Continuing with CDs?

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.

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

What developments are those? (Honestly asking, I’m curious.) How would you get CD quality digital version of a new album (on a major label, not some speciality thing sold in FLAC format)?

FLAC isn't too hard to get these days, although I was annoyed the new Lisa Gerrard is only available as mp3s... but that was first time in a while I haven't been able to buy FLAC if I wanted to. Or (eyeroll) WAV files.

i suppose people still like their physical items, but the CD as a physical medium doesn't have many redeeming features... susceptible to disc rot, small format artwork, easily cracked cases. FLAC is lossless (while being able to surpass CD redbook standards) and hardly a speciality - bandcamp offers it by default. it's just strange to me that we've stuck with such a lossy format of mp3 when hard disk space in excess of *terabytes* is readily available. i havent bought an LP in ages so i don't know what the standard is for download codes these days, but i think many labels offer WAV or FLAC, and if they aren't... why aren't they??

anyway, why are you listening to major labels? ;)

🤔

Forget vinyl-only releases, it's the cassette-only people that are the real bastards.

I've got a couple of thousand CDs, some going back to the late 80s, and have never yet encountered the dreaded bit rot.

Why is FLAC sold with a premium, over mp3?

ie mp3 albums at £4.99, FLAC albums at £5.99

why is shaker furniture sold with a premium, over Ikea?

Never encountered disc rot in 25 years and 2,500+ discs.

IIRC the problem was specific to CDs manufactured by a single company (PDO) between 1988 and 1993 so maybe you just got lucky.

I have, with discs pressed at the one PDO plant in England that was known to have the problem circa 1990-92