Continuing with CDs?

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

xpost

I LOVE the fucking around

"storage, climate control, giving the stupid things baths to clean them"

what is this nonsense? Yeah they take up some space but the other two things is not what people do.

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.

― Fastnbulbous, Sunday, December 2, 2018 10:49 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm

I like cds just fine but vinyl is not difficult to handle, does not require "climate control" (wtf) or baths and playing them does not destroy them, ask any collector rly

because of moving around I've been all Spotify this year and don't mind that either, people get too stuck up on media formats, whatever lets you enjoy great tunes is all good

abolish music listen to ~nature~

I've been buying a few CDs recently because they are cheap as fuck (cheaper than downloads a lot of the time esp 2nd hand obv) and I've been getting a bit pissed off with a) the (often shockingly bad) shoddy quality of new vinyl b) 2nd hand vinyl in crap condition

I've got a good record player and a new stylus, records should sound good but frequently they do not

I've been getting a bit pissed off with a) the (often shockingly bad) shoddy quality of new vinyl

give it time

To each their own, true enough. I've got two mates who are way into vinyl - one only buys high-quality original pressings, the other has been replacing his CDs with fresh LP pressings. It's fun for them and when I tag along on a record run it's a vicarious thrill for me, but I never liked the pops, clicks and potential bad pressings of vinyl but love the simplicity and easier storage of CDs. I do prefer the larger artwork - that's a clear benefit. I'm old, I want a physical copy if possible though I tend to shy away from doomed-to-degrade CDRs. MP3s are fine if that's the only option (I've been to way too many gigs to be able to hear the difference from FLACs), and I understand there are minimum print runs for CDs which might not work for small bands. This is the first year I've noticed the drop in CD releases - I expect that will continue. C'est la vie.

Why is FLAC sold with a premium, over mp3?

Because FLAC is a lossless format and mp3 isn't.

I've had two (out of about three thousand) CDs that had bit rot/bronzing... Disco Inferno's "Summer's Last Sound" EP and Trisomie 21's "T21 Plays the Pictures". It was definitely a pressing issue because every copy I ever got of those albums had the same problem.

My prediction that poorly mastered/pressed vinyl reissues from 2010-2015 would be filling up dollar bins by now has apparently not come to pass.

I think a lot of people who buy vinyl these days never actually listen to it; they buy it and put it on the shelf and listen to the album on Spotify. So a shitty pressing isn't necessarily a huge negative; it's a thing to have from the band you love. Plus vinyl has perceived value... give it 5-10 years, once people get tired of packing up that shit every time they move they'll ditch it and the used bins will fill up.

I buy CDs because I have a great stereo and it's easy and cheap way to get full fidelity music

My amp has an on board DAC so all I really need is something to spin the disc, I just replaced an old marantz CD player that broke (was pretty expensive in its day) with a $10 Sony DVD player with an optical out

Another thumbs up for CD's (although I did get swept up in the vinyl charade very briefly).

Yesterday, I was please to find a record company on Bandcamp selling the CD for half the price of the digital (Vakula's 'You've Never Been To Konotop' - £5 on cd). Obviously helps if you're living in the same country for postage.