When will your music collection be complete?

All my old CDRs kept doing fine whether playing or ripping them. The trick is careful storage from what I can tell.

"data rot" is 95% superstitious nonsense

I think you meant to say: what rot

i think it's just a problem i have because i insist on trying to play CDRs in my CD player instead of a computer. i think they play better in computers. this is anecdotal...

My computer won't play CD-Rs or DVD-Rs anymore (old), but no prob w any pre-corded. I sure hope digital rot is mostly xpost nonsense, but have read and noticed that mp3s are pretty flimsy; np w flac or wav so far, Have also read that some of the older CDs are just fading away, but haven't played any of my early 90s in a while.

Anybody use portable digital players, pref w radios? Thinking about getting one for the great outdoors this fall.

By "radios", I mean "tuners", nothing too bulky.

i'm glad i don't have to worry about computer stuff. i have 0 terabytes of music on my computer. i've never downloaded an album! or burned a CD for that matter. maybe i've already said that on this thread. i am a braggart like that. that would be like negative-bragging though. neg-brag.

last week someone in the store was going on and on about transferring vinyl to computer and using this and that and wanting to digitize their collection and they were having all this trouble and they asked me what i did and i kinda stammered: uh, i just listen to records....

oh, cd-rs and dvd-rs will go crap, depending on storage conditions and the quality of the media in the first place- i've had a number of them go off. pressed cds won't last forever, but will last a great deal longer than cd-r media on average- the ones that i've known to have gone off so far were poorly pressed in the first place. but that's simple media degradation, not "bit rot". and yes, many drives will over time fail to read, particularly cd-r media- my last car but one had that issue.

hard drives fail. in the past i've run across the "bad sector" problem, but not lately- i think, though cannot say for sure, that this problem was more acute with older methods of hard drive formatting, which is the kind of problem that would take out an individual file. good to have unique data (i don't think of commercially available music as "unique data") backed up to multiple media, in multiple locations (cloud storage makes this easy at a certain cost to data security).

most forms of media these days are simply not designed to provide long-term storage solutions (longer than a couple decades or so). the pace of technological change right now makes this seem not terribly important.

the idea that mp3s are more likely to "degrade" than lossless media, on the other hand, is pure applesauce. once they are converted they are no more likely to become corrupted than any other file.

i understand the certain pride that comes in not having a digital music collection- i'm that way about streaming. we have so many different media consumption methods at our disposal that we have the luxury of irrational attachment to one or more of them.

i think digital/streaming/spotify/etc makes TOTAL sense for the vast majority of the population. it's very handy. i, personally, am not a fan of streaming/computer sound. i have no problem with CDs though. i listen to tons of CDs. i also only listen to music at home or at work so the whole handy on-the-go quality of digital/MP3/etc is lost on me.

My music collection will be complete when I run out of music that I like to listen to.

i think digital/streaming/spotify/etc makes TOTAL sense for the vast majority of the population. it's very handy. i, personally, am not a fan of streaming/computer sound. i have no problem with CDs though. i listen to tons of CDs. i also only listen to music at home or at work so the whole handy on-the-go quality of digital/MP3/etc is lost on me.

― scott seward

see, i find this weird, because cds are digital! there's no "computer sound" that's distinct from "cd sound", there's just better quality and lesser quality components.

my personal obstinacy about streaming isn't for sound quality issues, it's just paranoia about "the cloud".

CDs - good ones anyway - sound way better to me than Spotify/Soundcloud/MP3s/etc. Spotify, in particular, has a cloying claustrophobic sound that reminds me of digital radio on cable television. i get ear fatigue from it after an hour or so. i can listen to CDs all day long. having said that, i don't listen to stuff like that on my stereo. i don't hook my computer up to my receiver. which would obviously make a difference. so i've only heard computer sound on laptop speakers/computer speakers/television speakers.

CDs - good ones anyway - sound way better to me than Spotify/Soundcloud/MP3s/etc. Spotify, in particular, has a cloying claustrophobic sound that reminds me of digital radio on cable television. i get ear fatigue from it after an hour or so. i can listen to CDs all day long. having said that, i don't listen to stuff like that on my stereo. i don't hook my computer up to my receiver. which would obviously make a difference. so i've only heard computer sound on laptop speakers/computer speakers/television speakers.

― scott seward

a lot of the fatigue is down to mastering/"loudness wars" stuff, which is not exclusive to mp3s or streaming. stuff like radiohead and flylo are mastered with very little dynamic range and thus more prone to cause "ear fatigue" in some people (i'm one of them).

the really important thing if you're thinking of hooking your computer into your receiver is having a good dac. most computers (and phones, etc) don't put very much effort into the dac.

I got to say for as much crap some old CDs get for poor quality, when you A/B and old pressing to a later remaster you might be surprised which one actually sounds better. The early CDs all have a ton of head room, so you do have to run whatever playback device back a bit hotter to keep the levels equalized, but when you do that, you will find some dynamics that are definitely squeezed by hotter digital mastering.

The one that recently I really noticed this on was comparing the old 1988 CD of The Who's "My Generation" in comparison to the deluxe remaster from 2012. The later CD is way hotter, but it sounds pretty harsh by comparison. There was some odd mix differences some track or something like that too, but older master sounded better to me.

CDs are maddeningly case by case as far as different pressings go. it's annoying. but the good ones can be great. i bought a couple thousand 80's classical CDs and there are some dawn-of-CD-era examples that sound so amazing. mostly pressed in japan and germany. they can hold their own with anything since. it makes sense though. classical producers knew how to make great digital recordings long before CDs came around.

(i think dvd audio should be the standard for music in 2016. but it isn't. it's so intense when done right. the avant garde and modern classical and edm and other niche stuff that most people never hear is so far beyond most normal/popular stuff sound-wise and i think it's a shame really. great sound should be common. i still can't get over how shitty the last adele album sounded on cd.)

I've been selling LPs on Discogs for a while, that's been chugging along reasonably well. I have everything on the 'collection', its reasonably easy to add them to 'Inventory', and so on.

Recently, started to list CDs in the same way, I don't anticipate a ton of money/sales, but you never know.

The 'random' button on the Discogs collection is something, I thought it would be a good way t get some of these played.

Started well, Dave Clarke's Archive one, then Shonen Knife's Baka Guy, then Konono#1..

Then it got a bit 'not that one' I.e. CD singles, or 'too familiar' (eg psycho candy), or too rubbish..

Then it seemed to produce the same suggestions over and over. Psycho candy came up three times, I know I own a few copies, yeah, but it was always the newspaper freebie version.

So, yep a good idea, wish it worked!

he avant garde and modern classical and edm and other niche stuff that most people never hear is so far beyond most normal/popular stuff sound-wise and i think it's a shame really. great sound should be common.

Hi Scott, please suggest some great-sounding avant and other niche stuff to check out! I'm rut-prone (ouch).

Kinda like Ned here. Reduction seems key. I've moved three times the last ten years, and every single time turned out to be a decisive moment of narrowing down my collection (i.e. keeping records of artists of who I would like to own everything). The collector in me has waned, I think, and I think this is a good thing. I now "only" want to own the complete discographies of Scott Walker/Walker Brothers, Hood, Elliott Smith, Cocteau Twins, the Caretaker and MBV. It's quite arbitrary, as there is so much music around and in between those that I love and would like to own. But those have stuck with me, and it's nice to have at least some anchor points to browse for at flea markets and at record fairs?

Otherwise I'm pretty much done with 'collecting' discogs: I have only unloaded myself of records and CDs the last couple of years, and that felt like a huge relief tbh. No pressure. I own the compete discog of loads of other artists (Source Direct, SP3 and related (pretty much), Mogwai, Disco Inferno, Michael Mayer, Stars of the Lid, Kranky-artists, not having collected them consciously but just bought them along the way) but feel like I could sell those without regretting it. And I probably will, or give them away to friends. Soon probably, as a move to another house is on the way.

Bottom line: I have learned to find delight in 'tightening' the collection, narrowing it down. Something I never thought would happen, but there you go.

I've slowed down the past few years. Went from about buying about 125-150 albums a year to about 25-30 a year. I basically stream an album for months and months before deciding to buy it, a practice which has saved me a lot of money.

I need to regulate my purchase speed but artificial scarcity and ridiculous prices has me scared to let a release sit 2 months before deciding to buy it. Now I'll preorder, listen to it for weeks on Spotify before the vinyl shows up and then be on to the next thing by the time the record arrives.