Continuing with CDs?

i wouldn't really part with them unless i had one of those fancy things that lets you use your mp3s on a good stereo, but it's like i just picked u a real nice old NAD cd player for only $30 off craigslist so why bother.

plus yeah like ned said it's gonna be sweet in the next few years, lots of crewsh older stuff for dirt cheap.

although...it is weird seems like some CDs are really picking up in value on ebay, out of print stuff...

Yeah I don't see anything that indicates that rare CDs are any less valuable then they ever were.

I am keeping my cds because I want backups in case I have hard drive failure. Even with two hard drive copies of my music, I prefer to have the backup. Also, I may want to rip at a higher bitrate later once hd prices come down.

I'm going to keep my CD's in case I ever need to build a fortress of solitude out of them, Jor-El stylee

a) no, except for ones i get sick of.
b) no
c) i download tracks and sometimes albums, but if i really like what i'm hearing i'll buy it in CD or vinyl form. artwork, liner notes, etc.

i'll never say never though, because maybe someday in the distant future i'll sell everything and have it all digitized.

I'm keeping my CDs.

I'm too lazy to sell and also I have a suspicion that some kind of new digital format will emerge (MP5?) that will make MP3s sound tinny and useless, and that I'll want to re-rip my CDs.

I still buy cds and vinyl. I will keep them all unless I needed the money.
I barely download now, but like always, I still try to buy what I downloaded as long as I liked it.

im continuing! cd's are beautiful

1. No, never.
2. I will keep them as the art objects/media that they are.
3. Until I can buy whole albums from iTunes or Amazon as .wav files, I will continue buying essential CDs.

A lot of good reasons to hang onto CDs in this thread. I still enjoy cases and liner notes and having a good thing around to throw my disposable income at. In a lot of ways, I also find them easier to store and maintain than digital music, where you need at least two forms of backup and need to keep an organized file/folder structure together if you're going to find stuff easily. Finally, I still can hear the difference between reasonably good-quality CDs and mp3s, and with formats, storage methods, etc. changing frequently keeping CDs around seems like less of a long-term headache.

I'll still buy a lot, taking advantage of the lower cost and because I like having the little cardboard boxes from Caiman in the post to look forward to after returning from work.

I keep the price stickers on my CDs, and it amazes me just how much I was paying for music in the 90s. £15 - £16 for some CDs was not unusual.

ridic

its like 12 bux tops for me now. unless its brand new and too good

I'll continue keeping 100s of cds in a sock drawer which I occasionally pull out for a car ride. I wont sell them. But I oughta clean them all. I hate when a cd skips and I hate how I lost some of my cds even though I dont listen to any of my cds much. But I did lose Roxy Music - The Early Years and Tangerine Dream - Rubycon. I broke Thrakattak. And I can't remember what else at the moment. Kinda sucks. Kinda not.

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 hate that too, captain -- i'm actually making a list of CD's i have that are too scratched up/missing. i replace a few ever year

it's like i just realized how to properly take care of a cd.

Fastnbulbous accurate enough, which is why the CDs I sell back are the ones I never listen to, or have only heard once and thought, "Nice" and never went back to at all. Ergo, why keep 'em around?

I moved into a new place two months ago and never bothered taking my CDs out of their boxes. I have a few lying around that I've bought recently, but there's no real reason for me to have them out, since the majority are on my iTunes/iPod, anyway.

Back when I started to download albums, I told myself that if I really liked something I downloaded I'd buy it on CD. But then it just seemed silly to go to the trouble of buying it, only to put it on a shelf and forget about it as soon as it was out of its shrink wrap.

Now the albums I buy are the ones I simply can't find online. I don't use p2p, but I can find most major new indie releases on a couple of choice websites or through friends. So what I buy ends up being not necessarily indicative of what I'm really excited about. A lot of times this amounts to used CDs I stumble across and take a chance on.

Those of you who sell off your CDs, someday your hard drive is gonna fail.
This is exactly right — CDs have become nothing more than backup.

http://www.sevenoaksart.co.uk/images/record1.gif

1) nah, I'm the kind of person who saves everything
2) ???
3) I never exclusively bought CDs, it was always a mix of vinyl, cassette (back in the day), or mp3 formats. I see no reason why this will change for me in the near future.

1) too lazy really - and they're not worth that much anyway
2) never completely stopped buying vinyl, so it's not even an accurate record
3) I''ve bought maybe 6 cds this year and maybe 300 LPs (and some cassettes, second hand for the car)

Also, I may want to rip at a higher bitrate later once hd prices come down.

yeah i thought about that. A couple weeks ago I embarked on digitizing my collection, starting with albums I didn't like that much; I ripped ~ 30 cds @ 320 which is fine for those but my main collection I'm probably gonna want to do in flac or whatever for posterity but i haven't done the math on what i'll need for space. I got 2 500G drives on black friday and I was gonna send one back but maybe I won't. than again i've been latched to rhapsody pretty hard lately and soon even the mp3s might be ancillary to how i'm listening to music. so much up in the air.

soon as I'm satisfied with backing up, and keeping the habit, I'm selling all my CDs. I need the space and I need the money.

i've sold all of my cds. still buy vinyl, which i also sell sometimes. while it's impractical, it retains its value better (and escalates in value far more often) and is more 'fun'. sue me

I keep the price stickers on my CDs, and it amazes me just how much I was paying for music in the 90s. £15 - £16 for some CDs was not unusual.

We still quite frequently pay $25-$35 AUD for some CD albums in this country. And they wonder why ppl use torrents.

resolved, did you just rip your CDs into FLAC format and keep them on your hard drive or something?

i ripped the ones that deserved it to FLAC + mp3 (for ipod), most of them just to variable rate mp3. and then a lot i just sold without bothering.

Will you bother trying now to sell off your existing CDs?

maybe. next year I might be compelled to "monetize" my vinyl collection.

Will you leave them as a record of 80s/90s to early 00s buying?

hate to say it but after sitting there unplayed for awhile they just take up space.

Will you continuing buying CDs selectively alongside downloading, for reasons of completing certain artists or genres?

Barely. I stream music on my computer, listen to old CDs less & less often. CDs/itunes I buy as gifts.

First off, CDs are still the primary way i listen to music, and I don't download very often.

1.) I'll hang onto my CDs for a long, long time, until they rot away (none of them have). I stopped selling back CDs a few years ago, because I tend to regret it later on. I used to regularly purge my collection of stuff if I hadn't played it in awhile, but there are too many CDs that I'm kicking myself now for selling then.

Plus, it always killed me when I tried to sell stuff that I knew was of really high musical quality or that someone would love to have, and the clerk would offer a pathetic couple of bucks (usually less!) for it. Most used stores never offer very much for CDs, and now when I think about it, the best offer I've ever received (about $3 for a CD, not common at all) is just not worth it to me. I'd rather hang on to the album, sorry, then take your 50 cents.

2. I'll keep my CDs as much more than just a record of this particular time, as they have fucking music on them!!

3. I'll probably buy CDs for quite a while. As others have mentioned, there are so many good finds on used CDs right now, it's great. So much stuff that I would never expect to find in used shops. It's only going to get better over the next few years, too.

Newbury Comics usually gives about $3 per CD.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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...

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.

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)?

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.

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.

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!

BAD!

Bad?

bad bad bad bad

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

People need to see an entire hamburger as an artistic statement, and not just pick off the pickles or eat the grilled onions.

http://www.baronbob.com/hamburgercdholder.jpg

Snacking is destroying the meal preparation industry

home cooking is destroying the fast food industry.

The hamburger analogy isn't so hot. I prefer to think of an album as very much like a box of chocolates.

Reading a comment quite a bit up thread reminded me of the olden days when I thought my CD collection was some kind of pension fund.

I spend 95% of my time listening to digital files on my laptop, through headphones. (Good headphones, TBF — Sony MDR-7506s, which are what musicians use in the recording studio.) Speakers and vinyl vs CD affecting the sound as it floats through the room? Not really an issue.

i'm not one of those guys with one of those programs that shows a seismograph looking thing for audio.

lol, it me

it's honestly one of those things i wish i had the time to do, i think it would at least be informative w/r/t whether or not i should upgrade something. it's rare that i notice a lesser version of an album. though i did have a really lousy repress of the first Led Zep album which immediately went to a friend who confessed to me he collected pressings of LZ1.

it’s not iust slick stuff, lofi or raw metal stuff can get totally fucked over by remastering that negatively alters the distortion texture, makes for a whole new and unsatisfying brain massage time

I spent some time reading up on speaker positioning, height, wall surfaces, etc because that stuff is easy and inexpensive to optimize. Make a noticeable difference. (Also my new place has a bedroom with big barn doors and I put speakers on either side of them... with a big open space between them it's astounding how much stereo imaging you get)

honestly, when all is said and done, i kinda can't believe there hasn't been more of a hepcat resurgence in reel to reel tape and players because they sound best of all.

It's happening, but too expensive for most.

https://store.acousticsounds.com/d/180395/The_White_Stripes-Elephant-14_Inch_-_15_IPS_Tape

reel-to-reels are sort of a pain in the ass to use (do I have one? of course I do) and the amount of pre-recorded media available is vanishingly small and the non-classical stuff is stupid expensive

i love Gillian Welch and hope she and Rawlings make some good money from this but it's definitely a pricey niche interest.

https://store.aconyrecords.com/products/the-harrow-the-harvest-reel-to-reel?variant=40182622388311

re: Spotify, that's another reason why I kept CD's - I can actually choose the mastering I want to listen to and not be stuck with whatever brickwall mastering that's your only choice on Spotify. Before Tom Petty died, he had this conversation with the guy in charge of the technical aspects of reissuing and distributing his catalog, and while Petty cared enough about sound quality NOT to subject his physical reissues to excessive compression, the compromise was that all streaming and possibly downloads (at least not from high-end vendors) would be brickwalled just so his music would be as "loud" as everyone else's on Spotify and elsewhere.

whatever old Canadian pressing of Aja i had sounded like trash next to whatever mastering is on Spotify. Huge variation among pressings of big releases.

i love Gillian Welch and hope she and Rawlings make some good money from this but it's definitely a pricey niche interest.

https://store.aconyrecords.com/products/the-harrow-the-harvest-reel-to-reel?variant=40182622388311🕸

we could do an entire survey of what the recordings on spotify are mastered toward, and whether settings make
it differ. do they change their EQ based on device? I’ve
never looked into it

CD mastering is fun. I had a discman and tape adapter for the car and it was such a shitshow

similarly to how I’m on a mobile app and keep accidentally putting new lines in my mobile posts

The blank tape reels alone for that Gillian Welch release cost $300 so they aren't soaking you to the degree it might seem

So many Canadian records got the shit treatment, like the cutting engineer was sent a 3rd-generation tape to master from and he had 10 cuts to get done that day and it was almost lunchtime so just crank something out.

Makes sense, from the scattered quality of the handful I've had. I once sold a copy of Space Oddity on discogs and the guy asked me if I had any more Canadian pressed classic rock because he'd gotten really into that. Not an interest I've heard of before or since. I think he was in the Sates. Maybe he had a nostalgia for the sound of vinyl copied to tape... copied to another tape.

do they change their EQ based on device?

No. I always poke at those settings. EQ is off/flat by default but there is normalization enabled... which makes sense to me given that there whole thing is playlists from scattered sources. I always disable it because I'm nuts.

if you're into flying the black flag one thing i've noticed about recent group releases is that a lot of them are "web rips" from tidal/qobuz/various other high quality streaming service. my question is whether these rips have actually cracked open the DRM egg that is a tidal/qobuz stream and are able to access the delicious lossless file inside, or are instead just a mic-out WAV record of a tidal stream after the digital to analogue conversion has already happened. hard to say.

back in the day some releases would advertise that it was downloaded directly from the itunes store. so at least you'd know it was 256kbps AAC.

another reason why it can be better to rip your own. you control the chain of custody. if you care about this stuff.

pretty sure people are using stream rippers for that web rip stuff, but as you say... it's not easy to know for sure

my question is whether these rips have actually cracked open the DRM egg that is a tidal/qobuz stream and are able to access the delicious lossless file inside

I haven't tested this personally, but I just looked to see what tools people have used to do this, and a quick skim of the source of a Tidal downloader seems to indicate it's downloading and decrypting. So if that one is still being used, it's cracking the egg

It's similar to the way eBook decrypters work, you (or the software) digs into the official app's code or communications with their servers and pulls your user token out which can then be used to decrypt the files/stream to allow you do whatever want with them. I would guess they're not overly worried about it because it's a pain in the ass to do it and you probably need an active subscription to keep ripping from their servers anyway. I spent a fun evening decrypting my Nook eBook files when I stopped using Nook eReaders... I'd guess that most people would give up in disgust trying to do that. It's "easy" once you've spent 4-6 hours locating all the random freeware you need to do it and working through the half-assed instructions across a dozen message boards.

i sort of assumed tidal drm was going to be really tough like widevine

Widevine is really tough... still got cracked.

Bought a new/not-used triple CD set yesterday.
Sickening.
What's going to become of me??

what was it?

that's how it always begins. very small.

It was the Steve Swell Fire Into Music Quartet w/ Jemeel Moondoc, William Parker & Hamid Drake on Rogueart.

That's a good set.

Yeah I'm excited. But also... not excited, even anxious, to start buying new CDs.

(f hazel, i have just sent to ilx-mail. nothing exciting, feel free to ignore)

Sale on hat hut-affiliated labels bringing things down to $7 mostly.
https://www.squidco.com/miva/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=S&Category_Code=HATSALE

Wow thanks, that sale looks great! I had to be careful to get stuff I didn't already own, packaged with a different name so it's not always obvious (e.g. Coltrane's "One Up, One Down" at the Half Note, a bunch of Miles Davis material already released in the Columbia "bootleg" series, etc.).

Yeah, it’s a little confusing, but at $7 apiece, even if I own one half of the package in another format, it’s no big deal. I got a pair of the aylers, plus one each by Marion brown, shepp, Cecil, and Paul bley.

This could/should probably be on a different thread but... My kid got given a CD player recently, but it's got a weird 3-pin plug that I have no idea what to do with. I've tried Googling it, and I think it's called an 'alter plug' but I can't find any real advice about adapters or if I can switch it out for a 'normal' plug. Anyone got any ideas?

https://i.imgur.com/WITJv5S.png

that's a type L 3-pin plug as used in italy (and chile!)

https://www.worldstandards.eu/electricity/plugs-and-sockets/

Thanks Nick! Having a dig around, I've noticed the word Conblock on it - looks like a connector they used to use in the 90s.

https://www.hifiwigwam.com/threads/what-sort-of-plug-is-this.122336/

okay that is a different thing than I was saying, yours has a middle pin that's longer than the other two. Either way I'm guessing you can just swap it out for a standard uk plug?

says random internet reply guy who doesn't really know what he's talking about

I'm entirely here for it - you know more than me! Looks like I need a UK plug, aye. It has the correct, er, wires etc so should be fine.

hey koogs, I can help you out! ilx-mail me again with your email address