Continuing with CDs?

i think you should make at least 10 copies of every CDR/CD you own and send them to friends and family for safe-keeping. also keep one copy in a safe deposit box on CDR and also a digital backup on some sort of external drive and also keep a separate digital copy of every CD on a separate computer from your main computer that runs continuously via its own emergency power source separate from your main power grid (diesel generator, etc.) 24/7. also, commit the CDRs/CDs to memory and hum a little bit from them every day in case you need to duplicate them acoustically on ukelele/banjo/etc if every physical and digital copy is somehow destroyed.

otm

You should back up everything to vinyl. It's the only format that can be played without electricity.

yep as long as there are cactus needles and styrofoam cups we can always listen to those sweet 180 gram lps.

I bought a limited run CDr from Mark Burgess' short lived band Bird and it totally crapped out within a year of purchase. Bummer too, as it features the brilliant guitar work of Yves Altana. But it's essentially unplayable now.

Often you can still extract usable files on a computer even if the CD won't play without skipping.

I've tried. Oh trust me, have I tried.

It does that weird thing where it sounds like rotating static over the music. You know that thing?

vinyl-only releases are super annoying huh

if i don't want the vinyl i have to hunt for the mp3 and i hate hunting down mp3s on shady sites, i hate it so much that i just might buy the vinyl

sorry not completely relevant to the thread but i didn't feel like finding another one

it's just, vinyl is so useless for me. i have a bunch but there are so few circumstances that allow for me to listen to vinyl at home. cds i play in my car, can rip to my laptop and then put on my phone, etc. like if you put out a vinyl-only release i am pretty much only doing the purchase to support you and not to listen to you.

Oddly, I did! The story here -- starting around 2000 I (like a lot of other people I suspect) ended up burning any number of mp3s to CDR as they were around, and after a while they all ended up in CaseLogics. In 2010 when I finally made a full switch to an external hard drive for the collection as such, I went back and imported them all in...and they all seemed to import just fine. Haven't removed them again since but hey.

― Ned Raggett, Monday, February 22, 2016 12:02 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is what I plan to do (seriously) given a Burgess-Meredith-in-the-Twilight-Zone-last-man-alive-in-the-bomb-shelter type scenario. I have thousands - thousands! - of CDRs of things burned from Audiogalazy, Napster, as well as stuff friends have burned for me, friends' bands, mixes, etc, just sitting on spools (and, God help me, "slim" jewel cases) and I know a lot of it isn't replaceable.

My New Year's resolution for the past five years running is "less stockpiling, more listening,' but it's tough to really listen when you're spending half your time cataloging the shit you have already, err, stockpiled. I realize it is a senseless waste of time, but such is the disorder. This is a problem that predates the digital glut: if someone recommends a book to me, I'm the guy who finds it cheap online and buys it that day, despite having a pile of unread books on the nightstand. I guess I figure I will live forever.

I have never done the math on this, but a similarly-afflicted friend once told me that if he started listening to every CD, LP, 7" and cassette he owned TODAY, doing nothing else for the rest of his life and without ever even eating or sleeping ever again, he still wouldn't get to hear everything he owns. A sobering thought, and a comment more on mortality than anything else. Especially fucked up when you realize you are still acquiring more new music every day.

that's true about not having the time to listen, but as a fellow fiend I feel that the real problem is not "I want to hear everything" but "I want to be able to hear anything"

having more and more choices is part of the addiction

Hmmm. That is an important distinction, I guess. Like, if I feel like listening to dub, I can go find a hundred dub albums I bought when I went through a massive phase ten years ago, and hear days of dub without leaving the house (or resorting to streaming). Of course, the problem is, I'm just as likely to find an old dub thread on ILX and be all "I didn't know that got reissued omg need that right now" and down the rabbit hole I go etc etc etc

Even at 33 I'm pretty sure I don't have enough days left to listen to my collection end to end, which causes a bit of internal concern every now and then when I bring home another haul of cheap CDs.

I still mostly buy on CD, preferring to to vinyl for price and versatility and to buying MP3s on the basis I'd rather have a physical copy if it's costing about the same. Until recently I didn't have a reliable CD player, so all of those CDs were being ripped straight to the computer and iTunes used as a convenient jukebox - if nothing else it gives access to the half of my collection that would have to be dug out of crates to play, so otherwise forgotten about.

I got a reliable second hand CD player before christmas, and started actually listening to CDs again. The input to the (cheapo) amp was a little distorted, but otherwise a reasonably satisfying experience. On a whim at the weekend I went into Richer Sounds and upgraded my amp, turntable and speakers and what a difference it's made! Everything I've listened to on CD since has sounded very good, certainly better than the MP3s. I'm even happier with how the vinyl I've listened to sounds, but I think my prime format will remain CD for now. I could do with a better storage solution than I have, though. There's not much space in my flat!

This may be a dumb question, but does the quality of the CD player make any difference whatsoever? Obviously I'm asking as it pertains to sound quality, not durability, looks, etc. I've been using a DVD player for a decade now and it's never occurred to me to upgrade.

I doubt it makes all that much difference, I replaced the old one because it was pretty temperemental as to whether it felt like playing a CD or not on that day. May be differences in the quality of the in-board DAC, I suppose.

I'm not much of an audiophile though, so may be wrong.

xp DVD player probably has a decent DAC, it definitely makes a difference. I think scott swears by the PS1 as a CD player on some other thread.

"When you burned mp3s to a CD and then ripped them as mp3 again you double compressed them... do they sound okay?"

MP3s don't "double compress." They remain unchanged. You wouldn't rip them again, just copy them as the music format files they are.

Here's my story. I'm old enough to have had a decent vinyl collection . . . bought and sold three f'n times, beginning in the '70s! Yeah, I'm not too proud of that. I swore off vinyl the last time for a number of reasons, mainly because of the poor pressings for too much money, and the fact that they're damn heavy when you have to move. I like CDs, and I even splurged on a Rega Apollo-R a couple of years ago. I had MP3s; always hated 'em, after the initial novelty wore off. Then I became enamored with computer audio and FLAC files. Sold the the Rega. After a couple of years of not enjoying the IT-ish maintenance, the bad album cover linking and other assorted aggravations, I said to hell with that for now (maybe the future will be beautiful and perfect). Back to CDs . . . So I thought I'd put my crummy Samsung single disc DVD player into use with a Schiit Modi DAC. That sounded pretty good, but I didn't like the display of the DVD player limited to only showing the current track's time played. And the DVD player's transport's noise started to grate on me, just enough to make yet another change. So I bought a refurb'ed NAD CD player from Spearit Sound in Massachusetts. $200, normally $300. Yes, a good player can sound better than a crappy one. No need to spend a lot.

I just want to put a CD into a box and hear good music. It's all I ask.

If you burned mp3s as *audio CDs*, ripped them (which is what "skip" wrote) and re-encoded to mp3 you would be talking about a further stage of sound degradation.

yeah the confusion here is that someone assumed Ned burned the MP3s to CD as redbook CD/WAV files, then re-encoded them to MP3, but what he actually did was burn the MP3s as data to a data disc, then ripped them back into his computer at a later date.

That's not really "ripping" which might be where the confusion is. He just copied the mp3 files off the disc back to his computer.

ha, good point

And I didn't have to say anything! Further, that is.

When I moved into my current (small) flat, I had space for a bookcase to the right of the sofa bed, and for some storage in my bedroom. (My speakers sit on Ikea Traby cubes full of vinyl). The bookcase contains A-C of my CDs, and the slightly terrifying storage behemoth in the bedroom D-Z + comps + CD-Rs and all my DVDs. I would like, one day, to condense all the CDs into that bookcase. I guess this means shedding 70%+ of them. Rather than the "I never listen to this any more" purge of a couple of years ago (when I put 200-300 CDs on Music Magpie), I guess this would more take the form of "I'm fine with streaming/ripping this" vs "I can't imagine being without a physical copy of this". Not that there isn't another layer of "I never listen to this any more" in those racks.

So I bought a refurb'ed NAD CD player

Which model did you go for, out of curiosity? I have a NAD C541i.

I still buy CDs, and listen to them about half the time (the other half is spent streaming new shit). But I'm really starting to get annoyed by the different-sized CD cases that companies use. Fucking Sub Pop is the worst. I really loved the Kristin Kontrol album that came out this year and wanted to own it on CD, forgetting that it was a Sub Pop CD (I never pay attention to labels). Like all other Sub Pop CDs the CD case is massive, and doesn't fit in my cd rack slots. Sub Pop isn't the only one doing this (Skeleton Tree, another 2016 album I bought on CD, comes in the same sized package), and I'm starting to acquire stacks of these CDs that I can't store in my CD racks.

Even worse is some of the CDs I purchased aren't thick enough to have a spine ao you can make out what album it is without taking it out. I'll stop bitching now :)

I'm with you on all of the above. But I like jewel cases so I'm a true relic of another age. I guess I just don't really require "artistic" packaging, would much rather be able to have some consistency for storage and display purposes. Hate the flimsy not-even-digipacks the most (Skeleton Tree is a good example).

Anything other than a standard box sucks. You don't get CDs for packaging. Or at least not nowadays. Just for convenience and sound quality.

If it's from the peak CD years and it's the kind of music that's recorded, mastered and possibly even written with CD as it's intended medium, then it's the best sound quality you can get. This is how I prefer to listen to Stereolab or Air or something like that.

With vinyl and cassette too - if it's music made for vinyl, from the peak vinyl years, and maybe a genre that fetishised the medium to begin with, it's often the best: garage rock, punk, 80s-era indie, easy listening, classical etc.

Early to mid-80s music that's highly polished sounds best on cassette: Duck Rock, Peter Gabriel, Punch The Clock-era Costello, Mike Oldfield/Jean-Michel Jarre in the 80s - I have a bunch of cassettes of this kind of stuff that I keep, still listen to and they don't seem to have deteriorated at all.

Modern CDs and vinyl: often badly made and not worth it (old ones were badly made too but most of the old ones are cheap).

I agree with you, Wimmels, about jewel cases. The fact that they'd probably inevitably break or crack is a risk I'm willing to take to have uniform sizes, lol.

I take the CDs out of unweildy storage like box sets and put in jewel cases so they fit on the racks and have a nice display for all the oversized packaging.

I prefer digipaks since they have a nice feel, very easy access to disc and won't break:

https://www.duplication.ca/shop/images/D/digipak-verdun.jpg

only downside I can think of is that they don't stack too well

most annoying are the ones with side inserted discs, I have no idea why you'd make em like that, also the double gatefold ones - why?? why???

new cds are pretty cheap too, not uncommon to find last years top releases for ~6 euros on discogs fx https://www.discogs.com/Angel-Olsen-Burn-Your-Fire-For-No-Witness/release/5374632

Sure I've raved about these before, they are polythene gatefold CD sleeves that take up a fraction of the space on shelves. If you get a CD in a jewel case, just throw the case away and put the disc, booklet and tray card in one of these:

http://www.spacesavingsleeves.com/

And yes, you can still see the spine of the tray card on the shelf.

I look at the digipak pictured above and I picture that glued-on tray cracking (which it inevitably will) or the teeth breaking (which is almost certainly will) and there being no way to fix it, so the case is effectively broken. Receive a CD with a cracked jewel case? Go get a CD out of the dollar bin and replace it if you want. The universality of the jewel case is its best attribute.

I must say, I'm finicky and all, but I don't replace cracked cases. It's just a thing that happens. I will replace trays with cracked teeth, especially if they fail to hold the CD in place, but even that can feel like an unnecessary chore. I used to store the CDs that came in cardboard sleeves in their own jewel cases but this too became too much of a hassle.

I still buy CDs every week, btw, and will continue to do so. It's become my preferred format, all things considered, for reasons I probably mentioned upthread someplace.

I might go for those space saving sleeves. I'd probably get a lot of pleasure from repackaging all my cds.

Anagram- do you bother with the paper sleeves for additional protection? I might get them, because paranoia.

I don't get how those sleeves can save 75& on space and still be wide enough to display the spine from the tray card

I would consider those sleeves, but honestly close to half my collection is digipaks, so it wouldn't really do that much good...

Those look like a lot of work and I'd probably worry about CDs getting scratched in those things.

I've already resigned myself to the fact that my CD collection is just going to be a major problem for whoever has to deal with my personal affects after my death. I may pin a note on them that says "Sorry, I was mentally ill LOL"

According to Discogs I own 5,361 CDs. But those dont include digipacks or any other irregular cases that can't be stacked (for practical reasons I won't go into now). So I'd say the number is probably closer to 7,000. This is the result of a) working in record stores for twenty years, b) writing music reviews for almost the same amount of time, c) knowing a lot of bands, and d) having an addiction to budget-priced used CDs in dollar bins and such. Thing is, I get rid of (read: sell, give away, lose) CDs all the time; I'm not one of those crazies who holds onto every CD I've ever bought. But when twenty leave, thirty come back. I'm old enough now to have realized that there is no way I will ever hear some of these again, and these will be of little value to anyone else, especially in the (I hope very distant) future.

having an addiction to budget-priced used CDs in dollar bins and such

I have developed this problem as well, the Value Village not far from me has a killer selection that's constantly restocked.

I think part of it is remembering when these very same CDs cost $18.99 and you had to make big decisions about which one to buy that week (or that month). Now those CDs can be had for less than a buck.

As I explained to my bewildered and long-suffering wife, CDs will never look like 'junk' to me. Most people nowadays pass a stack of CDs at the Goodwill and keep moving on, as if they were VHS tapes or holiday trinkets. A lot of people wouldn't take them for free.

xps:

Robert/Wimmels: no I don't bother with those and I've never had a problem with CDs getting scratched in them. They're made of soft polythene.

Lee626: they're kind of wide at the spine and narrow everywhere else, if you see what I mean. This vid should give you an idea:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40hd2-IXpdI

CDs are the new LPs w/r/t thrift store finds, lotta good stuff in there if you look (meanwhile the beat up vinyl is marked up to like $6 for a trashed Elton John LP)

think i probably bought less CDs this year than ever before in my music-buying lifetime ... but I still bought a few! need to find one of these thrift stores with decent CDs -- the ones near me still seem to have the same Kenny G albums they had in 1996.

I found the Fleetwooed Mac 2CD Tusk remaster/reissue and a Meredith Monk CD (both brand new) for $2 each the last time I looked

yeah, that is the kind of thing i want!

My local Goodwill is fully stocked with Ray Conniff LPs, but I found an Angus MacLise CD there recently.

for the archival things Numero or Dust To Digital do, CDs seem totally preferable, both in terms of affordability and easy access.