Continuing with CDs?

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