I've just sold 3000 CDs - and i don't care!!

[WAD62]

I agree about skipping around with files based music....it does for me in the end become less meaningful. It's too tempting to select the most instantly fun music and ignore the ups and downs of full albums. Deep and moving complex music seems to lose out. A sign of the times I suppose.

Grumpy.

I've been streaming my own flac files since 2009, and have recently added the spotify plugin to my LMS set up, yet I always stream album by album, whether local files or spotify ones...the playlist novelty wore off many years ago...

[Sherwood]

I agree about skipping around with files based music....it does for me in the end become less meaningful. It's too tempting to select the most instantly fun music and ignore the ups and downs of full albums. Deep and moving complex music seems to lose out. A sign of the times I suppose.

Grumpy.

I think the reason that many people find themselves skipping tracks is that most albums are flawed in some way. I would say that only a fraction of my cds stand up as a complete piece of work that I will listen to from first to last track. In the days of vinyl, it was too much of a faff to skip tracks but I know that even then I would tend to favour one side of an album over another. When cds arrived I would routinely skip certain tracks that were fillers or just didn't sit well in the flow of music. These days, I do not see many cds following the album format with a clear progression of music and some unifying theme. Streaming doesn't mean you have to skip tracks and the fact that many people do suggest that the skipped tracks don't stand up to repeated playing. I agree, that there are some artists and some pieces of work that really need to be played through as a complete piece of work, but they are rare, and, dare I say, becoming rarer!

Geoff

[dave2010]

Yes hard drives are much cheaper but unreliable. A hard disk will fail at some point, either partially or catastrophically. The M-Disc media is a special archival quality storage medium with a claimed 1,000 year storage life. If it survives 25 years that would be good enough for me.

Is the object to save space, by ripping and disposing of the originals? Possible technical legal problems with that - but probably nobody will really bother.

If you have a loft with enough space you could simply keep the original CDs, which would then be their own archives, having ripped the CDs to computer storage. That way you'd have the archive, and also the benefit - if such it is - of being able to acceess all the contents quickly. There could be issues if the loft gets very cold or very hot, or very damp - but not all lofts do. There are plastic boxes which will easily hold 50 CDs at a time, and they could be used in lofts. Admittedly the cost of storing the originals in that way would probably be about 10p per CD - if the plastic boxes work out at around £5 each, though some CD/DVD/SACD box sets would also go in, and reduce the overall cost per disc as they would be more densely packed.

Note also that at the present time it is still actually illegal to rip CDs in the UK - a somewhat retrograde step in legislation - even for personal/private use. I don't think too many people care though.

For myself I spent some time ripping a lot of CDs a few years ago, but despite that I have for the time being gone back to just playing the CDs in my player. I don't know why! It seems simpler, perhaps.

[Clive]

I think the reason that many people find themselves skipping tracks is that most albums are flawed in some way. I would say that only a fraction of my cds stand up as a complete piece of work that I will listen to from first to last track. In the days of vinyl, it was too much of a faff to skip tracks but I know that even then I would tend to favour one side of an album over another. When cds arrived I would routinely skip certain tracks that were fillers or just didn't sit well in the flow of music. These days, I do not see many cds following the album format with a clear progression of music and some unifying theme. Streaming doesn't mean you have to skip tracks and the fact that many people do suggest that the skipped tracks don't stand up to repeated playing. I agree, that there are some artists and some pieces of work that really need to be played through as a complete piece of work, but they are rare, and, dare I say, becoming rarer!

Geoff

I'm not even thinking about recent music....for example Saxophone Colossus / Sonny Rollins....I find myself playing just Moritat yet the the whole album is stunning. By not playing the whole album I'm not as satisfied but have more instant gratification. The result is that I play my vinyl version as a way to enforce my good behaviour.

[Chunky70]

Thank you to everyone for a most interesting thread. I can understand why some of you would be shocked at me getting rid of the whole lot but my feelings about my collection have changed over the last year.
I used to be proud of my collection, it was almost an extension of myself, a definition of who i am in effect. But lately i've actually started to resent it's hulking presence in my living room. It was a reminder to me that the obsessive cd buying was actually an illness.
I was actually really embaressed to discover whilst going through the lot with Tom that a quite a few of them were still in there wrappers!! Thats just madness!!
I'm really glad there gone.

[struth]

Did that once upon s time with records. When I realised I had a lot I'd never played I stopped buying and sold a lot They were not new but new to me

[Chunky70]

Did that once upon s time with records. When I realised I had a lot I'd never played I stopped buying and sold a lot They were not new but new to me

I know where your coming from Grant. I found it impossible to pass a record shop. I already had enough music but i needed more!!

[struth]

I know where your coming from Grant. I found it impossible to pass a record shop. I already had enough music but i needed more!!

Yup I play more music with Deezer or my flac files than I did using the cds or vinyl. I don't know why. It's not as touchy feely but it seems to leave me free to just listen. Ive put most of my vinyl away and intend doing same with cds. Will keep them tho as I'm not ready yet to sell

[Sherwood]

I'm not even thinking about recent music....for example Saxophone Colossus / Sonny Rollins....I find myself playing just Moritat yet the the whole album is stunning. By not playing the whole album I'm not as satisfied but have more instant gratification. The result is that I play my vinyl version as a way to enforce my good behaviour.

Surely this is a problem of your own making and not a problem with streaming per se. I just don't understand how a strength of streaming from a digital archive can be presented as a weakness: namely, the flexibility to instantly access whole albums; an artist's complete repertoire; a genre; a playlist; or just tracks at random. To enforce "good behaviour" seems a bit odd to me!

On the storage side, the Really Useful Box Company offer a range of really strong boxes for CD storage. If you are storing them in an unheated loft of garage, don't forget to drop a decent sized bag of silica gel to stop condensation. It's amazing how damp the cd inserts can get if left in long term storage without such precautions.

Geoff

[Clive]

I've not called it a weakness. It just doesn't help me listen to music in a good way or a way that I feel is good. Sure that's just me. That's said I do fight it and listen to files as well as vinyl.