Continuing with CDs?

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...

beaTunes looks like it will work for me. I really want to find a new home for my music now that I'm not using Apple products anymore. I've got a few dozen Itunes playlists that I don't want to lose, though. Anyone know if beaTunes will transfer those over? And do they have a star rating system option like Itunes (I really love that).

Actually, I plan on using my 500 GB android phone as my media player when my Ipod Classic dies, and I'm not sure if this will work for that. I'll keep looking.

When you do move over to Android, strongly recommend GoneMAD player--works excellently with large libraries.

guess y’all are... not... continuing with cds

I am continuing my quixotic commitment to CDs, even though I almost always listen to my digital library copy. I just can't quite give up the physical copy.

I still am. I don't have a real reason not to - I've got the space, I don't need the pennies I'd get from donating them to a charity that will probably have a hard time selling them, I can play them on my stereo, I like choosing the mastering I'm listening to rather than whatever's been uploaded to TIDAL or Spotify, and it's especially great with box sets that aren't really collected on streaming services.

Anyone have any suggestions for CD shelves when you get up around the 2k mark? There's basically, as far as I can tell, about 2-3 options online.

After investing a bunch of time and effort and money and emotional pain into getting my vinyl setup up to a decent standard, I feel sweet relief every time I put a CD on. Hey! It sounds good! I don't have to fuck around!

a friend just hooked me up with a Technics dual cassette deck and I'm kinda excited to check out f. hazel's mix tapes 1988-2005

CD purchases have slowed considerably as I've been more focused on contemporary music (and during Covid, Bandcamp). Most releases I buy have no physical release, or are only released on vinyl. Was probanly under 200 CDs bought in 2020, having averaged probably 400+ from 2000s-2010s. I'll still buy reissues and archival releases on CD, when possible.

only place round here to buy cds are charity shops.
hence my cd purchases have been rather few and far between recently.

i buy a lot of cd box sets these days just for the book/liners tbh, the discs seem like a bonus

Still buying cds. Own 3K or more. I like holding a product vs leafing through file folders. Did buy a ton on Bandcamp last year, but like to burn those to disc, too.

Re: cd shelves, I love these IKEA shelves. Discontinued, but a few years ago, was able to use Craigslist to pick up a handful more.

Yeah, Craigslist can be good for CD shelves for next to nothing. But for large collections, building your own can be the most efficient use of space (I even made a door, once wall space was gone). 1" x 6" boards work perfectly for CDs.

yeah, I might end up having to get some custom-built... about to get a wall unit that holds 2088 CDs, which should hold me for the next year or so. Even that will require some customization, since apparently the 1/4" shelves in it are very flimsy. I'm going to reinforce them with some 3/8" dowel rods. My current one holds ~1,500 and despite being made of pressed furniture sweepings and glue is very solid, it has 3/4" shelves that aren't flimsy at all!

As an inveterate and intentional small-apartment dweller, having 9,000+ CDs on display on shelves is a fantasy that will never come true. So I guess I should really be one of the people liquidating their collections--I have everything digitally (though earliest years of digitization leave something to be desired, quality-wise), and the CDs all end up in bankers boxes under the bed and in the basement...

But I just can't let them go. And nobody would want them, I'm told.

But I just can't let them go. And nobody would want them, I'm told.

welcome to my world.