Continuing with CDs?

but seriously, it's just stuff. for the most part I could lose it in a fire or flood and I'd be over it within a week

but seriously, it's just stuff. for the most part I could lose it in a fire or flood and I'd be over it within a week

if i grabbed my NAS drive en route out of the house, then yeah, otherwise, absolutely f*ckin not.

I was considering those sleeves but they're way more expensive than I remembered. Wanted the paper sleeves too (apparently they give more protection? But how?) but that's probably just too much. Maybe I don't have as many CDs as I feared.

I don't even get the point of owning physical media if you aren't going to keep the packaging. Why not just rip it all to flac or whatever and get rid of the discs too?

Seriously. "If you tear the covers off your books, you can fit more books on your shelf!"

That's.... not at all what this is like though. Those sleeves are specifically just to eliminate the jewel case - they allow you to keep the liner notes and the tray insert. I wouldn't use this for anything in a digipak or in any other kind of non-standard packaging. I wouldn't feel like I'm losing anything, and it's totally reversible if you ever want the jewel case again.

For what it's wroth, I'm not going to invest in these myself, but I totally get the appeal.

A revolving tower design of shelfs (with a lazy susan as the base), say about 5 feet tall, is an easy way of storing over 1000 CD's without taking up much space. The only catch is, since's it a greater concentration of media within a smaller space, it's also heavy AF, so once you fill it, don't expect to move it unless you take everything off the shelves again. (Also make sure you leave enough space around it so that it can rotate without bumping into any obstacles.) A good one can be expensive, but they're also easy to build if you've got the basic tools.

*shelves not shelfs

*since it's - sorry I need to proofread these before I post

The biggest reality is that I just need to cull my collection.

all these de-packaging solutions sound like violence :-(

― brimstead, Wednesday, 8 July 2020 20:28

This ^^ I can get it if you've absolutely no space. But it seems to defeat the purpose of owning physical media. I think I'd rather go totally digital before getting rid of cases etc

Never knew people loved jewel cases so much. I'm only getting rid of them if I'm struggling for room.

A significant part of my collection is not jewel cases. I don't like the idea of half de-packaged and half not. Plus, I don't dislike jewel cases. They have a practicality I can get behind. Completely renewable, for example.

lol @ the blurry 240p video on that space sleeve site

> 1000ct CD SLEEVES
> From $169.95
holy cow. and i'd need more than one of those...

and you'd have to pay import duty to the UK.

(says a UK person who ordered a box of them and paid import duty and then didn't get round to using most of them. I guess I should revisit that as I'm obviously home a lot and desperate for space atm)

I used a few and I think you have to fold the wider back section, which is annoying, and it seems to expect you to use some smaller liner to put the CD inside the sleeve, but I don't have any, so eh. I've only used it for stuff I don't really care about so far, but then I thought "if I don't case about this I should just put it on discogs", and then guess what I also didn't get round to.

Plus nobody wanted the empty jewel cases and they don't recycle locally and I felt bad putting them in the bin.

Jazz lofts for all!

Imagine trying to browse 6000 CDs on that rack made for 1000...

I like mixing the space-saving sleeves up with the digipacks. The digipacks give a bit of rigidity, plus their spines are more visible, so if you store alphabetically then you know roughly where you are. But I've always loathed jewel cases. Ugh, vile things, begone with them. They seem to have almost disappeared for newer releases, and when you do get them, they look like cumbersome anachronisms.

I'd perhaps choose a jewel case over a digipak. Lasts forever

yup, agreed

well, unless you drop one and it's a special color

I like the format. I can live without the packaging most of the time. shrug

vinyl packaging is another story. lyrics I can actually read, for one thing

all the replacement jewel cases I’ve bought in the last several years have been utter trash. Flimsy af.

just ordered two things on vinyl that don’t exist on CD

digipaks, paper packaging looks a lot prettier on a shelf than jewel cases, IMO. like cute little slim books

what’s funny is I’m totally cool looking at spines in my own home but I kinda hate shopping for used CDs that way. makes me think it’s all gonna be dust covered freedy johnston and stroke 9 and Santana supernatural jewel cases for some reason?

Usually is, yes.

My solution - used Mac Mini (2010 model about $100). Set iTunes to lossless rip inserted CDs, pop in a disc to play, wait a couple minutes, play from rip, eject disc and place case in higher density less accessible housing (shelves in laundry, boxes slid under bed etc. So gradually, collection goes digital, artwork retained, minimal playback inconvenience, can be transcoded for phone library, played to other locations in the house, etc. and physical media there if you ever need it, out of the way if not.
iMac would do just as well if there’s space, they seem to command lesser prices than Minis for that reason I guess. I did a collection of 2500 discs this way (including some bulk ripping sessions) and never looked back.

My solution - used Mac Mini (2010 model about $100). Set iTunes to lossless rip inserted CDs, pop in a disc to play, wait a couple minutes, play from rip, eject disc and place case in higher density less accessible housing (shelves in laundry, boxes slid under bed etc. So gradually, collection goes digital, artwork retained, minimal playback inconvenience, can be transcoded for phone library, played to other locations in the house, etc. and physical media there if you ever need it, out of the way if not.
iMac would do just as well if there’s space, they seem to command lesser prices than Minis for that reason I guess. I did a collection of 2500 discs this way (including some bulk ripping sessions) and never looked back.
Oh and Max Mini has good DACs for direct output, or use the optical/USB outs to a dedicated DAC for an upgrade.

ugh sorry got confused by Zing

xp that Freedy Johnston cd is not bad

I've had incredible luck with thrift shopping for CDs in toronto tbh

gah yeah jealous of big city CD thrifting, fuck it feels like another era already

I have my whole CD collection ripped as well, including new stuff as it comes in. But I still have room for the discs, which is nice because I still play them in the truck CD player.

I almost wish I had a car just so I could curate a sick Car Wallet

vehicles are really one of the last bastions for actual CD playing

That’s where I listen to them.

When I started ripping my collection 20 years ago, space as scarce and I used 128kps. I really need to go back and re-rip some of those CDs...

Space *was* scarce

My first experience of digitally copying a CD, 20 years ago, was to play the thing at 1x speed through the coax-S/PDIF into my Akai hard-disk recorder, painstakingly put in the track markers by hand, and then burn Disk-At-Once with a hulking great SCSI 4x CD-RW drive. A few months later I had a desktop PC with a CD-RW drive, but it was dreadful; glitches galore (the DVD drive played Get Shorty, once, and never worked again). Even one of the laptops I had in the mid-late '00s had a tendency to mess up rips. And now I have an iTunes (sorry, Music) library on an external 2TB drive with thousands of duplicates, missing source files, no metadata, etc.

Whenever I think "I should just rip this all", I consider what a giant mess my attempts at a digital collection have been. I could just start over.

I found Juliet Stevenson doing Beckett's "Not I" on that hard drive last night, though! I wonder who gave me that. She does an Irish accent. Nein danke.

Michael you really might want to try Beatunes. It costs, but it does just about all the metadata cleanup you could want, with various levels of automatic-ness, depending on how closely you want to monitor what it's doing.

There may be something better - I can't pretend to have done exhaustive research on alternatives - but for me it's worked well.

I use dBpowerAmp and like it very much

Can these tools check if the library entry points to an actual file, and get rid if it doesn't? Cos I don't wish to be reminded of that cracked Chain Reaction comp and how I ripped it in 2004 but all those files are gone (and many others).

I'd like a tool that looked at all the dupes, and just kept the one with a valid source file / highest bitrate, erasing anything on disc it's deleting from the library. I figure "Track 1", "Track 2", etc nonsense is on me to sort out.

Right, that's the sort of thing that Beatunes can do. For dupes it lets you choose highest bitrate, most recently added, keep both, whatever, on a per-dupe basis.

I play CDs almost every day. I have a specific set of conditions for a CD player: not a changer, loading discs reasonably quickly (under 15 seconds), option to display CD-text where applicable, and easy track access. Other things like SACD and HDCD at this point are side benefits; I've never seen a DVD or blu-ray player that had the kind of display capabilities I wanted for CDs.

Sony in the '00s checked most of these boxes, but it's hard to find a player that's not a changer (and thus doesn't take forever to load discs). Currently I have an MXD-D400 with CD and minidisc recorder, bought refurbished. As I only have one minidisc, that element is sort of moot if nice to have. It's getting a little finicky: sometimes I need to give the tray an extra push in insertion so that the hub will pick up the CD. So I'm not sure how long the thing will keep working. But hey, it can display CD-text and track times simultaneously, and it has one of those neat little knobs for immediate track access!

I do have too many CDs (pretty much out of shelf space) but have a hard time just giving away discs that I might play, some time. Need to work on this, way overdue for a purge.

xp I started ripping everything in 2011 and I don't think I ever had a single problem other than a handful of bad discs, now I feel lucky!

completely avoiding iTunes and using FLAC probably helped

Ok, will definitely look into beaTunes.

Though pretty much 75% of my listening these days is streaming, and the rest is physical media. beaTunes sounds like it might make the HDD library worth plugging in more often.

I got tired of curating downloaded mp3s in the way Michael Jones describes and basically deleted all of them... my digital collection is now entirely either ripped from CD or from online purchases.

my digital collection is basically stuff I haven’t gotten around to buying yet + stuff I probably never will get to buy

When I started ripping my collection 20 years ago, space as scarce and I used 128kps. I really need to go back and re-rip some of those CDs...

Yeah that's a half-long term project of mine. I've reripped all my box sets and things, plus some key artists.

i finished my re-ripping a few weeks ago.
took years.
for all the FLAC vs 320 discussions, i care not.
there is no way i am doing it all again.

I generally only listen to my ripped CDs out and about. Among the traffic etc, I don't think fidelity is *that* important. But still...