Continuing with CDs?

The jewelcase is like just this side of a really good design that might have let me stay in love with CDs. The universal-replacement aspect is great! Sliding them in and out of shelves is satisfying! It's everything else about them that's ugly and unpleasant - the tabs that hold the booklets in are ungenerous and unforgiving, swapping out the back panel is a little harder than it needs to be, the hinge attachment feels (and is) flimsy and doomed to break. And overall I think the plastic is just a hair too thick, or something, which makes them feel more like the massive utilitarian theft-proofing things the chain stores would additionally house them in, not like a beloved album in your hand. The material feels worn out and scuffled and not-quite-completely-transparent sooner than it ought, making even the brightest and most saturated album art look kinda dingy and blah.

One of those things where a design got standardized too soon IMO, and digipaks stepped in as the "classy" alternative but with such a host of other problems as enumerated above. Though even a period of wider experimentation might not have gotten us anywhere - the early years of VHS saw a real range of packaging solutions, almost all more satisfying and feature rich than the very basic form-fitting cardboard sleeve that became the ubiquitous standard.

I passed on a bunch of cheap used Eno remasters recently because they were in those digis.

I started buying CDs in the mid-to-late 80s and even those still play just fine. Back in the 70s some company(ies?) where selling car-audio turntables -- who would actually want to take their wax on the road? Cassettes, though, cassettes were practically designed to handle ketchup/beer spillage and even the errant leftover roach.

Using solid storage towers/shelves and organized will keep my well-used stax looking pristine indefinitely.

Kinda dig those 'slimline' jewel cases - they're roughly half the depth of a regular jewel case, yet you can fit a J-card in the top cover and still print information on the spine. Often times you see them without a back-sleeve, and the disc is fixed upside-down, so you can see the graphics when looking at it from the back. The teeth don't seem so brittle on my copies (+Minus - A Rainy Koran Verse, and one of the ErstLive series), as most clear plastic trays.

I liked the attention that Drag City put into their jewel cases, during the late 90s / early 00s - with a custom (glossy, or colored) tray piece, and high quality (various types of stock) paper booklets. Nowadays you get a cardboard slip that's dog-eared to shit when you get it in the mail.

Edition Wandelweiser uses these three-panel, folding paper (thick) pieces, with a small foam 'anchor' for the CD hole. Uniform layout / typography, discs are colored (nice appearance), but it's a flimsy package. It comes in a plastic slip, with an adhesive, fold-over lip.. pretty much throwaway

Another Timbre

Don't know why jewel cases still use teeth after so many other better types have been around.

I've never really thought about it, but it's kind of true that there's no durable, protective and aesthetically-pleasing case widely available for CDs. Jewel cases are durable (or at least easily replaceable) and protective, but not aesthetically pleasing. Digipaks are a slight step up in aesthetics still kind of ugly, and prone to breakage. Cardboard eco-sleeves are a bit more aesthetically pleasing but not terribly protective. I guess maybe having an inner sleeve in a cardboard outer sleeve would be the best of both worlds, but a bit of a pain to get the CD in and out. In my own cases, I ditched all my CD cases a long while back and put everything in binders - a triumph of convenience over aesthetics.

The basic / single (?) gatefold "wallet", with two panels (+ a spine = two creases) and a plastic tray glued on the right panel, (in)side works--no extra unfolding necessary, print the information inside the single-panel cover, beneath the disc, or on the back cover. Remember when Syro came out on CD, it has like a nine-panel gatefold packaging (wtFphex !?) - i would've cut the bulk/excess cardboard off if I had to open it every time I put it on.

I solved that problem by selling it to Amoeba.

I raved about these upthread, they are great:

https://spacesavingsleeves.com/

They are polythene gatefold CD sleeves that take up a fraction of the space on shelves. If you get a CD in a jewel case, just throw that shit away and put the disc, booklet and tray card in one of these. And yes, you can still see the spine on the shelf.

100% agree ^^^

I'm still thinking about getting those.

Oh hell no

No. Those look awful.

Sadly, if I wanted all of my CDs to be on shelves as a proper library, I'd have to own an apartment twice as big as my 650 s.f. apartment. So they're all packed away in boxes in the basement. Which admittedly does defeat some of the purpose of physical media, besides the sense that if I somehow catastrophically lost all of the rips/backups I have of everything, I could re-rip them (over a process of years).

Anybody found any reasonably attractive shelving system? In theory someday I could at least try to turn one wall in my apartment into shelves to make a library of a few thousand of the albums, spouse permitting. . .

Or maybe I need to admit defeat, and donate the 7k or so albums to a library, or to my favorite shop, or something, since supposedly they're now worthless to the LPs-with-download-codes/streaming-only youth ; )

Guess how often I curse at trying to unfold/refold an IPR release (Scenic, Savage Republic, Lanterna, etc.) in one of those origami discfolios. After 20 years, they/'re all coming apart.

Re shelving - a monolithic shelf wall in a neutral colour allows thousands of discs to be just a texture in a room. If you make the shelves a few inches deeper than the discs need, you can put small stuff like photos etc in front even.

Recently bought a bookshelf and a bunch of those Snap-n-Store CD boxes. They hold ~60 regular CDs in jewel cases. I still need about two more. It's an alright (but not perfect) solution so far, and I like that my discs can be accessible without being displayed. Most of my discs are ripped now (save for DJ mixes), and my home listening is usually through Airplay to the A/V receiver or on vinyl through the DJ setup in my front room.

i don't want to continue with cds, and i have a lot of them. some of them might be valuable to someone, i imagine. what is the best way to get rid of them? i'd like to maximize a return but also not have it be a pain in the ass

Buy a barcode scanner (seriously, it will make your life a lot easier) and figure out via Discogs what you have that's valuable. Then sell the valuable ones on Discogs. Then sell the common-but-still-desirable stuff in lots on eBay. Donate the rest?

sounds like a Ponzi scheme to me

also re barcode scanners, there are many smartphone apps for that (which may be what PP meant by buying one)

Just get the Discogs app itself, it has a built-in scanner.

I have never sought and installed an app more quickly in my life! Thanks Ned.

Sit them outside in a box that says "Free CDs"

thanks all, cool to hear about the discogs app!

we do have a really good record/cd exchange shop here but I don't think I'd be able to get a good return on everything in my collection there

'Hipster kryptonite': will CDs ever have a resurgence? https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/aug/08/cds-resurgence-hipster-kryptonite-compact-discs-vinyl-format-music

shit, it's happening.
just picked up :
mike oldfield - amarok
elo - zoom
various - the sound of dubstep 4 (2cd)
derrick carter - pagan offering
£3.50 the lot.
articles like that are going to kill my fun.

Just get the Discogs app itself, it has a built-in scanner.

― Ned Raggett, Wednesday, August 8, 2018 12:07 AM (nine hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i had this app but could never get the scanner to work, plus when i was in the app it would often open safari and take me to the discogs web page automatically. maybe i should reinstall and try again.

Find a store that still buys them (like a record store, some only do by donation but I found a place that gives me 3 bucks a piece). Unless the cds are in good condition with little to no scuffs they may reject them - this can be a blessing as on a good day I have made 50 bucks but not lost every record (including rare ones)

Just get the Discogs app itself, it has a built-in scanner.

― Ned Raggett, Wednesday, August 8, 2018 12:07 AM (nine hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

D'oh! I wasn't aware of this!

Like so many others, the hipster is at the helm of these revivals.

I put all the worthwhile cds on half.com when that was a thing like, 10 years ago? I think I made pretty decent money. The next time I moved, I got rid of all the jewel cases. The next time I moved, I finally Iet everything go (2 years ago). I couldn't even find people who wanted 336 caselogic books to use for whatever. It felt really good to stop lugging all of it around.

Find a store that still buys them (like a record store, some only do by donation but I found a place that gives me 3 bucks a piece). Unless the cds are in good condition with little to no scuffs they may reject them

some of them might be valuable to someone, i imagine. what is the best way to get rid of them? i'd like to maximize a return

I bought a shitload of secondhand CD's in the 'Book Off' chain whilst living in Japan - mainly £1.50 to £3.00 per disc. Have since made a bit of a killing on Discogs over the years. There's still demand.

personally waiting to make a killing off the rare discontinued mp3s I have

Check Discogs and set aside every CD worth more than about $20, then take that batch to local record store and see if they'll sell them for you on consignment. Not many do this anymore, but even if they only give you 50-60% of the sale price, if you're patient you can make a lot of money with very little effort. Selling stuff yourself on Discogs is more profitable but is a massive time sink (and headache).

How much would you pay someone to store your CDs or conversely, how much would you want to store someone else's CDs?

As I said on some other thread, the only thing that's stopping me from getting back into CDs is that I have no room for them in my house

On a bit of research it seems that Super Audio CDs work on ordinary cd players but are there any issues to keep in mind? I didn't know they existed until recently.

Only hybrid SACDs will play in standard players, and not all SACDs are hybrids. Also, you can only hear the 5.1 portion (which only some SACDs include) if your player decodes SACD and outputs surround. A fair number of players do these things (Sony's blu-ray players, for instance).

My sense is that the blind-study consensus is that people can't really hear the difference between redbook (standard CD audio) and SACD (higher resolution), regardless of equipment (apart from the surround sound, of course). A lot of audiophiles disagree, however.

supposedly not all of them have a regular CD layer, but I've never owned one that didn't. you just get regular 44.1kHZ/16-bit PCM audio on a normal CD player, but not the "super" format which can be a lot of things... 24-bit stereo or 5.1 mixes are popular with the pink floyd crowd.

a lot of inexpensive DVD players can play DVD-A and SACD if you want to play them though.

I made quite a lot of money about 5 years ago selling a bunch of SACDs. It seemed that the more anodyne the album the more they were worth.

amazes me how there remains a market for optical media given that developments in storage space and fidelity have rendered it technically useless

I buy a lot of digital now (Bandcamp is awesome) but there's still a lot of artists who won't make stuff available lossless. Vinyl I try and avoid, it's massively overpriced and requires too much fucking around.

fucking around?

bandcamp is the best thing to happen to digital music - direct payment to artists, no social network, popularizing and normalizing distribution of FLAC! i hope they never update/ruin it.

fucking around, yeah. CDs require way less fucking around.

good grief

I've gone full-on back into CDs in the last year or two. I agree there's less fucking around. Sound quality is the best and because they are so cheap (essentially worthless) they require no TLC.

My first oreference for buying is Bandcamp. Or reasonably priced CD. If those aren't options i check 7digital and Boomkat. Otherwise I pester the artist to make their stuff available through one of those. This vinyl only bs needs to stop. Fucking around = storage, climate control, giving the stupid things baths to clean them and fighting the losing battle of degrading fidelity after each play.