Continuing with CDs?

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.