Continuing with CDs?

I ordered new shelving so I could stop quarantining amongst piles of books and other stuff, and then the company was like "thanks for your order! it will ship in... twelve weeks"

I've cleared 2000 easy, but it's unlikely I'll ever get past 3000 albums, let alone CD's. I'm at a point where I'm selling off closer and closer to the same level I'm buying, which is probably good. I don't want to sit on albums that I'll barely enjoy and rarely hear, so I try to sell those off to someone who'll probably make better use of them.

yeah it's much easier to cut stuff loose and have fun curating a collection when you know 99% of it will be easy to hear online if the mood strikes you, in the 90s it was bit different as without the CD in hand chances are you had no way to listen to it again.

A friend of mine had a super cool system, it looked like an old wooden library card catalog like below, but more horizontal than vertical. He discarded all the jewel boxes and had the discs and art in sleeves. I may go this route at some point.

https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-ofrvbbu9ve/images/stencil/1280x1280/products/591/2023/cd456b__66228.1532050898.jpg?c=2?imbypass=on

yeah it's much easier to cut stuff loose and have fun curating a collection when you know 99% of it will be easy to hear online if the mood strikes you, in the 90s it was bit different as without the CD in hand chances are you had no way to listen to it again.

Exactly. Robert Christgau in his old CG columns often mention his "reference" shelves, which makes sense if you're a music writer/critic in the '80s and you need stuff you don't necessarily like, but nowadays, it doesn't make sense to take up valuable space that way.

I mean, I still collect CDs because I still have this reservation about throwing my lot entirely in with streaming services and relying on everything to be "easy to hear online" forever. Music is not TV/film to be sure, but I think we're already starting to see the drawbacks and disadvantages over there:

- Obviously a big one is the endless churn of shows/films between various streaming services, meaning we're likely stuck in this ceaseless cycle of chasing content across services as contracts get modified, catalogs get purchased and streaming services shut down. It seems (knock wood) that things have settling down on the music streaming sites, but after watching the Neil Young and Taylor Swift catalogs come and go, it isn't hard to see a similar future for music (particularly if artist specific services like Young's Archives prove at all successful over time)
- Edited content. We've already seen movies and films getting edited to fit our new paradigm, mostly for the good in removing straight up racists material (but again, that triggers a broader discussion about what is kept for a historical record) but also minor things like the guns edited out of E.T. We saw Kanye tweaking (iirc) Life of Pablo several times once that started to get streamed, so the first uploaded version is gone, minus some folks that maybe saved a local version early. It also isn't hard to imagine some artist some day wanting to George Lucas old bits of their catalog and, for better or worse, those becoming the only versions on streaming sites.

I've never considered myself a "film collector", so I've largely made peace with streaming movies and gave up on clogging my shelves with DVDs and BluRays, minus 3 or 4 a year that I want to keep around, or things like my Herzog box. I'm just not there with music yet and I'm not ready to place my faith in a bunch of corporations in keeping the music important to me easily available.

tl;dr - There's just little about the current streaming paradigm that makes me feel comfortable that all the music I care about is going to be easily available online five years from now, much less twenty.

I would love it if someone would buy me this would be so great to be able to digitize everything but not have to deal w/a laptop

https://www.bluesound.com/products/vault/

nice though those things look, i can think of about a dozen cds on my collection where an automated process just wouldn't work. looking at you, Klaus Schulze.

lol plz clarify

his la vie electronique CDs split long tracks into chapters so you just get abrupt edits. ditto the dark side of the moog cds. one of the Mary chain rhino boxes had incorrect index marks on it. floodlands fades two tracks together and the track mark is such that neither sounds good played individually. first pale saints lp also. and also every single mix cd (which i normally do as a single track).

my ideal storage would be cupboards along an entire wall, deep enough for CDs, lps, books, comics, basically all the media that clutters my life, and seemless doors.

ah, index issues, that makes sense, ty

I would love it if someone would buy me this would be so great to be able to digitize everything but not have to deal w/a laptop

https://www.bluesound.com/products/vault/

it might be the initial ripping he wants to avoid - those devices automate that

i did mine at work, a handful a day, swapping them, fixing metadata during breaks. took about 6 months, plus weekends on top of the 1000 or so I'd already done. problem now is, are there any i didn't do and how do i find out without going through them all again.

(Hidden tracks!)

it might be the initial ripping he wants to avoid - those devices automate that

I rip everything with nerdily exacting metadata and file tree structure, store it on a NAS, and also back up to two external SSDs, and also keep most of the collection on a 1TB micro SD in my LG V50 phone... I hate Spotify et al on an ethical level, but I don't actually pull out the CDs really ever...

If I do a big Dusty Groove order or (in the pre-COVID days, a big haul at a shop), it can be a bit tedious to spend several evenings ripping everything. But if you just sort of do it as you acquire CDs, keeping a digital library isn't that much hassle. But if I had the whole collection needing to be digitized... I guess I never would do it. (Still have a couple thousand early CDs that I only have in like V-6 low VBR, because HDD space was much more precious back then...)

yeah ripping is easy, the metadata is what takes work and there's just no way around it... no single CD information database isn't full of errors and other things that will annoy you

I mostly want it because it can just be a stereo component

I really miss Google Music but tuomas that sounds like a good solution, any idea if cloudplayer works with Chromecast?

guess y’all are... not... continuing with cds
― brimstead, Wednesday, January 27, 2021 8:55 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I'm sorry! I should've mentioned that I'm a 30-40 CD buyer a year, but I'm hoping to back up these purchases digitally, with a program that is conducive to android products (as a former Itunes slave).

I just bought a few CDs at the local hoard-o-rama, first CDs in many a year. I love vinyl, but CDs are cheap as borscht & sound great for the most part.

Talk Talk - Laughing Stock
Inbreds - Kombinator
some Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci album

These were all CD-era releases, which feels more comfortable than buying, say, an Equals or Zombies CD because I can’t find the vinyl at a reasonable price.

I really miss Google Music but tuomas that sounds like a good solution, any idea if cloudplayer works with Chromecast?

That sounds like a great solution. I too miss Google Play Music.

All that said, I've got two new laptops and neither have CD/DVD drives. I'm nae going back down the route of external drives.

I still get CDs whenever they are an option and this thread just makes me all the more reluctant to go digital. It just sounds like a bigger headache than space issues if you do actually have room for a few thousand CDs.

I still get CDs whenever they are an option and this thread just makes me all the more reluctant to go digital. It just sounds like a bigger headache than space issues if you do actually have room for a few thousand CDs.

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Friday, January 29, 2021 6:11 PM

Why not both? Once you get the habit of quickly fixing metadata to your liking, it's not such a laborious process.

While I've stuck with CDs for 28 years, I've been digitizing for at least half of that. I was one of those weirdos with daisy-chained CD changers--pretty sure I had a 200 and a 300-disc player. I first got an mp3 CD player in 1999 or 2000 or so, and a 100GB mp3 player (that you stuck a laptop HDD into) in 2004. And I have to admit, having my collection at instantaneous reach--whether randomized, making playlists, or picking a few albums to shuffle--had a profound positive effect on my listening. I think it made me much more sensitive to connections between different music, made me far less focused on individual artists and more interested in movements, times, places, common threads, and confluence between them. The ritual of pulling one album out and listening front to back--still important (though less ritualized) to me, but I really appreciate the more holistic perspective digitizing my CDs has allowed...

do you folks just sell back your CDs after you rip them or what?

lol that sounded snipey, sorry <3

For me, I keep all the CDs (hence continuing with CDs), rational or not. They're like... the archive, the library. But the digital library is what I use, day-to-day.

that's illegal, brimstead. just as a point of interest.

fixing metadata to your liking

― Soundslike, Friday, January 29, 2021 6:33 PM (one hour ago)

That just sounds stressful, I don't want to know about metadata, I don't want to spend time ripping CDs. I have about 10 or 12 digital albums and I have to remind myself I own them, which is a shame because they're great albums but I'd prefer to have them on CD.

You know what's crazy is that I have a decent-sized stack of still-shrinkwrapped CDs because I find it easier/faster to Slsk them rather than rip the CDs. I think the oldest one still unopened is the second Grinderman album, bought on release. I still like to have the physical product and in theory I'd prefer to be listening to the CDs, but the reality of my life right now is that my young kids have mostly taken oven my former listening area and 95% of my listening is through the Sonos speakers that have gradually been spreading throughout the house. I figure in 15 years or so I'll have time check out those liner notes and photos.

(I just looked up the release date of Grinderman II after writing that, I think it's not coincidental that it came out about three weeks after my firstborn.)

having my collection at instantaneous reach--whether randomized, making playlists, or picking a few albums to shuffle--had a profound positive effect on my listening. I think it made me much more sensitive to connections between different music, made me far less focused on individual artists and more interested in movements, times, places, common threads, and confluence between them. The ritual of pulling one album out and listening front to back--still important (though less ritualized) to me, but I really appreciate the more holistic perspective digitizing my CDs has allowed...

this. this. this.
a couple of years of re-ripping my cd archive off at 320 has totally paid off.

the process involved so many cds that i actually wore out the internal optical drive on my laptop.
thankfully, external drives are not that pricey these days ...

re: the demise of Google Play Music -- I really miss it. I'd done some research on alternates, and a couple looked interesting: iBroadcast and MediaLeap both give you unlimited music storage for $5/month (iBroadcast has a free tier but w/lower quality). Ultimately I decided that if I was going to be paying a monthly fee I might as well get access to a full streaming service, so I've started a free trial of Apple Music since as far as I can tell it's the only major one that also lets you upload your own library. But now I find I'm afraid to flick the switch that will sync my library because I remember all the horror stories of corrupted/disappearing libraries when they first started.

Completely forgot how long it took to rip my CD's for portable usage. There's no way.I would have done it on my own free time, I just did a few to a handful each day I worked in a computer lab, and pretty much got through it all over a year or two.

I have about 50 unheard-CDs; a separate ILM subject on here somewhere...

I ripped a bunch and uploaded them to Google Music, at my last job, over the course of a year or so when I had a CD drive. I focused on the titles that weren’t readily available for streaming, were out of print, etc. Glad I did it! They’re accessible to me now in YouTube Music.

I totally did this too ^. Took me days. I keep forgetting they're available in YT Music.

I've been seeing some rumblings about delays in vinyl pressing plants, but I'm starting to see a lot of talk about CD manufacturing delays as well now. I've gotten emails from four different labels this week about various pre-orders being delayed several weeks (or months in once case) due to manufacturing delays.

Yep - I heard from the printer this week that my CDs aren't gonna be ready for another 4-6 weeks (so, early April). I was kinda pissed, but then I got an email from International Anthem announcing that a CD I'd pre-ordered back in November, for release at the end of this month, also wasn't going to be coming out until April, so I thought, "Well, at least it's not just me."

On the other hand, I got a disc in the mail today that I bought on eBay - a 1988 edition of Julius Hemphill's Julius Hemphill Big Band still in its original longbox.

Yeah, seems like it's a bigger problem. Guessing I got the exact same International Anthem email, the Angel Bat Dawid live album?

Yep. Which were the other ones? I'm trying to figure out if we're all using the same printer (Stoughton, in California).

reading the recent thread re vinyl and the sheer insanity re configuring carts/needles to reduce inner groove distortion etc, just made me so grateful for the ease and brilliance of the cd format.
so, yeah, i am continuing with cds.

I just got a cassette deck, I'm increasing my format overhead

I have an old laptop I keep solely for ripping CDs. Keep expecting it to die, but it soldiers on.

weirdly i dug out my cassettes this week, and hooked up my boombox to my amp so i could listen to them.
they sound f&cking dreadful.
admittedly i am using the headphone out socket into an input socket on the amp, and even at the time, the boombox was a low level piece of kit.
however, i have subsequently spent the last few days perusing the local FB marketplace for anyone who is getting rid of an old cassette deck.
that said, even at the time, i hated tapes.
but i have quite a few of them that have never, and will never, make it to any digital forum.

either I've had too much of messing around with my record player or not enough, same difference I guess

that thread actually made me check the instruction manual for my record deck (Pro-ject Debut) as i was sure i had not done enough to get it to work properly.
which is weird, as i never listen to records these days.

Yep. Which were the other ones? I'm trying to figure out if we're all using the same printer (Stoughton, in California).

One was for a Riding Easy release, but that appears unrelated to the manufacturing delays. The other was for the upcoming Bob Dylan 50th anniversary 3xCD, got pushed back almost a month.

I know Stoughton is doing an upcoming Impulse! Records 60th anniversary 4LP box set; I wonder if it'll arrive on time.

I recommend getting a disc man.

I just got a copy of the Abkco Northern Soul collection, which is a US release from 2020 manufactured in the Czech Republic.