Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Audio, iTunes
Goodbye, CDs
Todd Dominey at What Do I Know has embarked on a mission of sorts: He's giving his entire CD collection - more than 4,000 discs - the heave-ho. The reason? iTunes and the speed of mechanical searching vs. the "stare at the shelves" method. He writes:"I never listen to CDs anymore. It's nothing but MP3s. I can't remember the last time I placed a CD in a real CD player. The reason? It's nearly impossible to find anything. With iTunes, an artist, album or song is always a search box away. On the shelves, I could spend thirty minutes with my head turned sideways looking for an album. It's just not worth it."
I agree. In fact, I did the same thing about a year ago. All of my CDs, save two (a limited edition picture CD by The Cure and a tiny, 3 inch Nine Inch Nails CD) are gone. I've digitized all of my music and it now resides on a hard drive.
Next on my hit list is my vinyl, but I have a harder time letting them go. I just like the look and feel of the packaging, and like Todd says, there's something about the liner notes and full-sized album art that is lost in a PDF booklet.
So, what's your story? Do you still have a stack of CDs lying around, or have they gone the way of the dinosaur?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
andyjack said 8:06PM on 10-19-2005
i have about 963 cds and i only plan on getting rid of them if i'm in dire, dire, dire need of money. however, i have them all in mp3 on my external firewire drive and i only play physical cds in the car. the idea of finding a cd and taking it out to play it is so ridiculously primitive to me now. i live for point and click!
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Mike said 8:10PM on 10-19-2005
If you rip all your CDs into MP3s and then get rid of (i.e. sell) your CDs, then you are pirating music. Your fair use rights to use the music in a different format is based on you having the original work. If you don't have the original CD, then you have nothing to exercise your fair use rights against. Remember that fair use is an affirmative defense; therefore, if you are accused of infringement, you have the burden of proof that your copy was a fair use right. That would be hard to do if you no longer have the original. Same as copying MS Office and then selling the original.
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El Payo said 8:19PM on 10-19-2005
I still have my CDs for these reasons:
1. a hard copy is nice - until I can afford a few terabytes of storage and another few terabytes for a mirror of the original data (or a lossless version thereof) I'm holding onto them. Amoeba will just have to wait.
2. Too lazy to scan all the liner art - I keep hoping elves will scan all my liner notes and properly scale and clean them up and then drop them into the appropriate digital music files or a nice PDF, but it just hasn't happened yet. Jobsie? You have a fix for me?
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umijin said 8:30PM on 10-19-2005
Yeah - I have stacks of CDs lying around still.
Why? Because I don't rely upon the iTunes store very much for my digital music. I get nearly all from CDs - which are not so expensive if you want most of the tracks on them. And when the next great music encoding format comes out, I'm can rip my CDs again into that format.
So there! :-P
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Poncho said 8:36PM on 10-19-2005
I like my CDs, but I admit it is a while since I've bought any iTMS all the way. It's a special occasion for me to bother going into town just to buy a CD these days. My CD collection now resides in several boxes in storage.
To Mike ^:
That's a very good point, but let me ask you this:
I pay good money for the right to listen to an album, I bring it home from the store on it's delivery medium (CD), stick it in my Mac and rip it. If I throw away the CD as 'packaging', I still paid money for the right to listen to that music. If somebody goes through my trash and takes that CD, am I still guilty of piracy?
I understand why it's there, and I buy the music I listen to, but sometimes all this Copyright/DRM shizzle just pisses me off. In every other industry that I know of, the consumer has the rights, but I guess the Entertainment industry has too much sway (money) :(
Cheers;
Poncho
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James Kahler said 8:40PM on 10-19-2005
While i now buy most of my music through iTunes (cheaper and more convenient), i wouldn't dream of trashing my CD's. There simply is a difference in the sound quality native to a CD vs iTune's lower sample rates. Most of the time you don't hear it, but put them through a high quality system or even just through an iPod with some high-end Shure headphones and you''ll notice. And since i've sunk the dough into CD's i'll keep them as a day to day backup and and for the time when storage is vastly cheaper still and i can fit them all on my Mac/iPod in a lossless format.
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bhamm said 8:55PM on 10-19-2005
i had (have) about 500 (7000+ tracks) cds that are now residing in a box in my closet. I haven't bought a cd for the last 18 months or so. All of my purchases are from iTMS now. Everything plays from the powerbook. If you go through the trouble of categorizing/rating your stuff.. it's a beautiful thing. :) I wont ever go back to physical cds. I'll keep mine (i don't support the idea of selling the cds just b/c everything's on the computer).
oh.. and stick an airport express in the living room and life is wonderful. Instant searches.. doing things like 'find/play me my highest rated tracks that haven't been played in over 90 days'.. etc. Awesome. To quote ferris beuller.. 'if you have the means.. i highly recommend it'.
;)
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Mike said 8:59PM on 10-19-2005
Poncho:
The rights holder has the right to control copying of his work. Congress has carved out a narrow exception, called fair use. If you look at the fair use exemption at 17 U.S.C. 107 (http://frwebgate5.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/waisgate.cgi?WAISdocID=7692641264+0+0+0&WAISaction=retrieve), it lists four factors to consider, and the case law has expanded on it, especially for things like timeshifting, making MP3s and whatnot, since the statute doesn't explicitly permit that (e.g. a lot of what we would consider fair use rights come from, erm, judicial activism). It's a gray area; however if you compare it to losing a book, I don't think you can keep a photocopy of a book if you lose the original.
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Tom said 9:14PM on 10-19-2005
I've got about 150 CDs on the shelf. All that I've purchased in the past 3.5 years have been used exactly once: to be ripped.
What I'd like is a way to purchase a CD, put my reciept number into iTunes and then get the downloads. I'd never have to even take the CD out of the cellophane. That'd be sweet.
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HowdyDoody said 9:31PM on 10-19-2005
So this guy is going to toss out all of his CD's into the garbage heap and re-purchase everything via iTunes? Is that what we're talking about here? What's this fool going to do when he finds out that a CD he's tossed isn't available on iTunes?
I still buy and keep all of my CD's on my racks along with all of my DVD's. But the first thing I do, and have been doing for 5 years now, is rip the CD immediately upon opening it. Hell will have to freeze over before I trash my CD's.
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Mauro Mello Jr. said 9:33PM on 10-19-2005
Um, can the combination iPod+iTunes sonically replace an all-tubed Musical Fidelity NuVista pre-amplifier, NuVista 300 amplifier, NuVista 3D CD player, Musical Fidelity X-Can v3 headphone amplifier, Gutwire power cables, NuVista speaker cables and interconnects, Sennheiser HD650 headphones, a balanced power supply and Focal.JMLabs speakers? No. The 600 CDs+ stay put. Period. (You can, though, *add* the iPod+iTunes to an audiophile rig for convenience's sake; Stereophile even concedes they sound good when playing *non-compressed* audio.)
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ephraimephraim said 9:36PM on 10-19-2005
All the CDs are stacked under my desk, gathering dust since I ripped them into iTunes. Maybe they'll head for the basement soon.
LPs are in a closet upstairs, awaiting the far-off day when I'll digitize them. But if my time is worth anything at all, I'm better off repurchasing albums from iTMS than digitizing the vinyl. It's hard to let go of the LPs, though: they cost me as much as $10 each when that was real money to me, 30 and 35 years ago. Not only is $9.99 worth less toward most purchases today, it also means immensely less to me now than when I was a teenager.
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Quicksilver said 9:37PM on 10-19-2005
I have given up cds. I might buy one in the store but i only keep it long enough to rip it on my mac. I then will jsut give the cd away to someoen or just trash it. I keep some cases tho. But i love having all my music right there then backed up on my ipod
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Sean Finn said 9:49PM on 10-19-2005
I am currently packing up all of my CD's (several thousand) into storage containers. I want to keep them in case of a hard drive crash or if I want to look up some info (like who played that awesome solo?). I also removed the 5 disc changer from the stereo configuration, as well as the tape deck (man that lasted a long time without ever being used!).
As I said, though, I'm not trashing them because a hard copy is still a necessity, just for piece of mind.
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Tilted said 9:51PM on 10-19-2005
Mauro Mello Jr.: Give me a break... get out of the house.
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narco said 10:02PM on 10-19-2005
Dave, I'm curious about which limited edition Cure CD you speak of. I've been a huge fan for years and have about 45 Cure CDs alone, not to mention vinyl, cassette, VHS, etc.
Anyway, I have close to a thousand CDs, but I will keep them. Maybe I will go through the ones I absolutely don't listen to anymore and toss 'em, but I like having the hard copy. Plus sometimes I DO feel the need to grab a CD and read the liner notes on the couch.
My vinyl gets a little more love from me because I have been absolutely lazy when it comes to transferring them to a digital format. Plus I've always listened to my records loud when I am painting or drawing, and I still buy records to this day so I don't foresee tossing them either.
It's also nice to be able to rip a CD at a higher bitrate later on if I choose to do so. Right now my entire collection is 128 AAC because I have a lot of 70's/80's punk, trashy obscure 60's stuff and a lot of low-quality obscure synth stuff from the 80's -- all of which don't require a high bitrate.
Fishes,
narco.
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Dave Caolo said 10:13PM on 10-19-2005
Narco: It's got 10:15 Saturday Night, Boys Don't Cry and Killing an Arab. The CD is a live shot of Robert at the mic w/his guitar. Got it in Boston maybe 10 years ago.
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Wry Cooter said 10:16PM on 10-19-2005
I started ripping my CDs. Took months to get about half of them ripped. I hated the things as physical objects; I never put them back in the cases. I was considering maybe selling them. Had about 120 gigs ripped. Then the hard disk crashed. Hard crash of mechanism.
Minimum fee for recovery of drive 800 dollars, probably an equal number of hours to rip them again.
Don't sell or give away the CDs, if you have a place to store them.
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jmrdc said 10:21PM on 10-19-2005
i feel somewhat the same way; however, i'm also and audiophile and have a "high-end" system that MP3's sound compressed when played. overall, i am a total convert to the digital system, but for ciritcal listening nothing can replace the cd - whatever form, may it be DVD audio or Super CD.
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bobbyc said 10:44PM on 10-19-2005
I love my CDs and LPs as well; I have about 1000 CDs and 200 LPs and intend to keep them for awhile just because they still sound better to me than MP3 files. But I definitely love the fact that iTunes come very handy especially on the road. But I still play my CDs and LPs at home; they're neatly organized along with my huge DVD collection. If anything, I like showing them off!!
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