Continuing with CDs?

(and that wasn't used I bought it new, and it's not scratched up)

I've never had a problem, even with stuff that didn't play perfectly.

And yeah the thrift stores are insane now. When I was a teen I looked at the 69 Love Songs set with despair at its pricing. Last week I picked up a copy in excellent condition from a Value Village for five bucks.

I think a lot of people who buy vinyl these days never actually listen to it; they buy it and put it on the shelf and listen to the album on Spotify. So a shitty pressing isn't necessarily a huge negative; it's a thing to have from the band you love

...which naturally encourages labels to not make quality control a high priority

youre possibly changing my mind about collecting CDs tbh... i got rid of most of my possessions a few years back, and i never thought id bother starting up a physical collection again. but maybe it'd be nice. i dunno. jewel cases still get on my nerves.

they buy it and put it on the shelf in one of those dumb plastic frames on the wall

fixed that for u

youre possibly changing my mind about collecting CDs tbh... i got rid of most of my possessions a few years back, and i never thought id bother starting up a physical collection again. but maybe it'd be nice. i dunno. jewel cases still get on my nerves.

― meaulnes, Monday, December 3, 2018 12:34 PM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

these are not a perfect solution, but it felt so good to throw a few hundred jewel cases into the recycling bin.
https://spacesavingsleeves.com/shop?olsPage=products

ha, I love that the example in the link there is a large collection of CDs by The Fall

xp Yeh I did that about 6 months ago. All the CDs into black canvas case / bags. I've probably opened them up about 3 times since. I still play a lot of vinyl, although I'm starting to sell the surplus of some of that, as well.

I thought the vinyl qc thing was because the plants are being maxed out but y'all are the experts

All the new vinyl I buy sounds great

yeah there's tons of great new vinyl just need to be a little choosy...obv certain labels and reissue campaigns you know it will be good, like Light in the Attic is always amazing

on the other hand, like if it's a thin-feeling, no frills pressing of some nu indie band that probably recorded digital in the first place just avoid

jewel cases still get on my nerves.

So get rid of the cases. My sister did that with mine, which she was kind enough to store for me when I had no room moving out of state.

that probably recorded digital in the first place

This is the key for me. If the music was recorded, mixed, and mastered on digital equipment, why transfer it to an analog medium? It's like buying a CD, taping it, then listening to the tape instead.

but, like, the warmth, man

"if you look back at only 20 odd years ago, a wealth of digital media from the 90s - and 80s - is futile; it can't be played back; the technology is outdated already. try opening a pro tools project from the 90s. try finding a DCC player. DATs are mostly fucked."

I disagree. Digital media is far more resilient than analogue media and, in my opinion, if there's a will, it's essentially immortal. The availability of emulation means that obscure old digital formats have, if anything, become *more* accessible over time; the ever-decreasing cost of storage means that nothing ever needs to be deleted.

The unavailability of DCC and DAT players is a physical problem, not a digital one. The classic example of the BBC's Laserdisc-based Domesday book arose because most of the project's media was *analogue* video - it was trivial to emulate the project's digital code - and although DRM can prevent direct bit-for-bit copies of a digital work, it will never win.

The biggest issue facing digital data isn't destruction, it's obscurity. I've written about this before and don't plan to do it again, but eventually the internet will host a digital copy of every piece of that humanity has ever produced, and 99% of it will go unviewed, forever. It will exist in a kind of living death, preserved forever but never looked at. "If there's a will" is also a factor. Imagine if we could bring human beings back from the dead. Any person who ever lived. Imagine if no-one chose to revive you, ever. You'd be pissed! And also dead, so thoroughly dead.

There's a notion that we're all immortal, because the atoms of our bodies will float through the universe and whatever "soul" we had will merge with time and space. But there exists a background cosmic radiation, and eventually whatever signal we produced will be weaker than this background radiation; it will be impossible to extract our waveform from the noise. Eternal life is impossible because of this. Even in a silent universe there would come a point when quantum effects would reduce a non-zero waveform to zero.

I'm not arguing that digital media cannot still be lost. The Lost Media Wiki has some examples of modern-day lost media, generally either web-based Flash games that no-one saved or time-limited demos; it's difficult to play older versions of Steam video games because Steam keeps them updated, notably Half-Life 2. But all of those things could have been preserved if there had been a will at the time, and analogue media is far more fragile. It will only be a matter of time before the original master tapes of classic albums from the 1960s have shed all their oxide, at which point digital copies will be the only copies available.

Which raises the separate issue of value, because what use is preservation if no-one looks at it, ever? I mean ever, over the course of thousands of years. If the entire musical output of Lambert Murphy was wiped from the Earth, is there a single person alive today who would notice or care? If it became widely known that his work had been obliterated people would protest, but not because they enjoyed his work; they would protest for a short while then move on. If his work was destroyed in obscurity it would be lost forever and no-one would shed a tear. He didn't have kids.

Eventually all of human art will be available on the internet, and 99% of it will never be seen by anyone, and if an asteroid wiped out half of the planet that unheard, unseen 99% will be destroyed and nothing will have changed. Something something 1998 Hell in a Cell plummeted sixteen feet through an announcer's table.

that was fucking dope

I pegged that as a top-form A.Pom. post within the first few chapters.

Presumably some sort of synthetic audience will be programmed to enjoy the otherwise eternally unloved 99% of media.

The future is Twitter bots, trawling the internet, upvoting thousands of abandoned soundcloud songs.

but eventually the internet will host a digital copy of every piece of that humanity has ever produced

why is anybody taking this post seriously when it contains this assertion

i was reminded of a few sites that show you random YouTube videos with few or no hits... I couldn't remember the name of one... and I found this very fitting new one: http://astronaut.io/ Now watching some unappreciated art as my soul leaves my body

that was a very fine post full of very harsh truths

Isn't there an app or something that only plays stuff on Spotify that has zero plays? I feel like a friend told me about this, but I can't remember now. I think he said it was a lot of classical music and audiobook-type stuff

that most media will be unappreciated in its lifetime is an argument against digital media as a preservation format -- we're still digging up bits of pottery and graffiti from thousands of years ago.
not sure a usb stick will outlast a vinyl record under similar circumstances. if a volcano covers spotify's servers in ash, i think it will be all zero plays in the year 3000.

fwiw literally everyone doing born-digital preservation professionally believes it's a much bigger challenge than preserving (most) dedicated physical media carriers, digital or analog so yeah i wouldn't take that Ashley Pomeroy post and its disassociation very seriously.

digital preservation takes constant time money and attention whereas you can literally just leave records or cds in the right room with the right environmental conditions and you can probably play them in 20 years without too much trouble -- the technology is much more self-contained and you aren't relying on constantly updated OSes etc.

which is easier to do with what you have in your home right now, play a cd or look at a file on a zip disk?

there has been an increasing number of conditions that enable us to access physical files and those conditions change very quickly. in theory they're all "out there" but in practice they fall by the wayside and all but disappear in a span of years. introduce proprietary internet platforms to that mix and it gets much worse. the internet archive can only do so much. someone has to pay for this shit.

access *digital* files

i was jaded and stressed to high heaven after opening the can of existential worms that was my brief study on digital preservation. probably didn't articulate myself too well. i have a lot of thoughts and feelings on it. i might pick it back up someday but it filled me with such dread! i can't think about things on such a scale. macropuente is completely OTM! about finances and institutional crises, lack of funds & education, etc. digital media may have some worthwhile permanance; magnetic tape, hmm - machines are no longer manufactured, spare parts will run out, and yeah, tape will degrade. i think analogue purists lean toward the theory that analogue decay is a) more flattering in its artifacts and b) easier salvaged than digital decay; you can bake magnetic tape, but once data has rotted, you're fucked. then there's all the concerns detailed above. digital longevity seems possible via multiple & off-site backups, maintaining standards, and further implementation of archival procedures -- and emulation, as noted - but at such great investment and expense, it seems.

i used to be such an analogue purist growing up, but my mindset completely changed: i guess recorded music has only been around for about 100 years. we embraced and committed to the digital paradigm shift. it may be futile to look to the technology of the past to preserve the music of the future. if things are becoming increasingly transient and disposable then so be it.

in dire straits, broke as fuck, i went all-digital with music, photos, videos, writing, etc. two years ago -- i love my laptop, but the tactility of physical media/carriers/tech is something i really miss. i know it's still possible to maintain tape & machines, but sometimes it just feels so pointless, now...

it's funny. i don't feel at all perturbed listening & appraising music within my entirely digital collection, but when it comes to experimenting with sound, i like to engage with tape, still, and feel a bit lost without some sort of analogue in the process. open reel tapes and cassettes are magic and so flattering to music. purely digital composition seems so weird. begs the question: is digital-born media void of tactility, organics, physicality - or are we just redefining those qualities? is digital always virtual and a 'representation' of an analogue?

in armchair theory i make this distinction: we engineered analogue technology to facilitate our needs. digital tech, however, is symbiotic. its intelligence grows the more with interact with it. unprecedented psychological effects of the internet & social media is a prime example that digital technology is developing exponentially at a rate we can't keep up with, despite its growth, intelligence and responsibility being entirely in our hands. but maybe it's natural after all. the universe is math, anyway, right?

ah fucking hell i'm really on one now. i digress. sorry.

https://media.giphy.com/media/vihyZxPIsX5hC/giphy.gif
https://media.giphy.com/media/vihyZxPIsX5hC/giphy.gif

I like thinking about this stuff too but it definitely gets daunting and like really complicated pretty quickly. There’s nothing very reducible or generalizable about it imo. Taken a few digital preservation courses over the years but it honestly seemed too hard (and dry / tedious) to pursue as a career. Now I sell old books lol. Maybe I’ll go back to it though I think I might be more into it / ready for it now that I’m older. Xp

i cant tell you how nice that is to hear from someone else after experiencing exactly that myself during university. it made me want to leave audio/engineering/technology behind altogether. i've diverted my aspiring career aims to cyberpsychology. realized i was more concerned with tech's inter/intrapersonal effects than hypothetical audio nerdery. but here i am, bickering about binary, still!

digital v analog, basically a matter of what crumbles first, the economy/viability of massive server farms... or the environment, humidity, etc.... overtaxed due to massive server farms?! My mind basically goes to a dystopian dust bowl future of rare and expensive books, vinyl, and filled-up ipods alike. Internet and storage media sustainability and growth are the real question marks.

by then no one is going to give a shit about our terrible music anyway

/thread

It’ll only take a single geomagnetic storm/coronal mass ejection to permanently erase all digital media (in addition to seriously fucking up electrical grids, satellite communications, and all related infrastructure). In terms of audio, vinyl is still the only format that can be played without electricity. Theoretically, a paper cone can be used to play a record, which conjures up a dystopian future of people arguing over which type of paper cone produces the best soundstage.

^^^

map also otm throughout

with that in mind, I sure am enjoying the hell out of this new (to me) Elvis Costello CD that I ripped WAV files of, being played through my Dragonfly DAC...

these conditions are such that life itself may involve too much fucking around

cant wait to record a bunch of sex noises to vinyl so that way future civilizations can look back and say, wow, they were horny as HELL

same

if anyone has a second and needs a wtf / lol look up the millennial disc, the golden cd mormons made that will last a thousand years

solving all of these problems

I bought three used CDs today

until jesus comes again xp

wasn't it Sanpaku who was talking about inscribing books onto nickel plates to survive the apocalypse? surely we could do that with records:

https://i0.wp.com/ajournalofmusicalthings.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Cereal-Box-Records.jpg?resize=620%2C350

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/

What with ripping, transcoding, backing up, importing, cleaning up track names etc there are many many CDs in my collection that I have spent considerable time archiving and zero time listening to in the 4-5 years since archiving them.

i was reminded of a few sites that show you random YouTube videos with few or no hits... I couldn't remember the name of one... and I found this very fitting new one: http://astronaut.io/ Now watching some unappreciated art as my soul leaves my body

this is too cool!

I bought three used CDs today

Yes, because I'm working in the evenings, and am usually not very busy, I got back into browsing for bargains, because bored, and have bought a lot of CDs in the last six months or so, more than I had in the last six years. Mostly new, but some used. I also play CDs all the time at home.

the physical/digital divide is inexistent and misleading, everything is physical.
cds are as digital as the cloud, vinyl isn't. bits on a server farm and our access to them are prone to disappearing as are our cds and photo negatives. cloud is someone else's computer, fuck the cloud, etc

the digital/analogue divide otoh is real but it's not about physical degradation of the underlying medium and playback equipment but about ease and fidelity of replication. you can endlessly reproduce digital information assuming you have the resources for it, not so for analogue

hot takes: writing is digital. paper books are digital information carriers, not analogue, unless they have printed images. digital > analogue for long-term preservation

eventually the internet will host a digital copy of every piece of that humanity has ever produced

always hilarious to see ppl credulously spout this nonsense