Goodbye, CDs

I couldn't agree more... I have currently in iTunes 1,410 Albums/podcasts/& partial Albums. I also used to have tons of cd's now adays they sit in a bunch of booklets not being used. The only thing I do is open them up and dust lol. Cd's to me are an out dated topic. Even dvd's are starting to look that way to me. Thanks to Handbreak all my purchased dvd's are mostly sitting there. Just using iTunes to watch them. Not as great of quality but you can hardly notice to be honest unless you sit right at the screen, only an 1'' away. Apple is the best company for anything. Stock, Music, Movies (near future), Computers, photos etc.

I have about 800 CDs and I have just recently completed the project of ripping all of them as Apple Lossless, tagging them all using http://www.allmusic.com/ and rating them!!! I could get rid of all of my cds, I just haven't been proactive about doing anything with them. After my hard drive crashed last summer and I lost half of my music (I was able to save what was on my 30GB iPod at the time) I now keep them on 2 external LaCie FW800 drives that mirror every night. I know it's anal, but I am NOT going to go through this process ever again. One of the biggest reasons I love iTunes and my iPod is that I get the opportunity to listen to ALL my music. The only thing I want now is the ability to put say 256kb versions of my song on my iPod. I can only fit about 3000 songs on my 60 gb ipod at the moment using Lossless. I just haven't found a reliable way of syncing the playcounts and ratings. Any thoughts?

I still purchase CDs, just because I still like the format and have a few CD players around the house and autos. My collection has just under 500. I would say about 40 percent of my CDs have been ripped into AAC (128k) and/or MP3 format (160k). I've recently taken to re-ripping some of my collection to AAC from MP3, which has helped a lot to clean up my ID3 tags and get all of my music into a standard format. Plus, it's saved about 1gb of space on my nearly full 4G iPod. As for CDs, they pretty much just stay on the shelf. Even before MP3, I always had the habit of making a copy of the CD for the car. This helped a lot 3 years ago when my car got broken into and my 200 CD case got stolen (along with the CD deck). I laughed my ass off thinking of the surprise the theif would get when they opened up the case, only to find 200 CD-Rs with band names written with a Sharpie. Now my iPod gets used more than anything, but I still like the idea of the CD... liner notes, pictures and something to re-rip should my hard drive take a crash or my iPod get lost or stolen. Plus, it's always nice to do best of CDs for the car on trips (don't have iPod connectivity yet) that I can make from iTunes. Since I first started with MP3s back in 1997, I've embraced the format but still used CDs. And I probably will until these record companies finally come to terms with the customer, not the dollar.

I am approaching 40,000 songs in iTunes as of today. I have no idea how many CDs those came from, but I still purchase disc from the record store and store them all in boxes. I too, rarely play the CD more than one time (to rip it to MP3), however having them all around as "backup" really eases my mind in case of HD failure or in case a new, better codec comes along. However I do have a 500GB drive dedicated for my entire system back as well. I take the CD storage one step further, I keep all the plastic jewel cases and artwork in the garage, and all the CDs stay inside the house in those Caselogic books. This way I don't clutter my house with walls of plastic, but I do have access to all the music if needed. I do not have plans to discard any of my CDs. However, I do plan on getting rid of most of my vinyl--consisting of 4 crates of records which I plan on encoding when I get a moment of extra time. I actually wish I could just buy the tracks new, since most of them are singles purchased in my DJ/college years and are not available in any other format. There are some collector's edition picture discs and really amazing pressings that I will keep, but for most, they were just purchased for live mixing.

CDs are not going to go the way of the dinosaur anytime soon at least I hope not. I have a modest selection of around 600 albums and about 100 odd in the way of soundtracks and such. I have bought no digital music though I do 'own' two internet only downloadable albums which were free. See ITMS is nice and itunes is pretty slick but until it becomes feasible to encode a substantial amount of CDs in a lossless format(ie cheap terabyte HDs)CDs wont be replaced. CDs sound better than whatever format you encode to if you want to fit a decent amount of music on your ipod. Its nice to have a physical medium. a wall of a room covered in racks of cds is a lot of music, itunes telling me that I have x days of music doesnt compare, its also nice to pull have liner notes you can hold(its abit like newspaper they still exist even though you can get the content digitally its nice to have something more tangible) Lastly ITMS and iTunes totally eliminates the element of suprise in shopping for CDs and scanning your library you go search for music by whoever and buy it with ITMS but in a shop you browse spot that CD you meant to buy when it came out, see a classic album at a low price, see a self-produced indie bands cd selling for next to nothing. It is that more than anything that will keep cds safe.

I hate the idea of buying my music from the iTunes store. I did that for a while, lost my harddrive and lost my purchased music... I know... backup, backup, backup... but _now_ that's what my CDs are. I listen to music on my ipod, and off the external firewire drive of my laptop. My CDs get ripped first thing, and then get set aside in case I 'lose' my .mp3s again. Besides, I'm not comfortable with _any_ of the DRM stuff out there right now. I'd rather be able to rip my own CDs and put them on an ipod, or psp or whatever comes next. Jeff

A friend loaned me his iTrip mini yesterday and I gave it a dry run this morning on my way to work. Amazingly enough I actually found a dead spot on the dial (88.7, IIRC). I loaded up the software, tuned the iTrip to the appropriate station (a major PITA, by the way) and soon enough was listening to my iPod. It was terrible. At first it sounded OK, but then the signal started to drift a bit. And even though the transmitter was two feet from my car's antenna it was full of static. After a couple songs I shut off the iPod. I'll be sticking with CDs a while longer.

Three words: Hard drive crash.

I am an audio engineer, and I still carry CDs with me to each session for reference purposes. AAC and MP3 sound great, but as little sound quality is lost, it's still a bit too much loss for critical listening. When they find a way to make a completely lossless compression format that takes up as little space as an AAC file does, I will probably cave in and start hooking my iPod into the console... I use iTunes and my iPod for everything else, though... I never leave home without my iPod.

Haha, throwing away all those CD's? What a dumb idea. Yes, all of my collection is in digital form, but when i'm at home and i want to listen to music in Loss-less quality, I break out my cd's and vinyl collection. I'm not a lazy-ass that can't get up and put in a disc.