I had ~1100 CDs in 2000. Now I have close to 0. I don't even own a device I could play a CD in nor rip it. None of my 4 PCs (3 Macs, one Gaming Windows Box) have a CD (nor DVD nor Bluray) player.

Instead I have about 9000 mp3 files.

I find streaming services frustrating because their recommendation algorithm suck. I tried playing "Swing" and it gave me "Volare" by Dean Martin. (that's not Swing), I pick Prince Radio and it plays rap (Prince has no relation to rap). My mom's into Tuba Skinny so I pick Tuba Skinny radio, every song it choose was nothing like Tuba Skinny (Dixieland Jazz). And on and on. It get music similar to the artists less than 1 out of 6 times.

> (Prince has no relation to rap)

Prince certainly created some songs that would qualify as rap, and they were some fairly big hits:

My Name is Prince: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0g9Qkrc8nE

Sexy MF, including the rap section here: https://youtu.be/bfHsF6FKgb4?t=324

A compilation of some Prince raps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ez4iEHtAuw

Same... literally. About 1200 CDs in 2000, I ripped them at some point and sold them when I became a digital nomad. I have no idea where those rips are; I think I may have just liked them all on Spotify and kept a folder of obscure albums I wasn't likely to find online. But I'm not sure where that folder is.

I bounce between Spotify and Youtube Music and Apple Music. I recently got into Apple Music library curation but then I got a Tesla which supports Spotify (and Tidal, but...). So I'm back on Spotify. But Apple Music has one really nifty thing -- highlighting major tracks on albums so that album exploration can be enhanced a bit.

But honestly, my appetite for keeping up with and curating albums is waning. I wish there was a nice "cd changer" like interface to one of these services -- load up 6 albums and randomize. Queueing isn't the same.

(I'll repeat a desire I've had a long time -- playlists of albums, not tracks, with album-shuffle. So simple, yet nobody supports it).

I have a few online streaming radio stations I love -- Radio Paradise in particular. Someday I can see chucking all the "streaming service album" management and just going other-peoples-radio.

Slacker (in the Tesla) is also good enough.

Did you notice how tracks and whole albums sometimes disappear from Spotify?

If not yet, you're in for a unpleasant surprise.

As annoying as this is, at least it shows you the name of the original track but it's grayed out, as opposed to when YouTube would remove a video you wouldn't even realize it had been deleted from your playlist.

Yeah, I’ve noticed. I get that licensing issues drift over time, but it just means it’s not in my best interest to care a whole lot.

FWIW you can get a USB dvd drive for under $30.

You can't control the quality of purchased music files. More significantly, you can't be sure that gapless playback has been encoded correctly into anything sold by the track. I continue to purchase music on CDs but they get used once while being ripped then go into storage.

> You can't control the quality of purchased music files

Sure you can, hdtracks has been around for nearly 15 years now, and even offers the same redbook data you'd find on a CD if you don't trust their FLAC encoding.

There are places where you can buy very high quality music files without needing a physical CD.

If you can organize and manage 9k mp3 files could you not just as easily setup your own playlists on spotify?

1. This presumes Spotify will still be in business in the next 10, 30, 50+ years.

2. This presumes 100% of the music collection is on Spotify. Personally speaking, 60%~ of the music I listen to ISN'T on Spotify.

3. This presumes music is only desired to be listened to when an available internet connection is available.

Having to shuffle my media collections around whenever a third party went out of business or pivoted was such a massive headache that it was the inspiration for just managing my own media collections locally.

This is just my own personal perspective on the matter but one could do that until the Spotify domain is gone. The mp3's will remain provided they have a habit of keeping their software backed up. I have CD's, DVD's and music files going back as far as such things existed and no internet connection is required for any of it.

Despite iTunes fans bashing me since iTunes inception the simple file structure

    Artist
        Album
    Artist
        Album
    Game OST
        Game Name
    Film OST
        Film Name

works just fine.

With WinAmp's quick jump it was a blast to navigate.

(just checked - my mp3 folder has 6231 files)

There are a few good providers of lossless audio files, so you can get still get a lossless, DRM free version of your music to own forever without having to have a printed CD. The two that I frequent are:

- bandcamp.com - mostly indie, but I've actually purchased a few more "mainstream" artists from here in the last couple years. - hdtracks.com - have a wide selection, but tend to be pretty pricey.

I'm worried about bandcamp.com after being purchased by Epic Games. BC's terms of service and privacy policy were updated to reflect this change, mostly legal ownership and related stuff, but I feel they're going to do the regular acquisition process: wait a year or so, make a detrimental change to the service, piss off a lot of people.

"Thanks for accompanying bandcamp on this incredible journey..."

I was pleasantly surprised recently with Merge Records. I bought a few lps and they came with digital downloads of mp3 and flac!

I like this trend with LPs. You get a physical totem and lossless digital copies.

I bought some Peter Gabriel records and they came with a code for downloading multiple formats including huge, lossless. And the site for one wasn’t working because it was too old and I had to email someone. But an actual human responded and send me a code to the new site.

Not sure if that’s just for RealWorld or for all Geffen LPs.

I think this is a good model where you get some limited release physical world thing and then the digital version to go along.

I think it might be just for RealWorld. They’re quite amazing when it comes to having a human being actually read emails and respond to them.

Yeah, I've moved back from being full on Spotify in the last 2-3 years, largely because of music being taken away. But I never cared much for the physical aspect of physical media, so it's drm free music from itunes/qobuz for me.

Doing similar with movies/tv but more slowly. Partly because the only legal option is ripping blurays/uhds (Need to clarify I'm not in the US), which is more hassle and also they're bulkier to store and finally there's less tv/movie content I'm inclined to rewatch. But movies/tv have the plaftform fragmentation/content going away problem even worse, and the streaming services love to try serve low bitrate content, or even refuse higher resolutions altogether if you're not using a locked down enough setup, so that's been picking up steam for me

> - bandcamp.com - mostly indie, but I've actually purchased a few more "mainstream" artists from here in the last couple years

Sadly bandcamp has been bought by Epic, so it's unlikely to live long :(

> I still buy Music CDs. Why? Because once I have the disc in my hand, no-one can legally take it away from me.

Precisely. The same reason I am wary of digital money. Its just too easy for the powers that be to flip a bit to make it all inaccessible. I do not trust them enough to give them that much power. They can still make things inaccessible, but they would have to put up with some inconveniences.

Mark me old school, but I like the physical cover designs, art work and well done liner notes too.

I’m right there with you. When possible, I still buy a band’s CD. I absolutely love having a CD in hand, being able to appreciate that bands still think about album artwork.

I also find that when I commit to listening to physical media, I’m more likely to listen to the whole thing through, rather than cherry picking songs.

Nobody can take them away, but the problem that I've found with with physical DVDs (I can't comment so much on CDs) is that they deteriorate after just a few years. For a while in 2010, my wife and I routinely borrowed DVDs from a library, but we gave up when it seemed like half of them were unplayable; sometimes from the beginning, sometimes freezing an hour into the movie. Over the next five years, we found that our own small collection of DVDs was becoming unplayable even though we rarely handled them. Now we have only a few DVDs left for our kids to watch in our minivan's DVD player, and I've ripped them so that I can burn new copies every year or two when the previous copies wear out. Replacing our favorites from our old collection with Amazon video purchases seemed like the best option.

> Nobody can take them away, but the problem that I've found with with physical DVDs (I can't comment so much on CDs)

I do exactly like GP: I rip everything to bitperfect (and it's verifiably bitperfect, using online DBs of other people who ripped the same CDs) FLAC files but I still keep my audio CDs.

We do not care if they're unreadable: we've got the bitperfect digital files on our SSDs / servers / USB stick and whatnots.

Now of course it's not convenient if you're always on the road.

But yeah: moved to another country a few weeks ago. My trusty old CDs were in a big cardboard box!

That's weird. Are you sure wherever or however you're storing them isn't damaging them somehow? Or maybe your player is on the way out? I've played some very old discs that work just fine. I haven't had any issues with DVDs despite having a few from the early 2000s.

Library discs are another story. Those are abused to hell and back.

It's a fair question, and I don't have a good answer. My best guess is the effects of heat while the discs were in moving boxes for several cross-country and overseas moves. Some of our discs looked like they were delaminated.

writable DVDs degrade, but a typical DVD won't on its own for a long time in reasonable conditions. I suspect that over the years those library disks have been scratched to hell several times over and ave had to be buffed down to the point where it's causing problems even though they now look clean.

I ditched all 400+ CDs and 300+ DVDs (and some 50 LPs). They just took up space, and never got used. I've just recently paired down my book collection to 20 from 250. I just don't need all this physical stuff that I rarely use.

The thing about CDs and LPs is that they're a store of value, similar to older books. I sold my old LPs but definitely got less than I could have, and I'm not gonna make that mistake with my CD and tape collection. Right now there's at least 10 CDs I bought that have gone up in value in the past year alone.

I do something similar. When I'm actively listening to an album I'll put on a record, if I'm driving or putting on some background music while I do chores or work, I use apple music. I know records are bulky and finicky but I like the ritual, the bigger album art, and little things like reading the liner notes and dead wax markings. I'm not really an audiophile or anything, my setup is pretty middle of the road, I just really like the ritual and the closes I've come digitally was discovering new music in the soulseek chatrooms and organizing my mp3 collection and foobar skin.

I'm really not sure if I follow you.

Why exactly do you buy a physical medium?

Because you don't think you are able to store 1000 audio CDs loss less for the rest of your life?

I mean that's not that much of space.

You probably have other similar critical things like pictures or videos so you have to have a backup strategy for that anyway.

And what music would you have which would be so unique that in the worst case scenario you are happy that you still have those 1000 music CDs but no longer your pictures etc?

Just curious what are these archival bags you're talking about? I just got rid of all my jewel cases and was looking for storage for the CDs themselves, ended up just cutting my own custom dimension cardboard box but if there's good economic alternatives I'm all ears.

On the one hand, you seem to (understandably) take great pride in the legal ownership of your CDs, but on the other hand, you're almost certainly breaking the law by ripping them. How do you feel about that?

I have the same conflict with DVDs/BluRay. I want to play by the rules and pay for the media I enjoy, but it's absurd that it's illegal for me to rip the content that I've lawfully purchased for my own consumption.

Obviously, laws differ in different countries, but in the US, making a backup copy for personal use is considered fair use, and is legal.

With DVDs and Blu-Rays, the situation is less clear because there is a specific law against breaking DRM. However, to my knowledge, there has never been a lawsuit against a _user_ of software that lets you rip a DVD or BD, that law has only been used against companies that make or distribute the software itself. Either because of the fair-use right or plausible deniability, it's unclear whether enforcement of this provision against an individual end-user would be permissible.

Even if it wouldn't fall under fair use because it broke DRM, I don't think the big labels want to risk a case against someone ripping for personal use only. There is too much risk that the story of the big giant trampling on the honest little guy making a backup will go viral (or anything else that would be fair use except for DRM laws). They know there are a lot of us who don't like DRM, but we don't quite have the power to change things, a few viral stories and the laws will change. (the treaties that require DRM can be renegotiated fast if there is political reason to do so)

> Obviously, laws differ in different countries, but in the US, making a backup copy for personal use is considered fair use, and is legal.

Title 17 certainly does not say that. The closest it comes to talking about the subject is by saying that copies are only allowed if consented to by the copyright owner. Space shifting and other forms of personal copies are at best a gray area with little case law to work off of.

Ripping CDs for your own personal use is not illegal, as CDs have no copy protection mechanism that you would be circumventing.

Unfortunately here in the UK that isn't true. It's technically illegal. See my other comment in the thread about it.

Ah, I didn’t know, that’s really mental.

In the United States there are a number of exceptions to the ban on circumventing DRM:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/victory-users-libraria...

CDs do have a copy protection mechanism in the form of flags in the subcode metadata that permit 0, 1, or unlimited copies to be made. It is used by standalone audio CD recorders to implement SCMS and prevent multi-generational copies. Everything else ignores it.

Oh, I didn't realize CDs didn't have copy protection? Why would they not? From the RIAA's perspective, isn't that just a way to double charge customers like the MPAA does?

There were attempts, but audio CDs were specced in 1980, and nobody was ever able to sell breaking compatibility with the existing (substantial) CD player ecosystem.

There's a summary of the context here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_and_DVD_copy_prot...

It seems counter-intuitive, but a red book audio CD really is more akin to a vinyl record than a CD-ROM. The laser locks onto a groove and throws bits directly at a few chips that perform error correction and convert the signal to analog with an absolutely minuscule amount of buffering. Obfuscation isn’t even on the table, let alone encryption.

CDs are older than DVDs, and when they were released there would have been no digital way to copy them. It makes sense that the DRM wouldn't have occurred to the developers of the format.

Also at the time they came out 640MB?! Who has that much money to keep on hard drive let alone the size of said drive. Remember when this was spec'd out 64k was considered a huge amount of memory. A box of floppies would cost 30-40+ dollars. That same box might hold 0.5 to 2 MP3s depending on format size and the song. That obviously dropped off over the years. But just ripping them was not even really feasible. Never mind a robust enough CPU to play something like a MP3. People would copy CD's over to tape. But that was considered acceptable as the gen loss was enough for the owners to not like it much but accept it.

I remember asking the HS computing teacher in the late 80s if CDs could be copied to a computer, since they were both digital. He said... hmm, it should be theoretically possible. Drives for PCs would not come out affordably until the early/mid 90s.

CDs are just digital storage media. You could just layer DRM on top of it, but you'd have to get the whole ecosystem to move. And I have to think they probably would if the RIAA insisted.

> On the one hand, you seem to (understandably) take great pride in the legal ownership of your CDs, but on the other hand, you're almost certainly breaking the law by ripping them. How do you feel about that?

It's totally legal both in the US and the EU (apparently not in the UK though).

Now I do very probably, without knowing it, break some law(s) every single freaking day because "the more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws". And I feel exactly zero guilt about that.

If you're ripping CDs that you purchased and only for your own personal use (i.e. not distributing the ripped files), then IMO the far more relevant question is an ethical one: does what you're doing in any way harm the artists or the copyright holders of the works you are copying?

No, no one is harmed when one uses content for which one has an appropriate license. Of course, some people might make less money, but that doesn't constitute "harm" in any meaningful way (they also make less money than if I donated my entire disposable income, but no one would argue that this is "harm" [although I don't want to give the RIAA any ideas...]) and indeed they should be pricing that into the sales of any given media (it's already insane that we give copyrights for 70 years after the lifetime of the artist).

On the other hand, the DMCA harms me by limiting my right to use content for which I legally hold the appropriate license.

>I think while CDs (and DVDs, and Blu-rays) are still being sold, they should 100% shift to carboard packaging instead of plastic.

Hard disagree.

I sold my large collection of records recently, for 2 reasons.

1. Because I realized I hadn't listened to effectively any of them in the past 5 years, across 2 house moves. I'm leaving on travel soon and may work abroad in the future, so better to liquidate now than later.

2. My entire collection had that "vintage" stink, aka mold/mildew/etc. I had mixed old and new records together, which effectively tainted the outer cardboard of the records. This caused me a serious amount of stress and anxiety (which is a separate problem to resolve) to the extent that I rushed selling the records to a record store (which I have minor regrets about, blog write-up to come on this all).

This all to say, while I really do dislike how plastic dependent we've become in society, from everything like fruits and plastic bags, I LOVE that CDs come in jewelcases for 3 distinct reasons

1. The plastic CD case protects the CD, and the inner paper booklet, from damage and other external factors, if stored properly. Also, cardboard cases for CDs often don't include inner booklet notes, which is disappointing. Cardboard CD cases are less resilient to damage as well.

I personally need some plastic archival bags (and if you can recommend some, please do), because I want to avoid my CDs coming to a similar fate as my vinyl. I found a few that caught a bit of a stink recently, and hurriedly cleaned the exterior cases (another benefit).

2. The plastic cases help with management and organization of the physical collection very easily, as every case is effectively the same size. While there are some slimline CD releases, and of course cardboard or double/deluxe CD releases, for single CD releases they all conform to the same size, making require space estimates and stacking very convenient to do.

3. Extremely easy to replace if damaged, dirty, smelly, etc. You can buy new blank CD cases so easily, and if you can't find an exact replacement, similar cases could be found. This is one reason I dislike vinyl cardboard covers: if the cover is damaged or stinky/moldy/etc enough, you're screwed. Throw it out, but good luck finding just a cover replacement. Whereas with a CD, you can get a digital copy of the inner booklet and CD one way or another, and remake a new physical copy if desired. Obviously, that's done for personal consumption only.

By extension of that last note, I want to say I love CDs for the fact that they're robust, reliable, DRM-free (excluding previous cases), high quality, and identical every play.

/end my input /start personal rant

Having the power to own your media physically and digitally is another benefit (by ripping the CD). I also love that many CDs come with the inner booklet which often contains interviews, lyrics, bonus photos, or other fun content that wouldn't be found in a vinyl release. I do admit that vinyl releases are beautiful with the large print 12" covers, but how many records do you realistically prop up on a shelf somewhere?

We moved off VHS tapes to DVD, and Blu-Ray has been around for years now, and yet despite that DVDs are still produced. I don't forsee any kind of death of CD or DVD in the near future, especially as more streaming services pull back or move media in and out of their catalogues; increasing costs don't help either.

Also separate side note, the case for a vinyl record being an involved process I agree with. I would say that limiting CD purchases per month could be viewed in a similar fashion, buying 1-3 a month and listening to each through.

Keep on collecting!

I've been using these 6x9 inch clear poly bags with adhesive seal: https://amazon.com/gp/product/B07X8C58BK Amazon ID: B07X8C58BK

I still use the paper sleeve with window for individual discs. Then bag those + paper inserts. I like those particular bags because they're consistently thin unlike zip-lock style bags so they pack nicely, and they fit most DVD paper inserts/cardboard sleeves except some multi-disc sets.

I'm currently in the process of getting rid of all my plastic jewel cases and agree with op, it should not be the default, there's better ways. If there's a market for plastic they could just sell collector's editions or package it in such a way that it's easy to use your own jewel cases, but I'd prefer a less wasteful default. Steelbook blu rays are on the right track in the collectables regard although they still use more plastic on the inside than I'd like.

What are you using instead of plastic jewel cases? I just really can't see any alternative that's as safe, reliable, and easy to replace.