I keep the CDs stored away just in case, but having the music on a hard drive makes it a lot easier to find the album I want. Lately, I tend to buy music in digital download form in the first place, unless it’s not an option.
I have somewhere around 700. I still buy them, though not quite as indiscriminately as I did in my younger days. My last purchases were The Monkees Headquarters Deluxe Box and the SACD set of Jeff Wayne’s War Of The Worlds. I listen to quite a bit of stuff on Apple Music, but on my system it doesn’t sound quite as good as when I play the physical disc.
Between new wife and I we had about a thousand CDs. Ripped them all to the cloud at good fidelity, put them in binders with the cover art & pitched the jewel cases. Then 6 months later we pitched the CDs, art, and binders. The collection is now 100% virtual.
Like many other posters have said, IMO the physical CD will never “make a comeback.” It may well continue to exist and be used for another 20 or even 30 years. But it’ll be increasingly a niche product and there will never be a nostalgia demand for physical CDs.
This is largely a decluttering effort on my part. And considering I still have a CD player that hasn’t been used in 5-10 years I’m not sure I will ever play them again. I could set up the player to work through my current stereo setup. That may be something that happens but I would imagine the ones I would still be interested in represent about 25% of what I have on hand. And my car doesn’t have a CD player. I doubt any I buy in the future will either.
Ripping them is out of the question as none of the desktops or laptops I currently own have CD drives.
As to selling them, pretty much anyplace that buys vinyl will buy CDs. I realize I won’t get anything close to what I paid for them. I’m trying to eliminate things that are just sitting here collecting dust. They are guilty of that.
@Musicat, I appreciate your input and will think about what you said. You made a number of very good points I will have to seriously consider. Most likely I will sort through them and find a good home for those I don’t want any longer. None of them will be getting tossed into the garbage.
Amazon can solve that problem for $23.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07DLRG9VH
It only takes about 3-4 minutes to rip a whole CD. I was surprised at how much of a chore it was NOT to rip hundreds of them.
Your local library might be interested in them, or at least some of them.
Now that’s a big help @LSLGuy. Thank you! I made the assumption an external drive to accomplish this would be much more than $23. That is an investment I will consider.
I realize I didn’t make it clear there is a fair amount of crossover between music I have on CD and on vinyl. Keeping the vinyl will be the priority. And donating to a library was already on my radar.
I had no idea a record store might be willing to pay me even a nickel for a CD. So all thousand went into the dumpster. Oh well.
No idea what they would pay for each one and it may not be all record stores. I can’t imagine it would be more than $1 per album. But that adds up quickly.
I just know the stores I check for vinyl also have a large section devoted to used CDs. That is in Chicago so other places may not be as likely to have stores buying them. And now that I think about it, if they are selling used CDs there is clearly a market for them.
I guess the best plan for now is to sort through them and see what I don’t have in mp3 or vinyl format and then get the old CD player set up.
I ripped all mine to FLAC for archive purposes and converted those files to MP3 for regular use (since not all devices can handle FLAC). I put the discs in paper sleeves and the sleeves in file boxes that are now in storage.
Although I rid myself of a lot of books before we moved into our present small house, I have kept the physical versions of all my digital media purchases (CDs, DVDs, BDs). For me, they are compact enough to be worth holding onto, just in case.
Although let me tell you, a box full of uncased CDs or DVDs is pretty damn heavy! A lot heavier than a box of the same size full of books.
My DVDs aren’t going anywhere. I have too much media in that format that isn’t easy to find in other places such as streaming from Netflix, etc.
And I want all of them in the cases with the paper sleeves, etc. Any CDs I want to hang onto would be kept the same way.
I had about 1800 CDs. I spent almost a year ripping them to WAV files and placing them on a Synology NAS. I’m still tuning their labels, but it’s pretty well-organized now.
I then pulled the inserts and put them in binders. The cases and CDs were destroyed.
In the 15 years since I did this, I have not had a single regret. I use the inserts frequently and keep some of them in sort of a cocktail table book in my den.
I also did a single pass to make 256Kb MP3 copies of all of them to use in the car and for personal players.
TL;DR: Rip them, save the inserts, dispose of everything else.
I keep a couple in each vehicle in case I get stuck in the desert and need to signal for help.
And in the future, we will be “protected” from hearing bad things. Pink Floyd will no longer sing of “do goody good bullshit”, Steve Miller will only sing of “funky kicks” going down in the city, and we’ll never ever again wonder “Who the fuck are you?”
And those younger will never notice the change. If this bothers you, here, have some Soma.
Everything will always be available online, legally or otherwise. The more they tighten their grip, the more content will slip through their fingers.
This is much the same as we did - we ripped them all to iTunes, then put the CDs themselves (along with printed matter from the jewel boxes) into paper sleeves, and tossed the lot in a plastic foot locker in the basement.
We’re still likely to buy a CD, than to just download it from Apple or Amazon or whatever, because we don’t trust that the online services will honor their promise in perpetuity. Call us old-fashioned, but there are rumors online of people claiming they’ve made purchases from iTunes, and later on the songs are no longer available - and Amazon got a lot of bad press for deleting a customer’s entire account including books she’d paid for. In any case, by having the original source material (the CD), a vendor’s changing policies cannot take away purchased content.
Yes, that’s the way to go.
I ripped all of my Classical and then my Jazz CDs to FLAC a few years ago. It took me over a year but I now have lossless copies of my entire collection in two places (PC and external drive) as well as copies of the most imortant ones in at least two other places (SD card in my smartphone and Google Drive).
I still keep my CDs, though just in case, but I don’t have a CD player at the moment.
I use Spotify a little bit but I sure wouldn’t trust it to remain available forever. I like to own my music. And make lots of backups.
What promise in perpetuity? Which music streaming service promises their catalog will be available in perpetuity? And any purchased download (as opposed to streaming) in the last 15 years or so from Apple, Amazon or just about every other big store is DRM free, which means they have no way of taking it away because of changing polices.
Not even remotely true.
The great MySpace music loss (50 million songs uploaded between 2003 and 2015 were accidentally deleted in a botched server migration) being but one example.
On a related topic (archiving and loss of originals), I recommend the book Double Fold:
https://www.amazon.com/Double-Fold-Libraries-Assault-Paper/
This book covers some of the concerns I have, although it is about newspapers only. The author points out that over 120 years ago, some Sunday newspapers were printed in full color, but all known copies of the originals were discarded for space reasons. It was thought that microfilm would preserve the essential data. But in reality, it was a poor copy; not in color, not readable in many cases due to low resolution and the automated equipment used to scan; and often entire pages or issues were skipped due to sloppy quality control.