Continuing with CDs?

susceptible to disc rot

ah shit already mentioned, nevermind

CDs are the new vinyl - cheap, underrated, widely available used, neglected & unwanted by a lot of "real" collectors

I just got 9 CDs in the mail today (12 if you count that one of them is a 3CD set) and I bought 10 others over the weekend, plus a deluxe box set that included 3 vinyl LPs and 2 CDs, and I only bought it because the second CD was only available in the box, not sold separately.

well, not exactly... the Internet has normalized the used CD market, and rare stuff is neither neglected nor unwanted. there was a sweet spot for used vinyl in the 90s where you had a confluence of three things that is unlikely to be repeated: 1. CD sales surging so everyone was ditching their vinyl collections 2. record companies were still pressing vinyl editions of new releases that were $3-4 cheaper than the CD 3. no real Internet market for used vinyl or CDs so the true value of stuff was difficult to establish (you had to have expertise vs. just looking at the median sale price on Discogs) and you were forced, except for really rare stuff, to price for local markets

I find Cocteau Twins and Big Star CDs in thrift bins these days, I'll take that as a win

I do agree that the vinyl market in the post-CD/pre-internet era was a unique convergence of factors

This was a problem with one batch (manufactured by PDO 1988-1993), it's pretty much a non-issue.

We've been over this several times on ILM already, I've had it on CDs from 1995 and 1996, and I think it was more than one manufacturer involved

a) the (often shockingly bad) shoddy quality of new vinyl b) 2nd hand vinyl in crap condition

OTM. this is what keeps me from investing in vinyl. QC/mastering is appalling, now. unless you can afford a turntable/amp/speaker system in excess of ~£250, its probably not worth the bother.

ah, format wars...

on digital carriers:
i wrote my uni thesis on the preservation of audio media - chiefly, the unprecedented challenges and risks of digital audio. i opened a real can of worms when discovering the complexity surrounding preservation - mostly institutionally, but domestic issues i hadn't thought about cropped up, too. for example, your mp3s files only play because the software you use supports the required codec. if software companies decide to cease supporting mp3 codec and make a switch in the near future, your collection is rendered useless - unless you have legacy software. this isn't an issue so much just right now, but if you look back at only 20 odd years ago, a wealth of digital media from the 90s - and 80s - is futile; it can't be played back; the technology is outdated already. try opening a pro tools project from the 90s. try finding a DCC player. DATs are mostly fucked. it progresses fast, and it's this rate of progression which prevents standards from being established. it seems we've settled with WAV and FLAC, though. i dunno. maybe that will change, too. bit rot is also a thing - to be discerned from disc rot. your digital media is still volatile, and susceptible to degradation as much as analogue carriers are.

i suppose you can get as technical as you like about all this racket, but really it just comes down to practicality and convenience. after ten years of critical listening in audio mixing/mastering, personally i can notice mp3 artifacts against a WAV if i listen to it that many times. but whatever. my hard disk space is limited. FLAC is ideal. am i worried about my FLACs rotting? not really. am i worried about my SSD failing? yes... do i want a load of CDs cluttering up my shelves (and probably skipping if i scratch them the slightest bit)? no!

it's weird how streaming services have made a wealth of music available in immediacy, while managing to render a lot of (painstakingly toiled over) art quite disposable.

ultimately, my whole study made me existentially question permanence and preservation of art! nothing lasts forever and ~life is transient~. erosion is beautiful.

now, where's my disintegration loops mp3 gone...? :)

OTM. this is what keeps me from investing in vinyl. QC/mastering is appalling, now.

To be fair, CDs can and often are released with breathtakingly bad mastering jobs, especially heartbreaking when it's the CD reissue of a rare vinyl-only release and they brickwall it, and you know there will never be another CD reissue.

^^ very otm

see: the Virgin Prunes reissues on Mute

CDs are the new vinyl - cheap, underrated, widely available used, neglected & unwanted by a lot of "real" collectors

Rather. Amoeba's CD dollar bins essentially allow you to collect full discographies for, say, ten bucks or so. (unperson's point re cheap CD box sets that are straight repackaging of albums rather than curated sets of things also applies.)

and - sincerely - how many of them are scratched up/skip?

I have literally never bought a used CD that didn't rip into my computer with no trouble at all

including thrift store purchases

Yeah, I can think of...one, maybe two over the years. And I've literally ripped thousands of CDs.

I've had quite a few tbh. Mostly stuff on smaller labels, maybe they used cheaper manufacturers. Minor Threat was one, I ended up having to rip it like vinyl, i.e. play it on my stereo CD player into the line-in of my PC

(and that wasn't used I bought it new, and it's not scratched up)

I've never had a problem, even with stuff that didn't play perfectly.

And yeah the thrift stores are insane now. When I was a teen I looked at the 69 Love Songs set with despair at its pricing. Last week I picked up a copy in excellent condition from a Value Village for five bucks.

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

...which naturally encourages labels to not make quality control a high priority

youre possibly changing my mind about collecting CDs tbh... i got rid of most of my possessions a few years back, and i never thought id bother starting up a physical collection again. but maybe it'd be nice. i dunno. jewel cases still get on my nerves.

they buy it and put it on the shelf in one of those dumb plastic frames on the wall

fixed that for u

youre possibly changing my mind about collecting CDs tbh... i got rid of most of my possessions a few years back, and i never thought id bother starting up a physical collection again. but maybe it'd be nice. i dunno. jewel cases still get on my nerves.

― meaulnes, Monday, December 3, 2018 12:34 PM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

these are not a perfect solution, but it felt so good to throw a few hundred jewel cases into the recycling bin.
https://spacesavingsleeves.com/shop?olsPage=products

ha, I love that the example in the link there is a large collection of CDs by The Fall

xp Yeh I did that about 6 months ago. All the CDs into black canvas case / bags. I've probably opened them up about 3 times since. I still play a lot of vinyl, although I'm starting to sell the surplus of some of that, as well.

I thought the vinyl qc thing was because the plants are being maxed out but y'all are the experts

All the new vinyl I buy sounds great

yeah there's tons of great new vinyl just need to be a little choosy...obv certain labels and reissue campaigns you know it will be good, like Light in the Attic is always amazing

on the other hand, like if it's a thin-feeling, no frills pressing of some nu indie band that probably recorded digital in the first place just avoid

jewel cases still get on my nerves.

So get rid of the cases. My sister did that with mine, which she was kind enough to store for me when I had no room moving out of state.

that probably recorded digital in the first place

This is the key for me. If the music was recorded, mixed, and mastered on digital equipment, why transfer it to an analog medium? It's like buying a CD, taping it, then listening to the tape instead.

but, like, the warmth, man

"if you look back at only 20 odd years ago, a wealth of digital media from the 90s - and 80s - is futile; it can't be played back; the technology is outdated already. try opening a pro tools project from the 90s. try finding a DCC player. DATs are mostly fucked."

I disagree. Digital media is far more resilient than analogue media and, in my opinion, if there's a will, it's essentially immortal. The availability of emulation means that obscure old digital formats have, if anything, become *more* accessible over time; the ever-decreasing cost of storage means that nothing ever needs to be deleted.

The unavailability of DCC and DAT players is a physical problem, not a digital one. The classic example of the BBC's Laserdisc-based Domesday book arose because most of the project's media was *analogue* video - it was trivial to emulate the project's digital code - and although DRM can prevent direct bit-for-bit copies of a digital work, it will never win.

The biggest issue facing digital data isn't destruction, it's obscurity. I've written about this before and don't plan to do it again, but eventually the internet will host a digital copy of every piece of that humanity has ever produced, and 99% of it will go unviewed, forever. It will exist in a kind of living death, preserved forever but never looked at. "If there's a will" is also a factor. Imagine if we could bring human beings back from the dead. Any person who ever lived. Imagine if no-one chose to revive you, ever. You'd be pissed! And also dead, so thoroughly dead.

There's a notion that we're all immortal, because the atoms of our bodies will float through the universe and whatever "soul" we had will merge with time and space. But there exists a background cosmic radiation, and eventually whatever signal we produced will be weaker than this background radiation; it will be impossible to extract our waveform from the noise. Eternal life is impossible because of this. Even in a silent universe there would come a point when quantum effects would reduce a non-zero waveform to zero.

I'm not arguing that digital media cannot still be lost. The Lost Media Wiki has some examples of modern-day lost media, generally either web-based Flash games that no-one saved or time-limited demos; it's difficult to play older versions of Steam video games because Steam keeps them updated, notably Half-Life 2. But all of those things could have been preserved if there had been a will at the time, and analogue media is far more fragile. It will only be a matter of time before the original master tapes of classic albums from the 1960s have shed all their oxide, at which point digital copies will be the only copies available.

Which raises the separate issue of value, because what use is preservation if no-one looks at it, ever? I mean ever, over the course of thousands of years. If the entire musical output of Lambert Murphy was wiped from the Earth, is there a single person alive today who would notice or care? If it became widely known that his work had been obliterated people would protest, but not because they enjoyed his work; they would protest for a short while then move on. If his work was destroyed in obscurity it would be lost forever and no-one would shed a tear. He didn't have kids.

Eventually all of human art will be available on the internet, and 99% of it will never be seen by anyone, and if an asteroid wiped out half of the planet that unheard, unseen 99% will be destroyed and nothing will have changed. Something something 1998 Hell in a Cell plummeted sixteen feet through an announcer's table.

that was fucking dope

I pegged that as a top-form A.Pom. post within the first few chapters.

Presumably some sort of synthetic audience will be programmed to enjoy the otherwise eternally unloved 99% of media.

The future is Twitter bots, trawling the internet, upvoting thousands of abandoned soundcloud songs.

but eventually the internet will host a digital copy of every piece of that humanity has ever produced

why is anybody taking this post seriously when it contains this assertion

i was reminded of a few sites that show you random YouTube videos with few or no hits... I couldn't remember the name of one... and I found this very fitting new one: http://astronaut.io/ Now watching some unappreciated art as my soul leaves my body

that was a very fine post full of very harsh truths

Isn't there an app or something that only plays stuff on Spotify that has zero plays? I feel like a friend told me about this, but I can't remember now. I think he said it was a lot of classical music and audiobook-type stuff

that most media will be unappreciated in its lifetime is an argument against digital media as a preservation format -- we're still digging up bits of pottery and graffiti from thousands of years ago.
not sure a usb stick will outlast a vinyl record under similar circumstances. if a volcano covers spotify's servers in ash, i think it will be all zero plays in the year 3000.

fwiw literally everyone doing born-digital preservation professionally believes it's a much bigger challenge than preserving (most) dedicated physical media carriers, digital or analog so yeah i wouldn't take that Ashley Pomeroy post and its disassociation very seriously.

digital preservation takes constant time money and attention whereas you can literally just leave records or cds in the right room with the right environmental conditions and you can probably play them in 20 years without too much trouble -- the technology is much more self-contained and you aren't relying on constantly updated OSes etc.

which is easier to do with what you have in your home right now, play a cd or look at a file on a zip disk?

there has been an increasing number of conditions that enable us to access physical files and those conditions change very quickly. in theory they're all "out there" but in practice they fall by the wayside and all but disappear in a span of years. introduce proprietary internet platforms to that mix and it gets much worse. the internet archive can only do so much. someone has to pay for this shit.

access *digital* files

i was jaded and stressed to high heaven after opening the can of existential worms that was my brief study on digital preservation. probably didn't articulate myself too well. i have a lot of thoughts and feelings on it. i might pick it back up someday but it filled me with such dread! i can't think about things on such a scale. macropuente is completely OTM! about finances and institutional crises, lack of funds & education, etc. digital media may have some worthwhile permanance; magnetic tape, hmm - machines are no longer manufactured, spare parts will run out, and yeah, tape will degrade. i think analogue purists lean toward the theory that analogue decay is a) more flattering in its artifacts and b) easier salvaged than digital decay; you can bake magnetic tape, but once data has rotted, you're fucked. then there's all the concerns detailed above. digital longevity seems possible via multiple & off-site backups, maintaining standards, and further implementation of archival procedures -- and emulation, as noted - but at such great investment and expense, it seems.

i used to be such an analogue purist growing up, but my mindset completely changed: i guess recorded music has only been around for about 100 years. we embraced and committed to the digital paradigm shift. it may be futile to look to the technology of the past to preserve the music of the future. if things are becoming increasingly transient and disposable then so be it.

in dire straits, broke as fuck, i went all-digital with music, photos, videos, writing, etc. two years ago -- i love my laptop, but the tactility of physical media/carriers/tech is something i really miss. i know it's still possible to maintain tape & machines, but sometimes it just feels so pointless, now...

it's funny. i don't feel at all perturbed listening & appraising music within my entirely digital collection, but when it comes to experimenting with sound, i like to engage with tape, still, and feel a bit lost without some sort of analogue in the process. open reel tapes and cassettes are magic and so flattering to music. purely digital composition seems so weird. begs the question: is digital-born media void of tactility, organics, physicality - or are we just redefining those qualities? is digital always virtual and a 'representation' of an analogue?

in armchair theory i make this distinction: we engineered analogue technology to facilitate our needs. digital tech, however, is symbiotic. its intelligence grows the more with interact with it. unprecedented psychological effects of the internet & social media is a prime example that digital technology is developing exponentially at a rate we can't keep up with, despite its growth, intelligence and responsibility being entirely in our hands. but maybe it's natural after all. the universe is math, anyway, right?

ah fucking hell i'm really on one now. i digress. sorry.

https://media.giphy.com/media/vihyZxPIsX5hC/giphy.gif
https://media.giphy.com/media/vihyZxPIsX5hC/giphy.gif

I like thinking about this stuff too but it definitely gets daunting and like really complicated pretty quickly. There’s nothing very reducible or generalizable about it imo. Taken a few digital preservation courses over the years but it honestly seemed too hard (and dry / tedious) to pursue as a career. Now I sell old books lol. Maybe I’ll go back to it though I think I might be more into it / ready for it now that I’m older. Xp

i cant tell you how nice that is to hear from someone else after experiencing exactly that myself during university. it made me want to leave audio/engineering/technology behind altogether. i've diverted my aspiring career aims to cyberpsychology. realized i was more concerned with tech's inter/intrapersonal effects than hypothetical audio nerdery. but here i am, bickering about binary, still!

digital v analog, basically a matter of what crumbles first, the economy/viability of massive server farms... or the environment, humidity, etc.... overtaxed due to massive server farms?! My mind basically goes to a dystopian dust bowl future of rare and expensive books, vinyl, and filled-up ipods alike. Internet and storage media sustainability and growth are the real question marks.

by then no one is going to give a shit about our terrible music anyway

/thread