Continuing with CDs?

I bought a Julius Hemphill CD on eBay last year — Julius Hemphill Big Band, from 1988 — that came in a longbox. Part of me wanted to keep it for nostalgia's sake.

Late '90s cutout bins were flooded with early '90s flops that had been salvaged out of longboxes and subsequently resealed. Good Stuff by the B-52's and the Little Village album were especially common.

there weren't really a thing in the uk. popular in US and japan though (for ages we'd get japanese album art in longbox format that we'd try and display in a square image on screen, with hilarious consequences)

aron's in LA used to lock cds into plastic cages which made them longbox size and would put those in the old lp shelves.

theres a store by me that still does that

Something I don't miss about shopping for CDs in the 90s: when stores displayed the jewel cases on the sales floor but kept the actual discs behind the counter.

I remember this being done for new CDs as well as used. Like, "Great, thanks, now it's no longer new."

one of my most favorite things in my collection is the original cure peel sessions with the original longbox.

but yeah, longboxes were preposterous.

And oh yeah, tons of places still use those plastic keeper things. I guess at this point it's less to deter theft than a case of "well, we have these fucking things, so we may as well use them"

i remember a buddy declining to go shopping at amoeba with me because he said he couldn't stand the constant clackclackclack of the keepers in the racks being flipped through. seemed weird to me.

when i worked at tower, it was more cost effective to just individually tape the sensor things to each cd by hand. we would get reprimanded if we broke too many keepers. they're fucking expensive.

also never stopped anybody from stealing a damn thing. people who want to steal are going to.

Re: the value of CDs in the '90s, it always tickles me that in To Die For, Casey Affleck's character does the crime because Nicole Kidman promises him like five CDs and a boombox as payment for murder.

haha wow

i stupidly left my car unlocked a while back and they took some stuff from my car but didn't even bother taking the cds in the glovebox

I can just about convince myself that there's a bit more there vs Spotify 320k-OggVorbis. Spent a while this morning bouncing between Víkingur Ólafsson playing Glass Études on Spotify (Connect, direct streaming to the Marantz) and same on Qobuz (24/96k FLAC, but (presumably) transcoded to 16/44.1k ALAC over AirPlay from my phone to the Marantz)

This calls for an Alexis Petridis GQ article exploring what kind of quirky, socially outcast people write such things.

I don't think I've ever seen or heard of a Longbox. Nor of Qobuz.

I noticed that, for instance, BOB DYLAN 1970, 3CD release (of which 2 of my discs are flawed, but do load music OK to iTunes), was *not* released for streaming. Wouldn't this, then, be quite a good reason for buying the CDs? Well, if the CDs worked.

re: iTunes, btw, I have maybe 15,000 songs on there but don't see it as very steady and reliable. For one thing, iTunes seems to be constantly updating, but that computer isn't capable of updating anymore, and there are things my iTunes could do 12 years ago that it can't do now. (My experience of tech typically involves decline as well as, sometimes, improvement. Oh yes, there's a whole thread for that.) For another, I am incapable of saving the mp3s from the computer to a hard drive. It's not that I don't have a hard drive with tons of space on it. It just won't save anything from that computer. So maybe those 15,000 tracks will vanish in due course and I'll be left with ... my CDs.

aron's in LA used to lock cds into plastic cages which made them longbox size and would put those in the old lp shelves.

― koogs, Wednesday, January 12, 2022 11:40 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

oh man i remember these! another incredibly wasteful plastic thing.

been reading this revive with interest, scored one of those cool new yamahas after seeing how few affordable options are out there these days:

https://i.imgur.com/ujvAMHW.jpg

I always felt terrible tearing open the longbox, seemed like it should be preserved. Like the way I'd cut the hype stickers off the cellophane on LPs and keep them in the sleeve. But there wasn't an easy way to preserve or store them. Does an intact longbox have any collector value?

i remember seeing a few longboxes (i forget which releases) that even included the info for some kind of anti-longbox campaign, like "longboxes are wasteful, write to your congressperson and tell them you hate longboxes" or something

I used to carefully open longboxes and then pin them in a row along the ceiling of my bedroom. after 2-3 years they went all the way around the room!

David Byrne included a sticker over the packaging of his album Uh-Oh reading "THIS IS GARBAGE", referring to the excessive material use of the packaging and encouraged customers to complain to retailers

I bought exactly one longbox CD: NIN’s The Downward Spiral, on release week. Not sure if I still have the box anywhere.

$16.99

I think I saw an intact longboxed CD for sale at the swap meet sometime last year.

many of them were ugly and undecorated, just grey cardboard with a window where the CD art could be seen. 4AD, however (and many others) took full advantage of the larger canvas.

i used to cut out the covers and hang them up in my locker

CAD - how is that Yamaha? Really been curious, I ended up buying used Rotel but the disc tray is flimsy

people not knowing what a longbox is makes me feel ancient

It seems as if every single thing about CD packaging was a mistake. The longbox, the too-bulky plastic case, the security sticker that you can't peel off, the plastic spokes that so easily break off. No wonder people don't like CDs.

I like the jewel cases when they were made of better plastic - if they were recyclable everywhere, it would be nice though.

The plastic wrap could be annoying - remember how they used to sell little blade thingies designed to open CD's? - and the sticker on top that had the album and artist name along with a thin bar code could be a pain to get off. I learned to unhinge one side of the case as an easy way to peel it, but 1 of every 3 or 4 would always leave some residue that I'd have to get off by sticking and unsticking the same sticker.

I had that blade thingy! and yeah I know exactly the trick you're talking about in unhinging the front cover and sticking/unsticking the stickers. started not bothering with getting the stickers off towards the end

I'm glad that was all we had to deal with when it came to CD's, and not off-center holes, warping, "non-fill" and all the other complaints I keep hearing from vinyl enthusiasts.

Well the stuttering of some new CDs has been really fucking with me and I'm very grudging about having to buy a better player if this isn't to be an issue anymore. I just hate it so much.

Those stickers on italian CDs are evil

Some paper/cardboard sleeved CDs could warped if they were shrink-wrapped too tight. My first copy of Brian Wilson's That Lucky Old Sun was fucked up like that.

jewel boxes are the work of the devil. used to think of creating a site to shame the inventor (Peter Doodson). knock over a stack and you'll have discs under furniture at the far end of the room, like they're designed as ejector seats, and 70% of the jewel boxes will have broken in one way or another. and they're heavy and take up too much shelf space. fie!

CAD - how is that Yamaha? Really been curious, I ended up buying used Rotel but the disc tray is flimsy

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Wednesday, January 12, 2022 6:01 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

i just set it up today but seems great, single-digit number of buttons on the front panel, as it should be. it's solidly built--i can't remember if it was you or someone else saying it but yamaha products usually feel pretty good. i got it from crutchfield, which i've never used but they seem to have really great service and shipping. it was shocking how few single-disc players for people who like decent stereo gear were out there. i've gotten into playing cds for my baby when she comes home for the day so it was a good time to do this.

that said i feel like every cd player in the world has some quirk with the tray--in this case, it doesn't *quite* extend out far enough to lay a disc on it completely flat. you have to angle it ever so slightly to get it in there. not a big deal but odd for sure.

was inspired by this thread to have a quick flick through the CD shelf at the charity shop today - found this which i bought for a speculative $2 - will be selling to fund an extravagant vinyl purchase, and so the dance of life continues

Nice score!

I found a pawnshop in a neighbouring town that has a good selection of CDs, including indie stuff that I’ve sold for 3 digits on Discogs.

For personal use, jewel cases are just the devil for so many reasons, so I end up not collecting very much for myself outside of friends’ bands. But I do have a bunch of 90s stuff that the vinyl is prohibitively expensive for. And like, how could the vinyl of For the Beauty of Wynona possibly sound better than that CD? No way it does.

For all the problems with CDs and vinyl, I’ve probably had more trouble with streaming:
—why isn’t this connecting?
—do I need to wait until I get more bars?
—why are there gaps in this audio?
—why is this coffee shop playing this thing that’s clearly struggling to connect and sounds like Morse code?
—why did this stop all of a sudden?
—wait let me try restarting the stereo
—Ok let me restart my phone
—Why does this internet suck

It’s insane to me how everyone LOVES streaming because like 10% of the time it’s like a Mr Bean sketch trying to get it work

What I hate most about streaming is that 99% of the time when I'm with someone who's streaming music, they're doing it through their shitty laptop speakers or phone.

I can’t stop buying vinyl even in this insane day and age and I don’t know why. I’ve been collecting for 20 years at this point so it’s not like it’s a new hobby and I’ve gotta catch up on everything.

I will say that even I have mostly stopped buying new vinyl after getting burned about a hundred too many times on warping, bad pressings, mp3 sourcings, etc…this doesn’t really help though because older pressings usually go for even more.

If I had to take a gander I think it has something to do with the art of the album (not artwork, but just art form) having been so important to me since I was like 8 years old and getting blown away by Nevermind and Vitalogy and with streaming the album as an art form carries way less weight…it’s way too easy to put it on shuffle, play through a playlist, or get antsy and start another album after two tracks of the one that’s currently playing. Even if you do sit down and stream an album all the way through there’s nothing to look at or touch (even though you could find whatever information might be contained in the liner notes online now).

As stated upthread, I built a massive CD collection in my early teen years but CDs just don’t do it for me anymore…feels like those AOL discs that they used to give out or something.

In short: help.

the solution to any physical media collecting impulse is to move, preferably several times in a short span

In this economy?

Forgot, one reason why I never got into vinyl was how junky they seemed. First time I went record shopping, it was because a relative took me to a huge record store specifically to buy vinyl - he collected 12" club singles, but vinyl in general was NOT fashionable, it had very much cratered. Aisles of vinyl, and it was 99% old stuff, and after five minutes of flipping through some particularly grimy ones in the movie soundtrack section, I had hands like coal miner. On top of that, a day later he developed pink eye, which he blamed on rubbing his eyes while going through the record bins! It was just the one time, but it left a pretty bad impression, that's for sure.

Sometimes after a day of flipping through (used) record bins my hands would swell up and get insanely itchy... assume it was mold or like rat shit, used record bins used to pretty fucking grotty.

Go to the “Packaging” section for the greatest cd longbox story:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_Time_(album)

Did not expect DOOM to show up in that story

https://www.discogs.com/release/8838193-Spinal-Tap-Break-Like-The-Wind

that said i feel like every cd player in the world has some quirk with the tray

I note there are even some audiophile "transports" with slot loading. I've wasted too much time trying to feed discs into a failing Nintendo Wii to be completely comfortable with that.

why isn’t this connecting?

Yep. Drop-outs are far less common now I have decent broadband, but still - every few days - my streamer will just decide it's forgotten there was ever a wifi network.

This calls for an Alexis Petridis GQ article exploring what kind of quirky, socially outcast people write such things.

At the risk of further agitating the nerd police, I even tried a third-party player to see if I could stream hi-res from Qobuz to the Marantz (bypassing AirPlay). mConnectLite (a free app). It didn't completely work: anything up to 24/48k was fine, but beyond that, it just buffered unacceptably every 30sec. (The Marantz is single-band 802.11b/g so probably can't really hack that kind of throughput, even if my wifi / broadband is up to it). Still nice to know the unit can play back 24/192k FLAC, off USB or whatever. I will likely never try again ;)

Thick booklets for the extensive notes of a reissue compilation, crammed under the tabs of a jewel box cover. Also those double-wide jewel boxes for two-disc collections.

xpost - Turn of the century AOL CD-ROMs certainly contributed to CDs suddenly feeling less valuable. I also recall walking down the dairy aisle and eying a block of American cheese with a CD-ROM of the World Book Encyclopedia attached to it, and shedding a silent tear for how the mighty have fallen...

It’s insane to me how everyone LOVES streaming because like 10% of the time it’s like a Mr Bean sketch trying to get it work

the main thing that got me back into listening to CDs regularly was realizing how fast the timespan was between wanting to hear an album and then hearing it with CDs (think of album, slap disc in player, hit play, enjoy) vs streaming (am i paired to the right device? wait this is the wrong song, is it tagged right? etc etc). I still go mainly for vinyl bc thats what i grew up with and its inextricably linked to how i think about music, but whiney otm that there can be room in our life for all of god's great formats

my dad has a huge CD collection and used to listen to music all the time, but got rid of his CD player years ago and I've literally never heard him listening to music at home since. anytime i point out his shelves of CDs collecting dust and say it might be fun to get a CD player again, he insists that its easier to listen to music than ever, and gets up, gets a CD, tries to put it into his Wii, tries to find the Wii controller, tries to turn the TV on, cant find the remote for the soundbar, gives up on the Wii and tries to find those high-numbered cable channels that are music stations, and 10 minutes later we are listening to some kind of top-40 station that he obviously hates but is too stubborn to admit.

^lol for real

I used to carefully open longboxes and then pin them in a row along the ceiling of my bedroom.

Once in high school, I was with a girl in her bedroom; she wanted to open her new copy of Bryan Adams’ Waking Up the Neighbors. I tore the longbox open straight across the middle… she looked at me horrified, turned out she had planned to preserve the artwork

that's actually the proper way to treat anything by bryan adams: total trash, rip and smash.

Lately I like to buy cassettes and digitize them with audacity and then manipulate them however I like as well

Have a handful of old college radio shows I've been meaning to do this to, also. Maybe a few songs that I haven't found since, but mainly for hearing college friends' voices during the PSAs.