. but it depends. some people do a great job with new vinyl. the making of vinyl from a cd/digital source though is just dumb. and that is mostly what you get now. i still like how vinyl sounds on tape. which is why i still make mix-tapes using good new blank tapes. my preferred method of listening to a bunch of 45s.

i flirted with spotify a couple of weeks ago and it didn't last long. i love how you can hear tons of electronic music and rap and metal, but i would have to figure out a way to listen that sounded better than on a computer or t.v. hook my stereo up to the t.v. or something. that spotify sound still reminds me of when i first heard digital radio. strangely claustrophobic and airless. in theory i am all for the streaming music thing though.

"Yes, and they get quieter, no matter how loud you set your speakers."

I don't see how this is possible. They may *seem* quieter, compared to albums made in the last 15 years, but that's down to changes in mastering preferences ("the loudness wars", etc). But a physically deteriorating CD can't get quieter. Drop-outs, skips, glitches, yes.

tarfumes, i am keeping my minty german copy of tommy handy for when you come to the store! gonna crank it up for you. sounds like a dream...

looking forward to it!

I'm conflicted because I love having a vinyl collection but I also constantly fantasize about selling it. I don't think be able to, though. I've always been addicted to collecting yet I try to be as neat and tidy about it as possible. Here's how I store my collection:

http://i1208.photobucket.com/albums/cc364/aerialnostalgia/photo3-4.jpg

I semi-share the "physical possessions begone" optimism but on the other side these possessions still exist they're just possessed by corporate monoliths we rent them from

― da croupier, Thursday, April 23, 2015 2:25 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

idg how this applies to an mp3 - though it's a reason i'm not down with streaming - but my "physical possessions begone" isn't a principle of optimism as literally a comment pertaining to clutter in the home

don't understand the act of "ripping it to digital" right away.. are you doing this so that you don't have to physically handle the artefact? so you can listen to it on your computer/personal device?

tarfumes, i am keeping my minty german copy of tommy handy for when you come to the store! gonna crank it up for you. sounds like a dream...

looking forward to it!

― scott seward, Thursday, April 23, 2015 10:35 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Woo-hoo! Thanks, Scott! I too am looking forward to it!

are you doing this so that you don't have to physically handle the artefact? so you can listen to it on your computer/personal device?

― braunld (Lowell N. Behold'n), Thursday, April 23, 2015 2:38 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

bc there is no longer a device in my house that plays CDs

Ripping it to digital allows you to take it with you on your commute, at the office, etc.

bc there is no longer a device in my house that plays CDs

What about the thing you ripped it with? /pedant

I also like to create mixes that involve my recent additions. xp

i don't think it's ever occurred to me to PLAY a CD in my laptop before!

speaking of which - in my experience it's cd players that tend to conk out and stop working sooner than the cds themselves. I used to have an almost masonic ritual I would go through when putting cds on my old AIWA stereo - 'You have to put the cd in, press on top of the CD drawer until it spins while holding down the ff button or else it won't play'.

I use binders. It was an incredible relief to throw out all that useless plastic. If I hadn't, I'd have to have another room in my apartment by now. Anyway, there's always digipaks to use for conspicuous display.

I have plenty of '80s CDs and have not noticed any of them getting quieter. Some were quieter than vinyl to begin with though, as mentioned above due to mastering. For example my Exposé 12" singles are way more booming than the Exposé CD from 1987. Manufactured CDs did get louder across the board around 1990 - maybe that's what makes '80s CDs seem defective?

Was at a party the other day and the host had cassette and boom box. Putting the tape (The Bangles' All Over the Place) in the box and pressing play felt like using a Victrola!

I have a Marantz CD+FM+DAB+streaming receiver thing now (with a turntable and "Smart" BluRay-player plugged in) and I guess its use breaks down as something like 10% vinyl, 10% CD, 20% TV, 20% radio, 40% Spotify (whether direct or AirPlay from my phone app - sometimes the former doesn't work and the interface for the latter is better).

I have a bookcase of 200+ CDs* next to the couch, all my vinyl in Traby units underneath the speakers and a massive drawer unit in the bedroom with everything else in it (1000+ CDs, MiniDiscs, DVDs, etc). This seems to work for me now.

CDs aren't getting quieter, you're getting deafer.

That asterisk was supposed to say something about it being purely alphabetical (got the bookcase before the drawer unit) rather than a curated subset. It's A through E, basically. I'm fine for Eno and Autechre.

xp

Oh, and in theory I could AirPlay anything from my iTunes library (assuming my external HDDs were plugged into my laptop) to the stereo but in practice this doesn't work. AirPlay icon goes amber, disappears. Which means I'm missing out on entire episodes of Hancock's Half Hour and dozens and dozens of "Track 1", "Track 2", etc untagged scree.

I have a Sonos now and it is mostly great, apart from my internet connection being shit. Overall though for a small room it's got a real wallop to it.

My parents lovingly stacked all my CDs and vinyl in cupboards in my old childhood room, it was a nice thing to come home to at Christmas despite not being able to play them.

don't understand the act of "ripping it to digital" right away.. are you doing this so that you don't have to physically handle the artefact? so you can listen to it on your computer/personal device?

I do it so I can play things on my portable FLAC player, which I mostly use to do a radio show - the station no longer has a cassette deck.

idg how this applies to an mp3 - though it's a reason i'm not down with streaming - but my "physical possessions begone" isn't a principle of optimism as literally a comment pertaining to clutter in the home

― lex pretend, Thursday, April 23, 2015 2:37 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

seriously not trying to pick a fight, but you wrote i feel like society moving away from physical possessions is only a mark of progress.

omg stop being the worst kind of pedant srsly

"society" encompasses quality of life as well as macro socio-economic factors as well u know

i'm sorry i misunderstood your statement - usually when people talk about "moving away from possessions is great for society" they don't just mean "less clutter" so i pointed out the flipside of that optimism.

yes i was exaggerating for effect, perfectly understandable if you didn't get it seeing as i've never exaggerated before

why are you mad

you explained what you meant and i apologized and explained what i reacted to. do we really need the "fuck you for not getting it right out the gate" talk?

you do it quite a lot and it feels like a spillover of those twitter dudes who feel the need to pedantically factcheck the most innocuous tweets ppl make

I think this case is a pretty understandable misread though.

i'm sorry our previous interactions have you on the defensive - that factors into why i said "honestly not trying to pick a fight"

"i think it's great as a culture we're moving away from owning music" is statement i've heard from plenty of people, most memorably jace clayton in an interview. it's not an obvious absurd exaggeration, it's a common idealistic sentiment.

yes but you see being needlessly pedantic after that phrase kinda negated it, as it usually does

xp

also i don't believe in the slightest you actually misunderstood for more than a second

i'm not sure what i did to make you this contemptuous but you get a third sorry and i'm leaving at that

leaving it at that, rather. not stomping out of a benign thread about cds or anything.

Ripping it to digital allows you to take it with you on your commute, at the office, etc.

i rip to a network storage device, which means i can pump the mp3s into my amp using the Sonos Connect gadget.
the quality is seriously so much better than using your audio output of your laptop.
also means i dont have to dig through my 5000+ cd collection to play anything, i just select it in the sonos application, and off it goes.

love it.

also, i have got some original vinyl pressings, and the equivalent (normally remastered) cd.
and having done a like for like comparison, for quite a few situations that i have this for : ELO, Cabaret Voltaire, The The, Madness, ABC, Human League, Foetus, ZTT, etc etc,

i definitely know which i prefer.

yes, i know it's probably due to limits of my entry level record deck (pro-ject debut), but still ..

Well, I just got a new CD player (the old one stopped working; I did um and ah about it a bit, as 99% of my listening is now mp3), so yeah.

My logic was a little shaky though: I need a new CD player so my thousands of old CDs aren't a complete waste of space, even if I barely listen to them, because I can't bring myself to get rid of them, especially now they're no longer worth anything to sell. And I worry that CD players may be getting less reliable and more expensive to replace. My father bought the family's first CD player in 1990 and it still works. My last CD player lasted just a few years. The new one is pretty plasticky so who knows how long it's got.

I don't get vinyl. Not for albums, anyway; I used to love buying a handful of 99p 7"s by bands I'd barely heard of every week, or getting admittedly childish "in on a secret" thrills from finding an obscure 7" with a sheaf of fliers for other obscure records/zines or a cryptic barely-labelled electronic 12". But LPs I used to buy only because they were cheap, for all the reasons 誤訳侮辱 said, and now they are not cheap: most of the new LPs in my local record store are at least £18-20 or even more, and they're not even any better pressed than the things I bought only reluctantly in the 90s to listen to on my cheap record deck through a veil of mysterious noise which might have been ground hum or surface noise or a dodgy stylus (though it never went away when I replaced the stylus) or a billion other things.

OK, that was my equipment's fault and not necessarily vinyl's, but I suspect the student-aged people I see buying vinyl are playing it on cheap gear or not at all, too.

lol yeah, they are using the download code and mounting the unplayed record in a frame on their wall

(shakes fist at cloud)

XXP sonos is great
I buy CDs if I like a whole album (rare) because my car is old and only has a CD player. I even make mix CDs for it!

i have no idea whether it's a more accurate or clear sound or whatever, but i love the sound of old records - authenticity fetish, lifestyle choice, whatever. i find it warm and pleasant. i can see my CDs going before I stop playing vinyl - the number of albums I love that aren't on streaming or easily findable on used LP relatively small, and while it sucks on principle that stuff gets lost in the cracks, there's only so many hours in the day to revisit them anyway

i was playing CDs in the car but my number of commutes dropped recently so i've just been flipping the dial on sirius, so currently the cds are just there for security and posterity, with records played if i'm chilling and reading and streaming played if i'm at my laptop

sound-wise, CDs have just gotten better. just in time for nobody to listen to them. some of the crazy dvd-audio CDs i've heard, man oh man, it's like listening in 5D. it really is the way to go with electronic music. and electro-acoustic music.

yeah someday i'd love to have all music i listen to coming through the same awesome system (that i don't currently own). until then any assessment of formats is filtered through the shit speaker they're coming out of

it just makes sense to listen to laptop music on your laptop. new digital studio recordings on CD or DVD. old analog recordings on vinyl or reel-to-reel tape. in my opinion. not that i listen to reel-to-reel tape. but in a perfect world. i think a well-made cd is the happy medium though. you are more likely to hear a satisfying recording that way. vinyl can involve a lot of trial and error to find the right pressing/copy and obviously most people don't want to go through all that. and if sound quality isn't your first concern, than streaming/MP3 makes sense too.

so when will the CD revival happen? 2025?

it's already begun with me! i find great used cds all the time now for cheap. and so much of it is already out of print. random reissues and old rap and metal cds. now is a good time to go through the cd bins.

plus, the PS1 i use as a cd player is the best cd player i've ever had. i love playing stuff on it. first cd player i've ever really enjoyed! i'm back to the future....

scott tells the truth.
as i have said elsewhere, cd bins/charity shops are fantastic at the moment.
i live in a small little town, and people are offloading their cds to the local charity shops at quite a pace meaning i am stocking up for little ££ outlay.
long may it continue.

i was learning some Zulu today on CD. language instruction CDs are big in our house. you can find them in book stores now for nothing.

somewhere I read that those PS1 things have really good DAC circuitry, I should track one down

that 'somewhere' was probably scott on another thread.
i had no idea until he mentioned it here.
i have since been asking people i know if they have an old ps1 they want to bin/donate to a worthy cause !

I feel like people are speaking at odds through some of this thread though. Depends what genres and styles, different releases are directed to different formats. This is an obvious point, but the idea that there is Platonic ideal of a record is a fiction. These things are technically accomplished in specific ways, and that can also mean that there are artists who are not striving for an ideal of CD high fidelity. It's an obvious point, but I still feel like it needs to be said.

just looked on Craigslist and PS1s are $10-$30, totally gonna get one

Is that original PS1's or do PSOnes count as well?

You've got me wondering wth even happened to my original ps1. It seems to have just disappeared.

do you have it hooked up to a tv and controller to use the PS 1 as a CD player?

i use a ps2 as a cd player cuz i like the goofyfuture spinning colored cubes that represent each track

my ps3 is my in-house cd player and i'm not happy the ps4 reportedly doesn't play cds

nope, hooked up to my receiver. it has rca plugs.

x-post

i've actually been thinking about getting good slightly smaller new speakers to put on top of my olde tyme speakers and listen to digi sounds on those. if that makes any sense. my old speakers make records sound amazing, but i think i could optimize my cd listening with speakers designed for digital.

I've read everything in this revive and have a few things to add:

1. All "portable" music is expendable. It's expendable because it should always be a copy. When i was young i copied my records and discs to (high quality) cassettes and took those mobile. Today; slide what you want to listen to onto a CD-RW or MicroSD, and take it mobile. Lost or otherwise ruined -- a new copy awaits back at home.

2. 8-Tracks really do suck. Unless it's the only piece of audio equipment in some remote cabin or lodge; there audio bleed-trough and track re-ordering leaves little beyond kitsch to appreciate.

3. Flac is an oxymoron. If it lacks the lesser footprint of a mp3 but you like it well enough to seek the higher audio quality of the format; bit the bullet and get a bonafide copy.

4. Mp3 players hooked into the aux jack of your car stereo. Most medium to low end players need and receive a tremendous benefit from a headphone amp -- spend about $100 and rock-out to your hearts content. Oh yeah, and skip the shitty earbuds as well.

5. The vinyl resurgence is awful? This is a short view; while inflated pricing and quality issues are currently evident, the increased popularity in wax further validates the longevity of the format. I began buying LPs in the 70s and bought a TON of second-hand stuff in the 90s when prices were cheap. Having a new generation jump on the bandwagon keeps manufacturers making new gear and will also lead to another buyers market when the folks who bought into LPs as part of a fad get out of the medium and, in turn, bolster the second hand market.

6. Will CDs retire with the Time/Life generation? It took grandma and grandpa a long time to accept CDs into the music realm; today their death-grip is assured. Sure, i still buy them as i fell confident that i will still be able to easily listen to them 20 years down the road. All of my CDs are well-cared for, and i'm proud to say that i've only abused and ruined a couple of them in my lifetime. All my custom-burnt CDs are on high quality branded media, and other than the requisite mis-burnt coasters, have none that have faltered do to excessive "shelf-wear".

7. Streaming doesn't float for the non-metro crowd. Not living in a large metropolitan area, while i do have DSL and wi-fi, struggle to get a 4G signal at my home. Again, going forward with my first point (that all portable should be expendable) it will still be some time before streaming, even though completely acceptable, will become a part of my day-to-day. Metropolitan areas always get the newest and fastest tech (even though the increased user-base may make it crawl) but they all seemed trained to need unlimited data plans, subscription music services, pay TV, and even more-so, an avenue to broadcast their comings-and-goings via their online up-to-the-minute presence. I've tried all the streaming services and satellite stations and haven't yet found one that's satisfying beyond the short term -- i'll take my fave local programs, podcasts, blogs, and review sites to keep my interest reliably piqued. BTW; i use the descriptor "metro" very loosely -- in rural america if you're more than a couple miles from a small town or major through-way, your chances of getting reliable and affordable high-speed internet remains very dubious.

8. It all comes down to storage density. Having a better mp3 compression regime may make those files sound better, but, frankly, i find today's mp3s very listenable when played through better hardware -- even though i still prefer the "full audio product" for my permanent collection. For me to forego the traditional physical media will require significant maturation in storage tech. My guess is that it will need to be in 5-10 terabyte range of capacity, completely removable, and be no larger than a deck of cards; that you "plug-in" to your central stereo system (media station) and access from wherever your corded or or wireless hotspot allows. The more significant linchpin is the interface; i've yet to use any audio device that replicates the feeling i get from flipping through an actual collection. A tablet-style interface could certainly satisfy my cover art and liner note needs, but it will take some fairly visionary software to make me enjoy the experience enough to ditch the real stuff.

9. Short answer: No, yes, yes.

Streaming doesn't float for the non-metro crowd. Not living in a large metropolitan area, while i do have DSL and wi-fi, struggle to get a 4G signal at my home.

Good obvious point that makes sense, considering I've a friend who lives in north central Florida and switched from dial-up to DSL eighteen months ago – and he could've afforded the switch years ago.

> 3. Flac is an oxymoron. If it lacks the lesser footprint of a mp3 but you like it well enough to seek the higher audio quality of the format; bit the bullet and get a bonafide copy.

not sure what you're getting at here. flac is a *perfect* copy of the original wav just in a more concise coding, analogous to a .zip file. ot if by 'bonafide copy' you mean a physical copy then the deciding factor for me is often price. are the cd sleevenotes worth the extra couple of quid (and the extra couple of quid of postage)? if the only other version that's available is a vinyl copy then this is a no-brainer - flac every time.

http://boomkat.com/vinyl/1230196-gomila-park-ununoctium
vinyl 12" - £12.99
flac - £2.95

also, you can turn FLACs back into WAV files and burn them to a CDR

apparently depending on how wonky your CD/CD player is, you might not be getting all the bits of data off the CD from a regular listen (hence why some ripping programs make multiple passes to make sure), so FLAC might be better for perfect sound forever purposes.

I did not intend to suggest that flac files contain any less audio data than the wav -- but, yes, the bonafide copy in my book is the physical copy. Besides the hard copy archival value, we could quibble over the value of the art and liner notes -- and not only do i place value on the art and notes, i would urge musicians to exploit these spaces to bring more value to physical copy (at least until the industry finds a reliable way to equitably compensate them for the digital ones).

Kinda wonder if the no-internet crowd are changing their format habits much. I've got a couple of friends with no internet so I'll probably ask them next time I see them. There's only a few choices so the results probably won't startle.

I'm sure hundreds of big cities around the world don't have a good enough connection for streaming.

In the decade I've had internet, the longest I've ever had completely satisfying internet service is just over a year. Streaming probably won't be an option for a long time but I don't think I'll ever use it much even if I can.

When does loss occur in an audio file? I've tried to find succinct explanations but can't.

When does loss occur in an audio file? I've tried to find succinct explanations but can't.

Compression or making a file smaller causes loss. Streaming and mp3 conversion both equal loss.

is there a streaming FLAC service? that would be lossless.

uhh

Tidal

apparently it has already crashed & burned though

There are a couple i've heard of -- but they're not ready to go mobile.

http://tidal.com/us
http://www.deezer.com/offers/elite -- piggybacks on Sonos

Tidal Hi-Fi is $20 / mth

http://www.qobuz.com/gb-en/ is $20 as well

Having a new generation jump on the bandwagon keeps manufacturers making new gear

No new record presses have been manufactured in the last decade or two; the tooling is prohibitively expensive and/or non-existent, and the people who knew how to make them are either dead or retired.

and will also lead to another buyers market when the folks who bought into LPs as part of a fad get out of the medium and, in turn, bolster the second hand market.

This will likely happen, but the problem is, this second-hand market will lean heavily towards the crappy overpriced mastered-from-CD reissues currently clogging pressing plants.

http://qz.com/103785/hipsters-are-buying-vinyl-records-but-they-arent-listening-to-them/

While vinyl sales have increased at about 30% compounded annually over the last 6 years, turntable sales have remained fairly flat over that time, ranging from 104,000 to 115,000 according to the Consumer Electronics Association. So either the newer turntables purchased are far, far more durable than those in recent memory (they aren’t—high quality electronics companies like Panasonic are discontinuing their units and those that are sold are increasingly cheaper, portable models like this one I bought from Urban Outfitters) or something else is happening with these records.

thousands of people buying OLD turntables. people come in my place and want turntables and i tell them where they can get new ones and they don't want new ones. they want "cool" vintage tables. for, like, a dollar. but anyway, no way to know how many old ones have sold in the last five years. tons though.

> the bonafide copy in my book is the physical copy

fair enough. and i will buy cds if they are comparative in price. but, like i say, sometimes the only alternative is an expensive vinyl copy...

and i realised the other day that it's not just the booklet and sleeve you miss with a digital copy, often you don't even get a catalogue number.

(flac, in my book, is superior to wav in more than just filesize because you can embed metadata to it.)

> Compression or making a file smaller causes loss.

no, you can compress a file losslessly, the same way you can zip a file and unzip it again and not lose any information. flac compression will typically make a file 60% of the original size without loss. mp3s at 128 are about 10% the size of the original wav but are lossy, so some information is lost. the trick is to try and throw away the unimportant data, things you don't normally perceive anyway...

or they inherited one from their parents like i did.
xp

Yeah, I realized that about used turntables as soon as I posted it. My dad's Dual, that he bought in 1977, is still going strong, as is my 20-year-old Rotel.

Yeah seriously it's huge to ignore how many used turntables sell or get inherited.

I got mine, a technics classic style one, off ebay about 5 years ago. £120

It was advertised as a DJ's home unit, which is the classic "One lady owner" of turntables, right? But it was very untrashed indeed.

Tenacity, basically. Took around a year to get one for that price, even then you'd need about £200 to be certain of a decent one.

(flac, in my book, is superior to wav in more than just filesize because you can embed metadata to it.)

was gonna mention this, thanks

thats the stupidest article

Do audio files lose stuff from being copied or transferred to another device (even an mp3 player)? Does compression happen in those instances?

Audio files copied from one device to another are identical, unless there's some kind of freaky error. Loss occurs when a lossless audio file is converted to a compressed format like mp3, which trades reduced audio quality for smaller file sizes. The amount of loss depends on the bit rate chosen for the compression. An mp3 saved with a bit rate of 128 kbit/s will be a smaller file, with greater loss, than an mp3 saved from the same source material at 320 kbit/s.

No new record presses have been manufactured in the last decade or two

I was referring more-so to the playback gear; you know turntables, cartridges, etc All the recent LPs i've bought have looked and sounded beautiful.

you can compress a file losslessly

I stand corrected -- a zipped flac can be returned to it's former greatness.

Do audio files lose stuff from being copied or transferred to another device

Depends on the device; although most take what you give them with no conversion (as long as the device can play the particular format). Exact Audio Copy (EAC) is a program that copies and then compares the copy with the source. Memory can become corrupt and not pass this bit-for-bit data comparison. However, how many times do you think you could copy and paste a file the size of a novel and expect every single letter of every single word to be the exact same as the original? Modern data storage is far more reliable than the old days of making a copy of a copy of a copy of a tape. And what Brad C. said.

While I was typing this other replies have appeared but I'll post it anyway.

When does loss occur in an audio file? I've tried to find succinct explanations but can't.

First of all, both lossy and lossless audio compression are just means to make audio files occupy less space on a storage medium, and have nothing to do with dynamic range compression despite the confusing terms, and the fact that lots of misinformed or outright deceiving articles try to conflate the two.

So, for example, you may have lossless/uncompressed audio files that were subjected to extreme dynamic range compression that sound awful, and lossy audio files sourced from a decently engineered recording that sound great (the preceding assumes that the listener dislikes the loudness war hypercompressed sound, YMMV).

Lossless compression is, like many above have stated, the same principle as a .zip file: you have an original file, you compress to save some disk space and delete the uncompressed original, then unzip it and get the original file back exactly as it was. Lossless audio compression is ideal for archiving. Examples of lossy codecs are FLAC, WavPack, ALAC, etc.

Lossy compression achieves much higher compression ratios (IOW, much less space is needed to store the compressed files) at the cost of irreversible information loss. Unlike lossless, you can not get back the original file from the lossy file.

Why would anyone use lossy? Because by saving more space, they can keep a lot more music on the limited space of their hardware player, and despite the scary sounding "information loss" the reality is that, with reasonable settings, modern lossy codecs produce transparent files. A lossy file is transparent if a listener can not distinguish it from its lossless source. Examples of lossy codecs are MP3, Vorbis, Opus, AAC, Dolby Digital, etc.

So, to really answer your question: assuming everything is working correctly, loss in an audio file only occurs if you deliberately compress it with a lossy codec. An exmaple would be ripping a CD (uncompressed audio data) to .mp3 files.

If you lossily compress a file multiple times, damage accumulates and eventually the result will be an unrecognisable mess when played back (although some lossy codecs detect previous lossy compression and do nothing when input with a lossy file). There is incremental generational loss.

If you losslessly compress an already losslessly compressed files, nothing will happen to the audio data. The file size may change, metadata may not be preserved, but lossless is lossless, the audio data will remain intact.

If you losslessly compress a lossy file, will you NOT gain back any quality nor further degrade it, but you WILL increase its size for no benefit whatsoever.

By just playing back an audio file or copying it to another device no damage is incurred, be it a lossy or lossless file, no matter how many times you do it.

super into cd-r releases rn seems like the absolute coolest way to put out music in 2015

lol here's my own redundant version of those posts

no, digital data doesn't suffer generation loss when you copy it because all you're doing is taking the clear and very finite sequence of 1s/0s that represent the song and reproducing exactly the same sequence somewhere else, like copying a list of numbers from one piece of paper to another. human error (and borges) aside, your second piece of paper will contain exactly the same information as the first.

compression--making data smaller--sometimes degrades and sometimes doesn't, because sometimes what you're doing is taking data out, actually removing numbers from your list (what happens when you rip a cd to mp3) and sometimes you're using clever formulae to express lots of numbers as fewer numbers, from which the original unchanged set of numbers can still be determined by running the formula in reverse (what happens when you rip a cd to flac, or compress a wav file to flac -- actually these are the same thing since when you "rip to flac" you really rip to wav and then compress). it's the difference between cutting bits off of something and folding it in on itself: they both make the thing smaller but only one actually degrades it. (also the former, obviously, can make something a lot smaller than the latter.)

these days i copy flacs or oggs directly to a ipod nano mounted as a regular removable drive and running "rockbox" instead of apple's firmware, so i'm actually not sure what happens when you copy files to a normal ipod using itunes -- i know it changes your filenames and directory structures and the files that appear on the ipod are cryptically named and organized but i don't know if it actually recompresses anything. i assume the files are the same but maybe they are processed somehow first.

i own a lot of cds i've never played -- i buy them, flac them, then look at the liner notes while i listen to the files.

it's the difference between cutting bits off of something and folding it in on itself

excellent analogy!

I've bought like 40 cds in the last month. But I can't seem to find the ikea CD shelves I've been depending on :(

My biggest worry is access to discmans when my present one breaks, which might be relatively soon, heaven forbid! It seems the only ones you can get in stores (and I'm basing this on the last time I looked, which was over 6 years ago) are bottom line ones which sound like shit and eat your batteries in under 10 hours. Ones on amazon or whatever seem to be marked up, whether due to scarcity or because people still think it's 2002 and that they have Ny retIl value at all. Normally I use a CDJ at home, but I've been travelling a lot this last year, and so have depended on my current discman to listen to music during that time.

hey ed.b, when you dj are you mostly using cdjs?

i dunno, it seems really silly not to continue when legal downloads are half the quality at twice the price of buying a CD off Amazon?

the only time i've bought legal downloads is when the explicit version of the album doesn't physically exist, or when i'm paranoid that it does not

like, i could not find an explicit hardcopy of the charli xcx album, and all the flacs i soulsought went "BEEP YOU, SUCKER!" which suggests that nobody else could find one either

(and i wanted to buy it cuz i felt bad for her)

xposts: My dj set up at home (and since I don't ever have the opportunity to dj out, that's it for me) is 2 turntables + 2 CDJs, so it could go any way. I'd say I use vinyl and CDs (which is like, store-bought CDs, i.e. albums and comps, not burnt cds or usb keys) about equally, unless I'm making some fancy, presentable mix, in which case I use audacity on my laptop.

the only time i've bought legal downloads is when the explicit version of the album doesn't physically exist, or when i'm paranoid that it does not

agreed.

CA$H by Nasty Rox Inc is one the rarest ZTT cds ever, yet they re-released it quietly in digital for a few years ago.
they kept it quiet due to fears re the samples.
(and yes, in good old ZTT form, one of the extra tracks is f*cked up with digital glitches ... hence why i am still on the lookout for a decent cd edition of it).

that was when i succumbed.

that and 'happy families' by blancmange as the reissued edition was deleted within hours of edsel pressing it making the hard copy version f*cking stupid prices should you ever see it available.

so, i am not totally adverse to doing the digital only thing, just that, i do like to have something to put on my shelf when i spend a tenner.

ty xp

i dunno, it seems really silly not to continue when legal downloads are half the quality at twice the price of buying a CD off Amazon?

^ This basically. Also suggests another possibility for those with more time than money: buy a cheap CD copy, rip your own soft copies [lossy with different codecs and bitrates, lossless, whatever takes your fancy] and immediately sell the CD.

not only that.
but i genuinely have bought cds/boxsets off amazon with their glorious autorip extra, where it is cheaper to get the cd/free digital version than it is getting the digital only option.
go figure.

!!

all of my cds are in the garage except a select few which I have in the house. I've whittled them down as much as I can, but the remaining 700 are not going to net me more than ten cents a piece, I think, so it's not even worth taking them in to sell (I sold all the ones of any worth, DCC things etc). I do have a nice vinyl collection, maybe about 500 records; it's a fetish for sure for the most part but I always listened to records growing up and there is something comforting about the sound of them, even with the surface noise. But I've recently sworn to not rebuy any music, it's a huge fucking waste of money; if I have something on Cd i'm not going to go out and pick up a remastered vinyl version anymore. I was about to pick up a nice copy of Rumors, of all fucking things, and remembered I have a perfectly good sounding deluxe cd of that in the garage.

The vast majority of my listening is still to digital files streaming off a home server or on a portable though. Sad but that's the way it is.

CDs do not get 'quiet' over time, that is a preposterous assertion. Some do get rot though.

eg : the recent 4 cd edgar froese boxset.

that said, i think i got the boxset/autorip when they had it mispriced.

xp.

CDs do not get 'quiet' over time, that is a preposterous assertion. Some do get rot though.

agree.

the only cds i have had the dreaded rot from are PDO cds : wiseblood/foetus, orbital, and neutron 90000 so far.

http://www.brainwashed.com/rot/

but the option to send them back is dead and buried.

lol at the "hipsters aren't listening to their records" thing.

turntables also last a fuck of a long time. my technics SL-QD35, handed down from my dad, was still going strong until the cat knocked it over a couple months ago. every thrift store in the country has at least one kinda shitty table and maybe some better ones. most people i know listen to vinyl on really awful tinny little plastic things, dunno if it's the cartridge or the shit speakers or what but their records sound like shit. but they love it! listen to 'em all the time! what a bad article.

Thanks for the information guys! Life seems slightly less scary.

I moved my CDs to binders a few years ago and don't regret it at all - okay maybe a teeny tiny bit for nostalgic reasons for certain CDs that it might be nice to still have the complete packaging/artwork/etc. for - but I don't regret it overall. The amount of saved space/mass is incredible. I've had to move apartments a couple of times, and the CDs in their cases occupied multiple heavy boxes. Now they all fit in three very portable binders, that I can stash on a shelf. I have nothing in theory against ripping them all to some lossless digital format, other than the time that would take.

i was heartbroken when i realized i had to get rid of my record player a couple years ago until i remembered that i had been given it used by an elderly couple more than a decade earlier

i then bought a cheapo suitcase one that requires a quarter taped to the needle but hey i kick it old school

I bought a crappy Ariston turntable with my first pay check from writing 17 years ago and it is still going strong. I need a new CD player though, as the drawer on my old one needs to be opened and closed manually.

ed B: I don't know what Ikea shelves you prefer, but I have at least two spare blue/white "Robin" shelves that I would part with for the cost of shipping.

I'd have four if my wife agreed to the binder plan (insert "binders of women" joke here)

but i genuinely have bought cds/boxsets off amazon with their glorious autorip extra, where it is cheaper to get the cd/free digital version than it is getting the digital only option.

this always amuses me. amazon is like, we will pay you to take this CD out of our warehouse.

I did the binder thing a couple weeks ago as well as majorly weeding my collection. The only ones I've kept intact are signed/cherished special edition/PJ Harvey. I thought I would be a lot more melancholy about it than I was but it felt... really, really good.

No new record presses have been manufactured in the last decade or two; the tooling is prohibitively expensive and/or non-existent, and the people who knew how to make them are either dead or retired.

I believe this was true until very recently, but it looks like this plant in the Czech Republic has internally developed and is building new presses to keep up with demand:

http://thequietus.com/articles/17670-gz-vinyl-pressing-plant-record-store-day

I have several hundred movies in binders and i struggle to find films i know i have -- with LPs and other "cased" items it's very efficient to be able to scan the spines.

Phrases i never thought i'd utter; "Do you have the Czech Import?" -- i always thought that Russian turntables required found pieces of talus slag for their cartridge styli.

Alphabetize

For movies I sort by genre, or director - and then by year of release; or, at least many other factors before alphabet. My music hard drive is sorted by genre, alphabet (band name), and then release date, and it's no fun to browse. Maybe "your" generation can mentally parse things this way, but it more revelatory to view my catalog in a larger macro sense.

idgi, you're sorting your stuff by genre and director and release date, isn't that more micro than just using the alphabet?

With somewhere between 10 and 15-thousand individual titles (20+ if you include the hard drive material) I would never find use in simply taking every piece of music i have a placing it in alphabetical order.

The alphabet is a cold, detailed, and finely-tipped brush -- blending those details into more generalized hues is what connects music from different artists -- and it's in a way that the alphabet cannot.

My mp3 player sorts alphabetically and I can never remember what's on it -- instead -- i'll throw in couple of preformed playlists for general listening and then a big chunk of something like "Complete 1950's Stan Getz" in a separate folder as something i need to slowly digest.

Let me use another example -- i have the entire Pink Floyd catalog thru "The Final Cut" -- how do i reconcile the fact that i only need one of those albums on vinyl, 2-3 of them on disc, and the rest is fine for high-bit mp3 -- and how do i sort them? Broad brush strokes; in my main vinyl stack (of maybe 400 LPs), Floyd's "Meddle" sets alongside "Yerself is Steam" and that makes more sense to me than the alphabet ever could.

I understand that to some extent we are all somewhat reliant on the alphabet -- the point i'm trying to make is that there is nothing fun about scanning through such an un-nuanced list -- and that one day that somebody devises a way for me to organically peruse my own catalog that's as enjoyable as the way i organically stack my records. Yes; the main stacks have to be in order; but when i get a fresh pile of CDs or LPs they set out front, unbound from the confines of their inevitable alphabetical slot. They set out front in an organic order that may include such factors as "completely random", "genre", "artist", "preciousness", "rarity", "condition", "level of interest", or whatever. Organic listening of music somewhat requires an organic order of titles, and i would be much more apt to committing to digital stacks if they made them more fun to look through.

Shuffle is the new browse

PINK FLOYD RULES

If the "shuffle" button was smarter and randomly included factors such as "mood" or "bpm" or "key" or whatever other details it can glean, we might be talking.

I started getting Cds in the late 80s in high school and later got into having vinyl and LPs a couple years later in college. I had a Sony turntable and LPs were cool as there were records were not on CD and you could sometimes get stuff crazy cheap. I know I got all of Tangerine Dream's Virgin LPs at a buck each. Sometime in 1999 that turntable conked out and I have literally thought about getting a turntable and nice stereo setup for 15 years and it just never has happened. There are definitely some newer vinyl records put out in the hip comeback that look really, really cool.

Never really stopped buying CDs and by now have over 3000. I mostly listen on a couple of PCs that I have studio monitors setup for playback. I had ripped a ton to mp3s and just always thought the quality sucked as it seems to me to clip the low end and I could hear clicks and other artifacts in playback. In early 2012 I installed a 2 TB second hard drive on my main PC and got the DB Poweramp software to rip and started over on my digital music collection ripping them as uncompressed wave files. I have them just sorted by artist name folders. No central database other than a spreadsheet and a word document that I have been using since Oct. 96 to track what I listen to and what's in the collection. I've probably now got maybe 60-67% of my collection ripped at this point.

I slowed down for a few years on getting CDs but the whole 'original album series' and other budget box sets of the like are music fan crack. It is kind of crazy that you can get those type of Cd collections often on import via Amazon for less than actually downloading the MP3s.

One thing about CDs that has always been cool since the home burners is making CDR comps for the car and on the go. Years on and MP3 players, I still like this part of CDs quite a bit.

There's no wrong way to listen to music.

Buy CDs, records, tapes, MP3s and Spotify subscriptions.

^^^^^^

I threw out all my jewel cases, and replaced them with gatefold plastic sleeves that display the spine. This roughly halved my storage space. I got the sleeves from Jazz Loft in theUS - couldn't find a UK supplier - and now there's this dedicated URL: http://www.spacesavingsleeves.com/

A few years ago I ripped all my CD singles/EPs to my computer, put the discs and inserts in plastic sleeves into a couple of those metal DJ box things. Chucked the jewel cases, saved a lot of space, the discs have been under my bed ever since. Have considered doing the same with albums - I've ripped them all already, would just be a case of letting go of the cases.

Those space-saving sleeves look a good solution, if a little expensive compared to doing nothing.

Reading through this thread nobody has seemed to mention the biggest benefit of physical copy (though not really vinyl) over digi - browsing, keeping track of what you've got. Having 500-1000 CDs shelved with their spines (damn those new cardboard cases) makes it easy to know what you've got and not get lost in a maze of folders on your computer or hdd.

Like with a lot of digital storage it's out of sight out of mind. You're easily likely to go a year without playing a record you like b/c you forgot about it. With CD@s theyre always there staring you in the face, not hidden down endless scrolling.

It's the same basic reason why visiting an actual book store is infintely better for book discovery than Amazon. Even with it's recommendations ( you don't always want recommendations, you want to browse something new)

I buy records and can never keep track of what Ive got, Ive grown to prefer it that way, I crate digger even in my own cabin

Like I said, records don't help, because they have no spine. CDs and tapes have. A 14inch computer screen can never replace this.

Uh, records do have spines! Granted more than half of mine are worn to shit from past lives in other storage/display situations but nearly all are basically legible, if not always from across the room.

RUSSIAN records don't have spines, ime. Also a copy of Ellington Uptown on Phillips from the early 50s. HMMMMMMMM

ehhh slap on some masking tape and grab a fine-point sharpie, whattyawantfromme

what about singles did you think of that

singles are for storing face-out and flipping through!

I ws suggesting Auk ws from the 50s and/or Russia actually, sry

flipping through is a v different experience to browsing spines & more wearisome imo

The records i buy dont have anything written on the spine

What about that Shriekback record?

Most of my heroes don't appear on no spines.

what about all your fat impulse records?

best spines...

The Spineless Ones are a humanoid race living in the alien dimension known as the Mojoverse. They have a yellow skin, no hair, only three fingers on each hand (plus thumb) and most importantly: no spine. Because they have no spine, their legs are mostly atrophied and they are very obese. The Spineless Ones are larger than humans (about twice their size). Somehow they could mentally receive television programs that were sent from Earth. These transmissions caused madness within the Spineless Ones and the creatures in these transmissions (humans) have become demons in the myths of the Spineless Ones.

needless to say, if you don't buy records, you never get to see photos like these.

https://fbcdn-sphotos-c-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xpf1/v/t1.0-9/10998010_10153878390682137_8721982341794000337_n.jpg?oh=fd9ad241ad10ee2461c37a381c5c169f&oe=559B28FE&__gda__=1440152961_3edbb351daf4b768dca884032cf7d272

https://scontent-sjc.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpf1/v/t1.0-9/10987344_10153878390482137_1935241303877396662_n.jpg?oh=ca4022215759b93ab09ac5448df5ce96&oe=55DEBB1A

/thread

what about all your fat impulse records?

― scott seward, Saturday, April 25, 2015 11:00 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I've only ever owned one original Impulse, Roswell Rudd's Everywhere, that I sold in the early 00s. Only other Impulse vinyl I have is a reissue of the Elvin Jones/Jimmy Garrison Sextet's Illumination.

one of my fave elvin impulses...

http://www.birkajazz.com/graphics2/jonesHeavySounds.jpg

i have a nice copy of Everywhere. sounds so good.

60's impulse vinyl....mmmmmmm.....oh MP3 peoples i wish i could play you some records...........

I do remember my copy of Everywhere sounded great, and all the Impulse records I've seen are super heavy.

Reading through this thread nobody has seemed to mention the biggest benefit of physical copy (though not really vinyl) over digi - browsing, keeping track of what you've got

― Arctic Noon Auk

Read again - this concept is central to my argument against hard drive stacks and mention it at least 4 times. Never new they made records without spine labels; too bad.

i challenge any1 2 read a record spine from more than 50 cm a way

When you know your LP collection the spine only has to remind you of the album it is, not tell you specifically. Colour, tatters, etc.

When you know your LP collection the spine only has to remind you of the album it is, not tell you specifically. Colour, tatters, etc.

a well worn battered spine = classic album.

One actual risk is that a good but kinda beat spine gets overlooked when you're just kinda browsing your collection deciding what to throw on. Especially if it's alphabetically next to a big chunk of one artist - the eye can kinda whisk past the "Beatles section" etc. But then when you do stumble on this record you've forgotten about for ages, it's a treat.

One of the most beaten spines in my collection is the white-label promo of Kick Out The Jams. I wince every time I see the spine, because I always forget how beaten it is (I've had it for 30 years).

Wish all spines were so easy to read. That Grouper CD Dragging Dead Deer is easy to miss.

This thread has inspired me to, with no clear direction in mind, consolidate my bindered CDs from two binders (a big honking 128-er that I picked up when I was DLing Survivor episodes from IRC and burning one at a time as Video CDs a decade ago, and a 72-er that i've had since forever), down to just the one small one, to contain only things of Sentimental Value, or just ones where the album really WOULD be missing something without the gloriously lavish 24-page lyrics book or whatever.

As projects go this is a fairly stupid one, since it'll take me days and reduce my storage and future-moves footprint by only the size of a biggish 3-ring binder. Also, it means my hard drive is rapidly filling up with the music I listen to least these days and which would give anyone who saw it the most distorted image of my tastes. But... it's oddly satisfying to throw the damn discs and booklets into the trash. Letting go of baggage you didn't know had become baggage and all that.

i still download instead of streaming, but if i was 20 years younger i'd definitely be streaming.

― rushomancy, Thursday, April 23, 2015 12:40 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

curious as to what you mean by this. Why is streaming a young person's game?

I think it mean that downloading is an old habit from when streaming was rubbish, and now they can't quite break away from it.

I also identify a bit with the "But I need to have something!" impulse.

I just am surprised by the idea that twenty years separates "those who are cool with downloading" and "those who are cool with streaming", esp since I'm in my mid-30s and have always thought dling was a gyp compared to CDs

For me (legal) downloading has proven a skippable part of music distribution's evolution

I never purchased a download. My iPod contains stuff that I get from labels and publicists who send me them even though I don't do shit anymore. If I like something, I buy it physically; if I do not, I delete it.

I did just sign up for Spotify which will make for listening to new things to check for quality and I'll buy the stuff I like.

I buy downloads all the time. There's a surprising amount of stuff available from Amazon MP3 that's not available on CD.

in the 90s it was probably more moral to pirate music than actually buy it off the record companies. Not sure what's changed.

These last few entries bring about some good points; one of which is value. A hi-bit mp3 has less than ¼ of the data present in a wav - so the pricing should START there. Lack of physical media brings the value down even more -- so a downloaded mp3 is only worth 15-20¢ on the dollar as compared to an actual CD. Add in the requisite portion for marketing and royalties and i still can't get much higher than 30-35¢ on the dollar.

So, a $12 CD offers about the same value to me as a $4 mp3 download.

Seriously; mp3s cut out distribution expenses, retail margins, shrinkage, the need for inventory, printing and materials cost, etc. I don't think the illegal download boon would have been so industry-shattering if the fat cats had simply allowed the price of CDs to go down as their costs became far more advantageous than that of LPs -- manufacturers could have easily made new CDs in the $6-8 range and may have kept the ship from sinking alltogether.

Not sure what's changed.

― Arctic Noon Auk

One thing that hasn't changed is that the record companies are still too greedy -- looking at the latest Kendrick Lamar album (via Amazon) puts the CD at $15.88 and the mp3 at $14.49 -- the record companies are the ones saying that these formats are of the same value (or maybe they say they have to keep the mp3 price that high to offset illegal dl's). Either way, this pricing structure forces more mp3 customers into seeking illegal sources.

every new cd ever sold on earth should have been $9.95 as of jan, 1, 2000. i'd still be buying CDs if that had happened. also, every top 40 single should have been available in stores for $3.99 on CD too. would have bought a TON of those.

They should have been priced that way for economic or for philosophic reasons?

in the 90s it was probably more moral to pirate music than actually buy it off the record companies.

No it probably wasn't.

they should have been priced that way so that people kept buying them! people - myself included - got so sick of those 16.99 CD prices. and those are still standard prices in the 3 or 4 CD stores that still exist. i would buy 5 ten dollar CDs any day, but i have a problem buying ONE $17.99 cd. in a lot of cases, i would end up not buying any at all. the 2000's were not the go go 90's when people were spending hundreds of dollars on CDs at stores. huge stacks of CDs going out the door.

x-post

i was buying tons of records (both new and used) AND tons of CDs in the 90's. i bought so many CDs it was crazy. anything that wasn't rent/food/beer money went to records and CDs. mostly cuz i would go to tower or wherever in philly and be stunned by how much stuff was finally available. there was an electronics/record store in philly back then that had like 20 shirley collins CDs in their shirley collins section! they had a shirley collins section! so, i went a little overboard back then.

every new cd ever sold on earth should have been $9.95 as of jan, 1, 2000.

I'd put it earlier, like starting around 1989. That's when manufacturing costs of CDs were lower than those of LPs, but of course the price of CDs was nearly double.

Since everyone was buying CDs -- new shit and, most crucially, re-buying old shit -- what incentive did the labels have in 1989-1998 to lower prices? Not only did they go in the opposite direction -- I think retail prices topped out at $18.98 for a single CD -- but the majors colluded on price-fixing.

also, every top 40 single should have been available in stores for $3.99 on CD too. would have bought a TON of those.

Ditto. And that's why the majors killed the single. Why make a $3.99 single available when it's vastly more profitable for the $18.98 album to be the only way to own the song?

i was buying tons of records (both new and used) AND tons of CDs in the 90's. i bought so many CDs it was crazy. anything that wasn't rent/food/beer money went to records and CDs. mostly cuz i would go to tower or wherever in philly and be stunned by how much stuff was finally available. there was an electronics/record store in philly back then that had like 20 shirley collins CDs in their shirley collins section! they had a shirley collins section! so, i went a little overboard back then.

― scott seward, Sunday, April 26, 2015 2:42 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I did this, too.

re: the Shirley Collins section!, I vividly remember when the ESP-Disks were first reissued. Tower in Chicago had a huge display, complete with the usual Tower huge mock-ups of the label logo, dedicated to ESP-Disk (which a friend told me about, and I didn't believe him until I saw it). It was completely surreal.

xp

Clearly they had an incentive not to lower prices - but in retrospect it's just as clear that any short-term gain they got from jacking prices up to near $20 was more than outweighed by what happened after those prices became uncompetitive.

I was thinking about the excessive price of CDs the other day, along the same lines of how the biz might have been saved. Wonder how it could have gone differently though, really. I mean in such an overheated market, what shareholder at any of the companies would have nodded along with charging less for something that's clearly selling like hotcakes at the inflated price? And what if the retailers just kept the prices of Company A's discs up at the level of Company B and raked it in? I don't know how that stuff really works though. In hindsight, they definitely might have experimented more... offer simultaneous bare-bones and 'deluxe' versions of big releases, see which does better, see if the low price gets made up on volume, see if you can dial back some of the big marketing expenses too.

I 100% agree that a lot of albums that got pirated would have been purchased had the price been lower. Downloading + burning was a hassle, even with Napster etc. It would have slowed the shift, at least, or given them time to harden fence-sitters into staunch anti-pirates.... or more importantly, to establish and nourish the habit of buying a record via an even-cheaper download system before everybody got used to doing it through piracy. The industry was just such a lumbering machine, though, and they happened to be selling something that was, by bad luck, incredibly easy to pirate even by 56K modem: 2-3 megabyte MP3s, in an industry largely built around the use of two or three songs to induce buying an entire CD, without half as many lost aspects of the experience as would keep people from pirating books (for example).

As well, outside of the reissue market, the CD as a package didn't offer other inducements, simply because of how they had come to be used socially. The fancy booklet was nice to look at once, or twice, but basically irrelevant once the disc makes its way to the rear-view mirror, the binder, the disc changer. The jewel case was convenient but ugly, fragile, and unsatsifying to manipulate in many ways. Future generations will never understand the small irritations of jamming a thick booklet back into a case and having the edges caught and torn up by the ugly little plastic tabs. The vinyl resurgence ultimately benefited a bit from having this convenient negative examples of things no one had previously rhapsodized about with regard to LPs. Meanwhile, everyone was ready to believe the pirate ideology because they'd already been grumbling for ages about paying $16 for a CD with three good tracks and a bunch of filler and skits. The Napster-Limewire era has many of the same roots as the short-lived boom of dedicated used-CD stores in depreciated strip malls.

Same experience when Tower opened a store in fall '98. Columbia House used to do a decent job of offering John Cale, Funakdelic, and Raincoats records, and I recently discovered Amazon, but the Tower was a big deal -- suddenly everything I wanted.

Don't underestimate the CD selections at Barnes & Noble too, also the home of hard to find stuff like Ryko reissues.

(Ground covered better by others, sorry for the long post!)

As a teen with a $5 weekly allowance it was pretty obvious to me that the action was in budget-priced catalog titles. There WAS plenty of $9.95 stuff available, but they were mostly Paul McCartney reissues. Which was fine for me! Actual 90s albums I got at the used CD stores or off of friends, nine times out of ten, unless I'd gotten a gift certificate as a birthday present. So I do think they missed out on a lot of sales they could have made at, say, $12... but I don't know if it would have made up the difference, or postponed the end by THAT much. There's an alternate history where the Internet doesn't come along for a few more years, and the market finishes adjusting to the CD, and the 'album' actually fades away as the primary unit. I doubt I'd have bought many $3 or $4 singles, but I'd have bought a lot of $6 or $8 EPs if it was clear that they were all killer, no filler.

I remember Best Buy, of all places, having a decent selection (I bought Tim Buckley's Starsailor and a bunch of the Sun Ra reissues on Evidence there), and everything was $11 or lower.

Best Buy had a decent selection until, like, four years ago.

I bought two Yoko albums and X's first four in Best Buy a decade ago. No complaitns.

Yeah, Best Buy CD section was a pretty big part of my teenage life, even just for window-shopping things. And that's definitely where those cheap Paul McCartney discs came from! I think generally things were a little cheaper than at mall stores like Sam Goody, which I went into very rarely and mainly for the small used section. I guess that's just in the nature of big-box stores with more shelf space and bigger volume discounts (maybe?). Anyway, it was a store that my parents would be going to for other reasons so I was more apt to end up there.

$16.99 CD's was nothing compare to £16.99 CD's in the UK! generally discounted CD's cuz they were in the charts were £12.99-£13.99 which was far too much. Tower,HMV,Virgin sometimes had £18.99 CD's.

rip off

Sam Goody's, Record Bar, Camelot -- their prices through the early 2000s were INSANE, even cassettes at the dawn of the nineties. But I bought most of Bowie's Ryko stuff at Record Bar in 1993 when my local record store didn't stock them.

Basically, any record store in a mall was fucking eyes-popping-out-of-my-skull expensive in the 90s and 00s. But Tower always had decent prices, especially for Prestige/Original Jazz Classics and Blue Note reissues. Impulse titles were more expensive. For rock stuff, Best Buy was at least tolerable, plus there was a place on the highway, the name of which I can't remember, that was $2-5 cheaper than any mall store in NJ.

Yeah, I avoided mall stores like the plague. They were the only places I ever saw that actually sold CDs for list price.

Tower Records here was by far the most expensive. about £5 more expensive sometimes. It was great for imports though or the mid-price CD sales like 3 for £15

I guess that's just in the nature of big-box stores with more shelf space and bigger volume discounts (maybe?).

CDs were loss leaders for stores like Best Buy so that people would buy TVs and washing machines.

Really? How lossy? I mean, they were a ton of square footage. Not saying I don't believe it, but my first guess would be that it's more like movie theaters (as I understand them!) - just about cover overhead on the ticket sales, make the profit on concessions. But I really don't know.

I may have bought a couple dozen titles from mall stores when i was in my teens, but once i found the key indie stores (in just about every college town) they were the only ones that got my money. And they usually had fair prices, or at least, a fair used section to peruse. Sure, i took advantage of pricing in the early days of CD Universe (where i think i bought like 8 Fela two-fers when they came out) and a few years at Best Buy (early days of Dick's Picks got me in a bunch of times). But still, most of my cash went to the indies.

Anybody else remember the Planet Music chain from the mid 90s? I spent so much money at the Memphis location when they first opened. A CD store the size of a Walmart...that was a dangerous concept to me. I don't think they lasted too long.

Planet Music was part of Border's, whom they were folded into around '97 or so.

I think I wrote about this on the ask the old-timers thread, but I got my first CD player for 8th grade graduation in spring '97. At the time both Best Buy and Circuit City had promotions where no single disc album would be priced more than (iirc) $12.99. By that winter Best Buy had quietly done away with that, with much catalogue material getting bumped to $14.99.

Didn't the price of cds drop quite a lot in early 00s? I recall a lot of £15 cds in the late 90s then very few things being that high in the 00s. Especially with Fopp, Music Zone and similar cheap stores that followed.

I'm struggling to think when I stopped buying new CDs. Maybe Reveal (spring 2001)... in the $15-16 range feels right. At that point, I was pretty much switched over to vinyl. I only bought the CD in that case because IIRC the vinyl was available mainly as some expensive dumb novelty edition, like $26 for two ten-inches on colored vinyl or something. Or maybe it was just a regular record and really overpriced.

the F.Y.E. store closed across the street from me in january and the son of the guy who started TRANS-WORLD (who owned FYE and which used to be Strawberries) came in and told me that 40% of their business had been video games. which i already kinda knew. son of TRANS-WORLD looked like he really wanted to get out of town. he said they maybe should have paid more attention to the location. oops!

part of me wants to call Gamestop HQ and tell them to move into the space. no place anywhere near Greenfield that sells video games. or CDs now. you have to go to Newbury Comics in Northampton or the mall in Hadley to buy a new CD or DVD.

this is what TRANS WORLD owned at one time. almost all of them became horrible shells full of crap and feeding troughs of cheap DVDs and CDs.

Camelot Music

CD World: New Jersey and Missouri

Coconuts: Chicago area, Indianapolis area, New Jersey, New York, and Mid-Atlantic States (some stores still operate as Coconuts)

Disc Jockey: Southern U.S. (mall-based)

Incredible Universe: Nationwide (17 stores; closed in 1996, six stores sold to Fry's Electronics)

Media Play: Nationwide (closed in 2006)

Music World: New England states

On Cue: Nationwide

Peaches: Nationwide

Record Land: Nationwide (mall-based)

Record Town: Nationwide (mall-based)

Record World: Mid-Atlantic and New England states (mall-based)

Sam Goody: Nationwide (mostly freestanding; most mall-based stores have been re-branded as f.y.e. stores)

Saturday Matinee: Now only one location at Rockaway Townsquare in Rockaway, New Jersey; other locations closed or converted to Suncoast; previously operated in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Virginia, Texas, Mississippi, and Pennsylvania

Spec's Music Inc.: Florida

Square Circle: Nationwide (mall-based)

Strawberries: Texas, Maryland, New England and Mid-Atlantic States

Tape World: Nationwide (mall-based)

The Wall: Mid-Atlantic States

Wall To Wall Sound & Video / Listening Booth: Mid-Atlantic States, later converted to The Wall

Planet Music: Virginia Beach

Wherehouse Music: Arizona, California, Colorado (formerly Rocky Mountain Records), Georgia, Louisiana, Missouri, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Washington

Streetside Records: Missouri

Vibrations: South Florida

the son of Trans World also thought he was doing me a big favor by closing and i had to tell him that there was almost zero crossover. the people who wanted fye stuff don't want my stuff. maybe if i filled my store with used DVDs. or if i sold attack on titan beach towels.

the Record World in my town in the late 70's and 80's was a godsend. they would have the weirdest stuff. import cut-outs. they carried every Homestead record in the 80's and SST too and all kinds of stuff you wouldn't think a suburban connecticut chain store would have. the only other option was Caldor and that wasn't the greatest option.

really digging the phrase "the son of TRANS WORLD" for some reason

xp

I also remember prices moderating somewhat in the early 00s. They weren't back to the $11.99/$12.99 of the early 90s though, and it was far from across the board. Desirable stuff was still $16.99.

Anyway some price drops were inevitable once this started happening: http://stopmusictheft.wdfiles.com/local--files/music-sales-analysis/UnitSalesIndex600.png (love the URL)

Price drops also a likely result of the outcome of this:
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2002-09-30-cd-settlement_x.htm

"This is a landmark settlement to address years of illegal price-fixing," New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer said in a statement. "Our agreement will provide consumers with substantial refunds and result in the distribution of a wide variety of recordings for use in our schools and communities."

The companies, including Universal Music, Sony Music, Warner Music, Bertelsmann's BMG Music and EMI Group, plus retailers Musicland Stores, Trans World Entertainment and Tower Records, admitted no wrongdoing.

The companies have not practiced the pricing agreement since 2000. At that time, they agreed in settling a complaint by the Federal Trade Commission that they would refrain from MAP pricing for seven years.

Former FTC chairman Robert Pitofsky said at the time that consumers had been overcharged by $480 million since 1997 and that CD prices would soon drop by as much as $5 a CD as a result.

this is what TRANS WORLD owned at one time. almost all of them became horrible shells full of crap and feeding troughs of cheap DVDs and CDs.

Curious how many of those stores/brands began life as head shops.

For a while there in the early 2000s you'd could get new vinyl for $9 where CDs were $12

It was heaven for a vinyl buyer; I was in college with not a ton of extra cash for stuff like that. I would love to go back in time and snap up all these awesome $8-11 records that I remember seeing and passing over. Or even stuff like, I mean, I've seen exactly one vinyl copy of Beck's Mutations in my life, for $18 at Low Yo Yo Stuff in Athens, skipped it because $18 was too much for me back that. It goes for over $100 on Ebay these days. And don't get me started on This is a Long Drive For Someone With Nothing To Think About, or the second copies of Lonesome Crowded West I could have snapped up had I had any notion they would become high-priced rarities. Sigh.

Very timely - http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/27/the-man-who-broke-the-music-business

On August 10, 1996, CDA released to IRC the Scene’s first “officially” pirated MP3: “Until It Sleeps,” by Metallica.

indie rock on vinyl in the 90's was definitely the way to go. so cheap compared to CDs. i don't think anyone had any idea what stuff like that would be worth in the 21st century. how could you know? i would have bought 30 original copies of bee thousand instead of one if i had known. i still go back in my head to the dozens and dozens of copies of paul's boutique on vinyl at strawberries in philly. in the dollar bin! nobody was buying records. all those copies of the dead man soundtrack for 2 or 3 bucks at 3rd street jazz....oof. it makes sense though. the lack of demand meant they only did limited pressings. and they STILL hung around stores forever.

yeah that new yorker article is amazing even if it raises as many questions as it answers. paints a picture anyway.

reading that article made it seem like none of those people had any fun! so dreary.

and yeah... god the discs i passed over. knowing me though, had i even had it in my to buy extras of things as 'investments' they would have gotten dumped at some point for space or the weight or something.

kudos to those labels/artists that've kept stuff in print and cheap that they easily could have jacked up CRAZILY. like, in the aeroplane over the sea was $12 circa 2002. it's $15 now. that's less than inflation! if they wanted to, they could have forced all latter-day arrivals to this band to buy some horrifying super-edition for $32. really a bummer when something that's been long unavailable finally gets reissued, but it's only in this narrow little niche edition for a million dollars, making it effectively as unavailable as before. o well, can always walk across the street and rifle the dollar and $5 bins of all the endless music from the 60s through 80s that i've not heard yet.

the 90's vinyl pressings were good too. nothing fancy, but i'll take them over all the new stuff that comes out now.

i have "Continuing" on cd

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9JzxBFP3Ck

Really? How lossy?

having worked in the media department at Best Buy for a year or two, we barely made pennies on each cd sold, and in some cases (especially with new releases) lost money; this is why our employee discount often wasn't jack shit on cds, if anything at all (we got items at cost + 5%). we were expected to upsell to every customer for this reason - anybody coming in for the new Alicia Keys had to have one of us assholes hovering over their shoulder trying to sell them expensive CD storage cases, cleaners, and other bullshit with high margins.

mizzell is otm about the washing machines too. the margins were the highest on appliances. but really we made our money fleecing people with shitty performance service plans.

so glad I got out of that shit hole.

wow. that's really revealing, thanks. not surprising as such, but fleshes things out quite a bit.

Very timely - http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/27/the-man-who-broke-the-music-business

I like that all that was made possible thanks to a questionable fashion accessory.

MikeTD I'm interested in the Jazz Loft cases; I don't suppose I could be cheeky and ask for a loan of a couple to try out, if you have any spare? Will return relatively quickly, obviously.

Will you bother trying now to sell off your existing CDs?
Will you leave them as a record of 80s/90s to early 00s buying?
Will you continuing buying CDs selectively alongside downloading, for reasons of completing certain artists or genres?

No, I still use them every day.
No, I still buy new ones; they're my primary (only?) format for purchasing / experiencing new music.
No, I'll continue buying them to the exclusion of downloading, because fuck being a database temp for you own hobby.

I don't use a computer at home very often; we have a laptop that I type on or work from home on occasionally, and which I run my iPhone off, but I use it maybe once a week if that. Other than that all my web / information / communication needs are done on an iPad or my phone. Fuck using a computer at home. Computers are tools I use at work. At home I want to cook, hang out with my family, ride bikes, play football, listen to music on big speakers, etc etc. I don't want to sit looking a fucking computer screen anymore.

Written about vinyl vs CD an odious number of times. Here's one! http://sickmouthy.com/2013/12/31/on-vinyl-vs-cd-again/ I just like Cds; they're convenient and sound good and I like how they look on our shelves (which we had purpose built, and which look awesome, thank you very much). Ascetic minimalism is a nice idea but it doesn't work for me in practice. Plus it's a bit Fight Club and I'm not 20 anymore. I like stuff; books, CDs, boardgames, chairs, blankets. Not trinkets and ornaments so much, granted, but I guess books and CDs fill that gap slightly. There are a couple of thousand CDs in the house; about 1,600 on the shelves and about another 400ish in a couple of boxes under the bed in the spare room. And another 100-200 in the loft, actually. We have maybe 50 pieces of vinyl. Never liked it.

Don't get harddrive / cloud / streaming 'convenience' arguments; 'convenience' is something I only want a certain amount of in my life, because I also want to be aware of what I'm doing, and that means ritual and attention and a certain amount of awkwardness, sometimes, to have a better experience. Otherwise I'd eat microwave meals off paper plates.

because fuck being a database temp for you own hobby.

^^^ a million times this

Paper plates all the time would be my dream. Paper plates and streaming music. Life.

Nick, I can happily bung a couple of Jazz Loft cases your way. DM me your postal address on the Twitter.

Definitely agree with that data entry feeling part. Really hate the idea of your job, phone, book reading, music listening and general internet stuff making you spend so much of the day looking at an electronic screen (in addition to screen based things like tv, film, videogames). Don't know why so many people feel comfortable with that amount.

Thanks Mike, will do.

very good point about the database temp. Then again that database work lets me have a curated set of my entire collection on a 4-ounce device.

I wonder if lack of storage space and the likelihood of needing to move house are some of the biggest factors or if just as many digital converts have lots of space in a big house they probably won't leave?

I think that's a good point. Physical media gave me anxiety until my partner and I bought a place and knew we wouldn't have to move again. I've certainly bought more CDs and records since then.

Written about vinyl vs CD an odious number of times. Here's one! http://sickmouthy.com/2013/12/31/on-vinyl-vs-cd-again/

Good article but the Hydrogen Audio FAQ link is broken there, I assume you meant this?

plus you have a lovely daughter to pass them on to now stevie

as does nick

EXACTLY

she bloody loves records, tbh. i think that's half the reason i love putting them on now, she gets v excited and wants to see them spinning around - picture disks and coloured vinyl at a premium. obvs she loves the noises they make too, has already been spotted dancing to madness and oranger and grace jones.

you should get here a toy fisher price one like I had as a toddler. Loved that thing (and the tv my aunt threw out at my grans that was mine)