I've decided to take a leaf out of Jemima's book, and rip and sell all my music CDs. Why? Well, I have the following:
- a shitload of CDs
- a shitload of hard disk space
- a desire not to have my lounge cluttered with CDs any more, and
- an impetus to make a wee bit of cash back
I started collecting CDs in 1990: Christmas, 1990, to be precise, when my parents gave me a Hi Fi with CD player, and a copy of Iron Maiden's No Prayer for the Dying and Jean Michel Jarre's Waiting for Cousteau. I may hang on to those, but I'm now pretty intent on ripping and selling every other CD I've ever bought, be it album, single, soundtrack, magazine cover disc ... you name it, it's going. I just can't justify the space they take up. I haven't bought anything more than a CD or two a year for the last few years, and I definitely haven't played a CD for just as long a time: there's a Mac mini plugged into both the TV and the surround system for playing music via iTunes, I have an iPod for listening to music outside the house, why do I need to keep all these CDs again?
I have the odd gem which I may find it hard to part with (for example, a Tupelo pressing of Nirvana's Bleach, a gold [coloured, sadly] disc version of the GoldenEye soundtrack, and so on), but I'll take those on when I get there.
Onward, iTunes; onward, jiffy bags; onward, sense of preservation in the face of probable blatant copyright infringement! Undisc!
7 comments
martinb · 26 May, 2008 at 11:49
Well, ya *might* fit your CDs into your 22.66Gig of /export/music. Good job you're not ripping DVDs though - even a terabyte disappears mighty fast under those circumstances.
But yeah, I can't remember the last time I actually played a CD, other than in Lucy's car when the iPod was @ home. We have a similar Mac Mini setup.
MrLithic · 26 May, 2008 at 12:29
I find physical music media like CD's really weird now. I tried using them a while back and was stunned I had to change disks to listen to different songs. I have a complete disconnect between music and a piece of round.plastic. Considering how many of these things I have hauled around (across oceans), I am ticked that it took so long to replace physical music media with data formats.
g · 26 May, 2008 at 15:32
sod that, you're selling memories and part of your life and soul. mp3s, flac, ogg, it's all worthless. okay, we're moving that way, but there's no physical connection to something that defines part of your life or a time and memory. that's what was so great about vinyl. CD is sadly nowhere near as good, but at least it's a tangible object.
i will always choose to buy the physical product and then rip it to what i want. if i'm not sure, i fully admit i "try before i buy". the majority of music is largely rubbish.
you could not get me to part with my stone roses records for love nor money!
at the moment i desperately want this:
http://warpmart.com/item/Various/Streetsounds%20Electro%20-%20The%20Ultimate%20Boxed%20Set/3523
however, look what they've done! i had some of those on vinyl back in the day. it's painful to see what they've done to something that means so much to so many.
i'm having a real problem deciding if i should buy it.... *sobs*
martinb · 26 May, 2008 at 20:06
Interestingly, a lot of the music I have a connection with, I never actually owned (until recently and iTunes). There's a lot of single tracks that have a huge amount of nostalgia for me, but at the time I just couldn't countenance shelling out the monstrous amount of a fiver for the album.
So I'm perfectly happy for a track to come onto a playlist (selected by all kinds of metadata, not simply albums) and trigger off all those memories of when I heard it without the physical product.
neuro · 26 May, 2008 at 23:00
Gerald, interesting point, but I have a ton of music trapped on cassette - I spent a few years buying albums on tape since CD was way too expensive before actually getting a CD player, and occasionally thereafter once I got a car with a tape deck - which I don't have the time or patience to recover digitally. In the end game, it's the music that I'm emotionally attached to, not the media it's stored on.
Allix · 27 May, 2008 at 17:50
I have thought about doing the same , this post might push me nearer to that reality. Somewhere I have a pre-master of a page and plant album , I really feel nothing attached to it, i was crazy to pay £30 for it at the time. Some of the cds have some really good art, even though its just copied art....
Strata · 23 June, 2008 at 18:59
I moved all my cd's into those big zippered notebook thingies, and have a stack of the liners in the back of a storage closet. I still have not digitized most of my cd's, yet I have 12+Gb of music. Oy.
Wish I'd bought one of those early MP3 players where they had a service of sending it to you with all your music on it if you sent 'em the CD's. I think the RIAA shut 'em down, the buggers.