[OT] Music CDs

Looking at job lots of CDs on ebay, under 5p in the £ they were when new?

It's a crying shame that CDs are regarded as yesterday's technology, superseded by overcompressed MP3s on iTunes, Spotify etc. There are times when it is very useful to have portable versions of the music on a phone etc - eg when in a car or on the move, but for really good quality sound, I would never ditch the original CD from which the MP3s came. I'd chuck vinyl before CD - as long as it was an album that was also available on CD - CD is much better sound quality, with virtually no background noise, whereas vinyl is subject to scratches, dust, constant background crackle and "sandpaper noise".

MP3 in itself is not the villain of the piece. Lightly compressed (eg 320 kbps stereo) is indistinguishable from CD (to my ears), but 128 kbps and lower most certainly is markedly inferior.

I transferred all mine to my fileserver some years ago as FLAC files, and they are played directly from there. I had stopped using CD's before then, but having them more easily accessible on the fileserver gave me a renewed interest and I started playing them again. I do still buy CD's occasionally, either new or in charity shops, but the only way I have to play them nowadays is when I've put them onto my fileserver. I still have all the CD's on a shelf. I should either move them all to the loft or destroy them.

I don't use spotify.

I buy second hand CDs I want for pence and then rip them myself to MP3, but not at a silly compression.

If they are stored in a lossless (or minimal lossy compression that is indistinguishable from the original) then that's fine. CDs become obsolete, though I'd keep them as a safety backup in case of loss of the FLAC files in a HDD crash. Actually, I keep a backup on external HDDs of any data files (music, TV recordings, documents, emails etc); my new year's resolution will be to keep the backup drive in a *different* place to the PC, except when I'm actually updating the backup, though this is a real nuisance: it's so much easier to keep the backup drives permanently available to be backed up to by being plugged into the PC...

When I had this problem with my son's CDs (after he'd moved to Canada, taking all his music with him on his Mac), I sought out a couple of collectors' music stores in the city, who were glad to sort through the massively heavy box I had them in, and then gave me money for the lot, based on the ones they really wanted.

That way, my son got a bit of cash, some collectors got CDs they really wanted [why?!], and we were relieved of getting rid of about 56lb of plastic!

Cheers John

I've just weighed a CD in its case - 60 grammes. So 56 lb is:

(56 / 2.2) * 1000 grammes = 25454 g

so your son had 25454 / 60 = 424 CDs.

I was expecting it to be a much bigger number. A collection of 420-odd CDs is not that many - and it weighs as much as one of the sacks of coal that I bought yesterday. Wow!

I wonder how much it would cost if the same number of minutes of recording were on vinyl. No heavy protective case, but an LP is probably heaver than the actual disc of a CD. And an LP is usually about 30 minutes, so you'd need over 800 LPs to store the same number of tracks (ie a CD that is reissued from LP is often two LPs combined).

And a hard disc to store it all on weighs about 500 grammes. 420 CDs is about 420 x 600 MB which is 250 GB. Fortunately weight is not proportional to capacity or amount of data ;-) That's for a 3.5" PC drive; a 2.5" laptop drive of the same capacity is lighter - especially if it's SSD rather than spinning disc.

I buy CDs, new and second-hand.

I like to have an object that I can keep, lend, lose, find unexpectedly, give away and so on. I trust objects more than I trust files.

Daniele

Not sure I agree with you there. I find the vinyl crackle adds depth to the music. In fact there are some producers out there who add artificial vinyl noise to their new songs for similar reasons!

In message <1o1q7hi.174o8h11of6n4mN% snipped-for-privacy@apple-juice.co.uk>, D.M. Procida snipped-for-privacy@apple-juice.co.uk> writes

I have chaos here with CD's in racks, but the overflow lives in piles all over the place. The biggest problem is with the youngsters, when they visit. They are used to Spotify, so they tend to listen to about 20 seconds of any music before moving on to something else. The "jewel" cases and CD's are left where they fall. My 78's, 45's and LP's are all organised. It's just the CD's that are chaotic and I think would be better if I had the time to put them onto hard disk.

This. This a bazillion times!

No surprise there.

What's the best free (or cheap) prog to library all your CDs, etc on a PC? Something with a good search feature, and the ability to arrange them as the whim takes you on any particular day.

Well I still use them and I see Amazon no matter what you are looking at say, got one to sell? No idea how much you would make at this though. I much prefer to own my music in a hardware collection. I'm too old fashioned to use streaming music. For a start unless you go for flac encoding the quality is crap, and also you are at the mercy of other people every time you want to listen.If you have your own player there is no worry if the web goes down. Brian

Yes, I like to have my own copy of music and videos (whether as CD/DVD/BluRay disc or as a recorded or downloaded file on my computer) so I can play it offline, rather than having to stream it from a server every time I play it.

In my case, there are particular advantages because my internet connection is so slow and patchy than streaming video can be very hit-and miss, whereas downloading from Get iPlayer may take a long time but as long as it corrects any errors as it goes a long, I end up with a good copy that I can play. However I record TV and radio programmes as they are broadcast, so I don't have to use iPlayer and the various ITV/CH4/Five catch-up sites unless I happen to miss a broadcast.

What is this streaming lark anyway? I've only tried Spotify, but there's no way I'm paying £9.99 pcm for it as I'd probably not use it very much (and that's almost as much as I pay for Internet access). The free version is little more than a kind of streaming radio as you can't actually play what you want, just what Spotify thinks you want, in random order.

I suppose there might be better services, but I don't know which to try

- I've got most of what I want to listen to as CD and/or MP3.

In message <1o1q7hi.174o8h11of6n4mN% snipped-for-privacy@apple-juice.co.uk>, D.M. Procida <real-not-anti-spam-address@apple-

Quick! Where is the *LIKE* button?

I doubt you'd get much. You could try