1) No - mainly because CDs are not worth much now, particularly when trying to trade them in at a record store.
2) Most of the CDs I listen to regularly have been ripped now, but I'll keep them as a backup and also because of the possibilty of ripping in higher quality formats/higher bitrates later.
3) I still buy CDs sometimes but nowhere near as often as I used to - I've gone from half a dozen a week in 2001 to a couple a month now. But if I see a box set at a cheap price I'll probably buy it.
― snoball, Wednesday, 12 December 2007 21:48 (sixteen years ago) link
Those of you who sell off your CDs, someday your hard drive is gonna fail. If you're lucky, you'll have it backed up to another drive. But then that one could fail as you're trying to dump it to your new hard drive. Then I will point and laugh.
I've never had a hard drive die on me ever before. Meanwhile in that time a lot of my records and CDs got damaged in a flood. Life's funneee.
― blueski, Wednesday, 12 December 2007 21:50 (sixteen years ago) link
I wonder how homeowner's insurance would cover a hard drive filled with burned FLACs. Are you just screwed or could you reasonably claim the full value of replacing them on iTunes or whatever?
― Alex in SF, Wednesday, 12 December 2007 21:53 (sixteen years ago) link
i sold them on amazon btw, the run of the mill ones at least. you get a lot more money that way if you're prepared to go to spend an hour going packing/going to the post office every few days.
― resolved, Wednesday, 12 December 2007 21:54 (sixteen years ago) link
x-post but when your hd dies it's all gone. and the probability is much higher than all your cds being destroyed at once...
― alex in mainhattan, Wednesday, 12 December 2007 21:56 (sixteen years ago) link
word. i'm still reeling from getting over £30 for a tatty Sasha & Digweed CD. xp
what is with you hd-failure doomsayers? you have to fuck a hd up pretty bad before the data on it is completely irretrievable.
― blueski, Wednesday, 12 December 2007 21:58 (sixteen years ago) link
Oh I'm just curious from an insurance standpoint. Like what if someone broke into your house and stole your HD. Can you only claim the HD or could you reasonably claim the cost of replacing the MP3s (I just talked to my boss-a former underwriter--and he's gonna find out for me)?
― Alex in SF, Wednesday, 12 December 2007 22:00 (sixteen years ago) link
once i had a hd which seemed perfectly ok. but suddenly it crashed. it had been formatted a couple of megabytes too high. when i reached the limit it was all over.
― alex in mainhattan, Wednesday, 12 December 2007 22:01 (sixteen years ago) link
presumably it might differ according to the original source of the mp3s. like if you've bought them from digital sources in the first place you'll have the receipts etc to demonstrate this. if you've just ripped your cd collection i assume you'd be shit out of luck.
― resolved, Wednesday, 12 December 2007 22:22 (sixteen years ago) link
The downloading thread is bad for music. People need to see an entire album as an artistic statement, and not just pick single tracks.
The only positive thing is that people are at least less fixated on singles, able to see that there may be good tracks that aren't hit singles too. But generally, downloading is bad bad bad bad!
― Geir Hongro, Wednesday, 12 December 2007 22:49 (sixteen years ago) link
BAD!
― Alex in SF, Wednesday, 12 December 2007 23:02 (sixteen years ago) link
Bad?
― John Justen, Wednesday, 12 December 2007 23:03 (sixteen years ago) link
bad bad bad bad
― latebloomer, Wednesday, 12 December 2007 23:03 (sixteen years ago) link
On the insurance thing, pretty sure the only things that would be insurable would be receipted downloads, as you don't actually legally "own" the ripped mp3s if the CD is gone, thus they have no insurable value.
xpost
― John Justen, Wednesday, 12 December 2007 23:06 (sixteen years ago) link
People need to see an entire hamburger as an artistic statement, and not just pick off the pickles or eat the grilled onions.
― Alex in SF, Wednesday, 12 December 2007 23:06 (sixteen years ago) link
http://www.baronbob.com/hamburgercdholder.jpg
― Euler, Wednesday, 12 December 2007 23:08 (sixteen years ago) link
Snacking is destroying the meal preparation industry
― Shakey Mo Collier, Wednesday, 12 December 2007 23:10 (sixteen years ago) link
home cooking is destroying the fast food industry.
― John Justen, Wednesday, 12 December 2007 23:11 (sixteen years ago) link
The hamburger analogy isn't so hot. I prefer to think of an album as very much like a box of chocolates.
― blueski, Wednesday, 12 December 2007 23:16 (sixteen years ago) link
yes, yes, and yes i guess. the last few times I went to sell stuff back i didn't get a whole lot, and with 800+ CDs still it's kind of a pain to drag them up to amoeba and then back home. BUT, I did sell more stuff recently, and got more money for them than I'd expected; might have just been because I had a new buyer. I also sold off a ton of rare stuff on ebay because this stuff is never going to be worth more than it is right now. But there are things I still can't see myself getting rid of, and I'll still buy CDs from time to time, of artists I like, who pay attention to packaging
― akm, Wednesday, 12 December 2007 23:18 (sixteen years ago) link
Geir you assume no one downloads whole albums, then? Oh wait why am I even arguing.
― Trayce, Wednesday, 12 December 2007 23:20 (sixteen years ago) link
Mark Clemente OTM on all counts. Same for me.
― stephen, Wednesday, 12 December 2007 23:26 (sixteen years ago) link
you have to fuck a hd up pretty bad before the data on it is completely irretrievable.
That's not entirely true. I've had an external (Maxtor) drive fail that wasn't fucked with at all, and internal (IBM) drive that, well, it was involved with Microsoft products, so I guess was doomed to fail. (Back on a Mac, thnx Bill.)
Secondly, have you ever paid to have your data retrieved? I did, once, for 40GB worth of data - and paid about $1K/10GB (aka $4K). Now I've got two external drives, backing up my backup of my backup. But I would guess that, for example, $4K to retrieve one's digital library would, by cost alone, define "irretrievable."
― dblcheeksneek, Wednesday, 12 December 2007 23:35 (sixteen years ago) link
Youch. I had no idea. That's crazy expensive.
― Alex in SF, Wednesday, 12 December 2007 23:43 (sixteen years ago) link
when you say fail do you mean it was completely beyond repair/no way to salvage at all?
― blueski, Wednesday, 12 December 2007 23:55 (sixteen years ago) link
Geir you assume no one downloads whole albums, then?
Some do, but way too few. We need to get back to the early to mid 70s where typical album acts such as Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Yes and Genesis dominated absolutely everything.
― Geir Hongro, Wednesday, 12 December 2007 23:57 (sixteen years ago) link
i've had a few drives fail; i'm not sure what the problem was, but it had to do with the b-tree something or other getting corrupted, and no operating system (windows, mac, dos) could read certain sectors. I'm relatively positive running norton on the drive made it worse actually.
― akm, Wednesday, 12 December 2007 23:59 (sixteen years ago) link
"We need to get back to the early to mid 70s where typical album acts such as Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Yes and Genesis dominated absolutely everything."
Geir you should go back in time Terminator-stylee and kill Malcolm McClaren's mother or something.
― Alex in SF, Thursday, 13 December 2007 00:01 (sixteen years ago) link
People need to see an entire album as an artistic statement, and not just pick single tracks.
so funny. geir's far from the only person who thinks this, and i shake my head sadly at every one of them
― electricsound, Thursday, 13 December 2007 00:23 (sixteen years ago) link
anyway
Will you bother trying now to sell off your existing CDs? - possibly, but it may end up being too much effort Will you leave them as a record of 80s/90s to early 00s buying? - some of them i might, but there's not really any need Will you continuing buying CDs selectively alongside downloading, for reasons of completing certain artists or genres? - kinda.. i like having the disc if i'm a big fan, mainly for liners & pics. i couldn't give two hoots about the "extra quality" of a cd vs mp3 (which is pretty hypocritical of me considering i am obsessed by the difference with regards to my own recordings)
― electricsound, Thursday, 13 December 2007 00:26 (sixteen years ago) link
http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php
― dan selzer, Thursday, 13 December 2007 01:10 (sixteen years ago) link
if disk warrior fails, use that.
We need to get back to the early to mid 70s where typical album acts such as Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Yes and Genesis dominated absolutely everything.
Christ you sound like my boyfriend haha.
― Trayce, Thursday, 13 December 2007 01:15 (sixteen years ago) link
i used something called stellar phoenix succesfully as well, but it only works on FAT formatted drives
― akm, Thursday, 13 December 2007 01:26 (sixteen years ago) link
I've got a room with racks on almost all the walls (except the one with a couch on it). My CD collection is a bit of a changing art collage of spines, when I had it in the same room as my PC I almost memorized the color flows.
The volume of my racks is the limit of CDs I'll own, about 4500 or so. I try to purge 100 or so every year but the inflow is still greater than the outflow and all the truly horrible albums have long since been sold. I'm now at the Ned Point, where I'm ripping and selling albums that aren't bad but simply never grabbed me. I figure I'll have reached my limit in 3-5 years.
But, yeah, I have fetishized the physical. I love getting a CD in the mail, or tracking down something hard to find even if I've already downloaded it. But I also want to make my own rips because almost no one sells high-quality VBR's of the stuff I buy.
They may end up in boxes one day after I've ripped them all and we decide to repurpose the music room.
― Mr. Odd, Thursday, 13 December 2007 04:47 (sixteen years ago) link
I had the internal drive repaired out of apparent necessity (it held all of my class notes/outlines and crashed a week ahead of my first year law school exams). I only say "apparent" b/c, well, it didn't seem to improve my grades much (sigh).
The external drive, as I still had (and have!) a vast majority of my music on CD, I didn't look into salvaging b/c it just didn't have a pulse (i.e., it'd turn on sometimes, but usually not, or wouldn't get recognized by any of my PCs/Macs) and given the aforementioned expense and lack of the necessity above, just wasn't worth saving.
I wholeheartedly agree and it's the single greatest driver of my continued purchasing of CDs. I think the only thing that sabotages the argument is artists that don't deliberately set out to make an album per se (and are, by design singles artists). But then, I rarely find myself impressed by such singles artists and even less frequently cite them as influential either in my continued study (as it were) of music or their impact on their peers.
― dblcheeksneek, Thursday, 13 December 2007 05:08 (sixteen years ago) link
1. No 2. Some, yes 3. Definitely
I won't buy anything with DRM though. That's already ballsed up a couple of my artist collections.
― Autumn Almanac, Thursday, 13 December 2007 06:14 (sixteen years ago) link
1. No, never have have, don't think I'll start now. I'll always have the nagging feeling that just one day I might be dying to hear Miranda Sex Garden's first album at 2AM
2. Yes, being a relatively nostalgic person, browsing my collection always reminds me of my musical phases. Also, and mostly, for me a CD collection is a relatively social thing, whereby guests can check out what I have, pick sth out to put it on or borrow it. Obviously, you could also do that by browsing my iTunes library but that strikes me as somewhat unsociable
3. Yes, but like said upthread, these days I usually dowload first and then buy what I really like. Somehow, psychologically, I can only engage seriously with a song or an album if I have it on CD. Old fashioned, I know.
― baaderonixx, Thursday, 13 December 2007 15:29 (sixteen years ago) link
Can I be the only person who buys music from itunes?
― Bob Six, Thursday, 13 December 2007 15:31 (sixteen years ago) link
those who are ripping and selling may want to take a look at this thread:
The Data Migration Thread
Anyway,
1. Probably not very many more, I sold or traded around 200 about a year ago.
2. I will leave them, not so much as a record of buying, but as a more reliable data backup than some hard drive or DVD-R.
3. yes, as long as stuff continues to come out in CD-only formats and not on vinyl.
― sleeve, Thursday, 13 December 2007 15:31 (sixteen years ago) link
With the rise of Amazon's DRM-free, higher bit-rate downloads?
You might rabbit. You might.
― dblcheeksneek, Thursday, 13 December 2007 15:53 (sixteen years ago) link
Will you bother trying now to sell off your existing CDs?
i have been thinking about a big purge lately, but i find it really difficult to part with archives. like others here i still enjoy the physical artifact though organizing and moving it all is a chore and not nearly as exciting as it once was. i think the best way to purge is just to continuously edit. i am sure that eventually i will convert everything to flacs and be done with the physical objects.
Will you leave them as a record of 80s/90s to early 00s buying?
maybe. it is fun to find random half-remembered boxes of media.
Will you continuing buying CDs selectively alongside downloading, for reasons of completing certain artists or genres?
yes, but i am not a completist except in very rare cases. i use a few digital music shops and i use p2p. anything i really like that i freely download off the net i buy or try to buy, either on cd or vinyl, from an actual physical shop or any of the good online shops of esteemed record stores from around the world. with mp3 i also go the other way where i will buy vinyl and then download a digital copy off p2p.
― tricky, Thursday, 13 December 2007 16:57 (sixteen years ago) link
god i wish we had amazon mp3 store in the UK
have bought some DRM tracks out of impatience. i lived with low-bitrate mp3s for years so a few more won't really hurt altho the big general 'under-192kbps' purge continues and i've deleted thousands of mp3s in the last 2 years having replaced them with better rips (inc. many from 2nd hand CDs).
― blueski, Thursday, 13 December 2007 18:37 (sixteen years ago) link
the man who put the 'I' in 'itunes'
― sonofstan, Thursday, 13 December 2007 19:03 (sixteen years ago) link
I think the only thing that sabotages the argument is artists that don't deliberately set out to make an album per se (and are, by design singles artists).
That kind of artist doesn't deserve to be popular.
― Geir Hongro, Thursday, 13 December 2007 22:41 (sixteen years ago) link
hahahaha
― electricsound, Thursday, 13 December 2007 22:44 (sixteen years ago) link
"That kind of artist doesn't deserve to be popular."
Yeah how dare they release brilliance in three minute spurts. If a musician can't produce an entire 7 or 8 albums of pure unadulterated melodic genius then I SHALL CLOSE MY EARS TO THEM.
― Alex in SF, Thursday, 13 December 2007 22:44 (sixteen years ago) link
lol@people still falling for "Geir"
― jon /via/ chi 2.0, Thursday, 13 December 2007 22:47 (sixteen years ago) link
He's still FUNNY!
― Alex in SF, Thursday, 13 December 2007 22:49 (sixteen years ago) link
As Stephen Colbert might say, "nailed it!"
If a musician can't produce an entire 7 or 8 albums of pure unadulterated melodic genius then I SHALL CLOSE MY EARS TO THEM.
Ditto.
Perhaps I shouldn't have, so late in the evening, "wholeheartedly" agreed with the sentiment that ...people need to see an entire album as an artistic statement, and not just pick single tracks. People don't "need" to do anything; in some/many ways I'm glad most of the music I buy is unpopular, album-oriented, fill-a-CD-oriented music.
However, in my view, it's unfortunate that people in general, i.e., measured in terms of record and/or MP3 sales, tend to reward the immediate, one-hit, here-today, gone-tomorrow artists (Fergie, anyone?) to the exclusion of those that demonstrate the creative prowess required to bundle together a collection of eight or more songs over the course of one album (versus over the course of a career). It's the sustained attention an album requires that requires 45 or so minutes of a listener's undivided attention that appears to be going further by the wayside.
Of course some singles-driven artists return to popularity (i.e., the top of charts) with regularity, but the disposable nature of their product and, in my view, people's gravitation away from album driven artists (or, really, albums themselves) isn't, in my view, a positive development (assuming, it's still a "development"). But then I can't imagine artists with a nascent or established penchant for albums, versus those predisposed to singles, will tailor their decisions according to what people want or will buy.
Put another way (and, admittedly, as the most patently obivous/obviously lazy example): would The Beatles have been as demonstrably influential had their career ended with "Help!"?
― dblcheeksneek, Friday, 14 December 2007 17:37 (sixteen years ago) link
i'm gonna throw away my records and just make CDrs of youtube videos. sounds way better than Spotify. don't know about Tidal.
― scott seward, Wednesday, 8 May 2024 04:30 (four days ago) link
Wow. I can't believe how obviously the quality of the LP and system come through on a YouTube video. The soundstage was instantly there and everything is smooth and lush..Thank you for the experience.
― budo jeru, Wednesday, 8 May 2024 05:14 (four days ago) link
Whooooffff! Superb sound, easily noticeable even on YouTube. Wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't heard it. All the high detail but no sibilance, weighty and detailed lows. Best I've ever heard and I'm a SD fan. Excellent review.
my barometer for used vinyl had been (until lets dance jumped up several years back) the 80s bowie records.
my new one is randy newman.
― Western® with Bacon Flavor, Wednesday, 8 May 2024 05:46 (four days ago) link
obviously this is the best comment:
"GEEEEEZ! Porcaro is da epitome of perfection punch and subtle nuance dynamics and leads the energy like driving the song like a bus steady as she goes"
― scott seward, Wednesday, 8 May 2024 12:07 (four days ago) link
or maybe this is:
"i like your humor, greetings from switzerland"
― scott seward, Wednesday, 8 May 2024 12:09 (four days ago) link
i don't know how all the audiophile/classic rock dweebery hasn't killed my enjoyment for steely dan. they must be unkillable. i can talk about SD here on ilx and NOWHERE else. like, the very idea of a real life discussion fills me with fear, loathing, dread, hate, etc. even on social media. they are an asshat magnet for sure. and i do feel for the people who hate them. people probably should hate them.
― scott seward, Wednesday, 8 May 2024 12:21 (four days ago) link
Same, the fucking virus of awful Steely Dan internet meme joke crap hasn’t diminished my love either
― brimstead, Wednesday, 8 May 2024 13:52 (four days ago) link