PART 2: The CD Conundrum: Coasters or Collectors Items (What to do with my 1,000+ CDs?!?)
Back in November of 2009 I wrote a post about what to do with all of the CDs I own. In that post I talked about why I needed a solution and what the possible ideas were. You can have a read of that post here:
Part One of The CD Conundrum: Coasters or Collectors Items (What the hell should I do with my 1,000+ CDs?!?)
Since then, my physical CDs purchases have been next to nil. I am buying primarily downloads, save for my now growing vinyl collection (which is my fave format). I’m not sure I will ever buy another physical CD again (sorry my old friend, liner notes…I’ll just have to rely on websites and PDFs when they are available).
I just found this picture today. This is my music collection circa 2002. This is the first apartment my wife and I lived in together. I had to fight to steal this closet space (still paying for it today).
CDs are just dead. Shit, I don’t even have a CD player anymore. I bought a killer Yamaha tuner a while back and when I did, I decided that the CD player was not needed. My thinking then (and now) was that I would just rip the CDs to my hard-drive and stream it via Air Tunes throughout the house. If I had a house that I owned today rather than all of this global transient apartment living, I would trick that casa out with the top of the line audio with all the super geeky tech stuff. I digress…
In a recent post, The Rise of the Streamers, I questioned the notion of streaming versus owning your music. There was some healthy debate on the topic. I did miss the mark on taking a deeper look at another angle: still owning your music (CDs) and transferring it al into the cloud. This tangent is more in line with my first post on this subject, what to do with the music…all those damn CDs…that I now own.
I have come to a decision on what I will do with all of my CDs.
When I replaced all of my cassettes with CDs I threw the tapes away. We were talking about two different beasts then. There was no relationship between the two. CDs and digital files are another matter. I can turn water in to wine with these.
My music collection, Judd’s Juke Joint, totals 1,515 albums. The collection is comprised of 1,065 CD (box sets included) and 450 downloads. Whew…that’s a lot of plastic and paper. I also have 107 pieces of vinyl…but they aren’t going anywhere.
So this is the plan:
- This winter I will rip the rest of my collection to external hard-drives. I have over 25,000 songs dumped into iTunes as of today. That is not my entire collection, but it is a larger portion of it.
- Once I have my entire collection in bits & bytes, I will make a few back-ups of the hard-drives with one master that I can add to as I buy new stuff. Each month I will clone it over to my back-ups.
- I am going to find a cloud storage service to put the entire thing in. Dropbox, Google Docs…not sure what yet. If there was an option that had a player that I could use/stream with or take my own songs and embed playlists with or share to social sites, etc…I would prefer that. Not sure what the cloud solution is yet, but will research it heavily.
- @dopeburger and I were talking about uploading to the cloud in Part One of this post-series. We were envisioning a ‘bandwidth-bar’ or someplace you could go to rent screeching-fast upload speeds to upload mass file-age. Uploading 1,500+ albums to the cloud is going to be costly. I want to do it right once, make it as inexpensive as possible and simple. Very simple. I think that I brought up a retail chain, like Costco, that would sell a wide pipe and warp speeds on the cheap to make this happen. Cool idea.
- I’m going to dismantle my entire CD collection…separate the CD & liner nots from the pastic.
- I will buy some simple storage solution to catalog all of the CDs in. I think I can get that down to a couple/few boxes. If anything, this makes me feel better knowing that at least 70% of my collection is backed up by “hard copies”.
Once I get this done, I will invest in the latest and greatest technology to trick out my flat or house so that my music is always ready to play anytime and in any room. I also want to be able to play my stuff anywhere…the cloud service I end up using will be key here.
For the past eight months I have only been buying downloads and vinyl. That is the way forward. With downloads, where possible, I will buy higher quality files (as I did with Arcade Fire’s new album & offerings…they nailed that execution…and their interactive album is cool, too).
I will continue to buy vinyl…old and new. I will carefully curate my collection so that I focus on top vinyl-album-experiences (Layla, Pet Sounds, etc.). the new vinyl will be in two forms…new albums on high quality vinyl (i.e. 180 grams) and special re-releases of killer classic albums. The new albums refers to new shit such as The Black Keys, “Brothers” (love this album) and Tom Petty & The Ass-Kickers, “Mojo“. If new release albums come with download codes…all the better.
The Old-New releases come in flavors such as the limited edition Neil Young 4 album set and the re-release of the Stones, “Exile on Main St.”. The Neil set is fucking bow-down. He has plans to release more classic and lost album on the black beauties and I will buy them all.
OK…sounds like a good plan. I have a few months still before I kick out the jams on this project. Am I missing something? Anyone have any suggestions on how I can improve my master plan?
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Wow. Big decision. My wife would want me to unload all my 1800+ CDs too, but I haven’t been able to get myself to pull the trigger yet. I really do like the visual of my wall of music, but I do know that I’m on borrowed time with it, and I’m preparing. Several hard drives/backups, but I haven’t yet archived the bootlegs, which isn’t just as easy as ripping (date entry for every file, a PAIN IN THE ASS). Also just procured something called The Black Box, which contains almost every recorded Pearl Jam show. A bit overwhelming, but a good historical document.Good luck with the deployment. I’ll probably be a year behind ya. For the record, I also bought a great Yamaha tuner about 8 or 9 years ago. Love it.
Ivan: Agreed, big call. I figure I need to do something with all the CDs now since I am. most likely, not going to be buying anymore. The time I may buy them is when it comes to to-cool-to-pass-up box sets A nice Delaney & Bonnie one is in my line of sight). I’ve seen your bootleg collection…it is ridiculously cool and large. Yeah, that will be a bitch to do that. I am also going to look into services that will do some of this for me. Will let you know if I find good ones. As I research and roll out my plan, I’ll keep you updated. Yeah…love the Yamaha tuner. Because of my set up now, I am not even maxing it’s potential. It’s future proofed so that by the time I trick it out, it won’t be obsolete.
Sounds like a very worthwhile project. I need to figure out a plan of action along these lines. Airtunes is sweet. However, I just got a new internet service and new router and cant get the damn thing to work.Now that I have a nicer tuner I am noticing more and more how shit mp3′s sound. Especially softer jazz music or older country. I have re ripped my Jimmy Smith collection 4 different times because it was getting too distracting.I want to go all FLAC format. That’s what most of my bootlegs are in anyway. Hard drives are getting cheaper. And keep 256 mp3′s on the ipod. A buddy of mine is making me an xbox media center to play the high quality goods over my stereo. And keep all the cd’s and shows on a separate drive. Once I get it all together I will copy it 4 times and set some mates up with the same.
@ozzybeef Good to hear from you, mate. Love the xbox idea. To be honest, I need to bone up on FLAC, AAC, etc. I’m not FLAC qualified to make calls yet. I agree, some of my mp3′s sound like crap on my tuner as well. I am not an audiophile, but am trying to acquire all the knowledge quickly. I always figured that once I got my act together I would start to do all of this at once…I like Airtunes, but am not married to an Apple system. It is just my easiest path right now. The more I talk about streaming and cloud storage, the more excited I get about the prospect of pulling all this shit together to get the right system and sound. Let me know how you go on the FLAC transfers.
I have been using a free program called XLD to rip my CD’s to FLAC. But iTunes wont play them. So you have to use VLC or XBMC to listen.What’s funny is that there are a lot of Vinyl rips to flac of great records. The biggest one being the Purple Chick rips of Beetles LPs. I tell you I am pretty excited about the Delany and Bonnie remaster!
@ozzybeef Nice. Thanks for the FLAC-ware tips. I had never heard of the purplechick stuff. Will dig deep.Yeah, I’m chomping for the Delay & Bonnie Dee-luxe treatment. Funny…the day I saw that @wsjrock article, I was cranking my vinyl version of that album. Rolling stone has an article on it http://goo.gl/U0q1The album they did at STAX, “Home” is terrific…that STAX grease is all over it. http://goo.gl/dHjR
My poor music collection. When this picture was taken, I had a shitty, shitty tuner…actually, the entire stereo system sucked.
Any suggestions…. hmmm… uh… you…. could…. give them to me… I’ll store them for you.
@thefrontloader Thanks for that Sweet Lou. OK…are there any sane suggestions out there?
Streaming…damn you streaming. Was trying to listen to the @ronniewoodshow on Soundcloud app while walking down the street and it kept failing even with a full 3G signal.
Ok ok… after thinking about it, I realized that your plan is WAY better than how I’ve been going about it. All I’ve done is back up my music to an external drive. That’s it. Not even a backup to the backup. I used to burn data discs to that I’d kinda sorta have a physical copy, but that got old fast.Your plan has made me think about my collection… should that external drive go bad, then I’m screwed. So I’m going to read this post again and see if I can duplicate your efforts. Sorry, not much of a suggestion here.oh wait. I do have ONE suggestion… SAN DIMAS HIGH SCHOOL FOOTBALL RULES!
Great plan, Judd. I’m in a very similar position in terms of size and the sentimental connection to my own physical collection. But I haven’t bought or played a CD for several years now and my MP3 library is now 223Gb and growing. As the months have gone by I’ve become less attached to the physical and protecting my well manicured bytes is now my number one priority.As I agreed last year in Part 1 of this story, the ‘upload to the cloud in one fell swoop’ service is the pipe dream that I’m desperately hoping for. Like dropping off a camera’s mini disc for same-day processing at a photo print shop, I’d love to be able to drop off my external drive to a similar upload service. It would act as the ultimate off-site backup but also make my toons available for cloud listening once that idea becomes mainstream and ubiquitous. Incrementally updating your monster cloud ‘drive’ would be easy and no big deal, even for the stingiest home broadband plans.Like computers once were, commercial off-site data centres are currently used exclusively by corporations and SMEs. The average punter doesn’t even know they exist. How long before they grow a retail mentality? Or hook-up with a Costco or Boots or K-Mart or Walmart? The biggest problem with a service like this is that most folks would only need to use it once for the in initial monster upload. So is it a sustainable business model? A question for the MBA’s methinks.It’s this off-site backup that I really think is most important. I keep an extra backup drive at work for this very reason. I figure if my flat burns to the ground or is robbed clean, there ain’t much point having a backup drive hidden in my bedroom is there? I simply cannot imagine losing my entire collection like that. Can you?
AHH I went through all this a few years ago but came out the opposite end. As someone who is well versed in FLAC-ology and maintaining digital libraries, and likewise harbour a deep respect and fondness for vinyl as the proper medium (most, but not all, of my favourite albums sound best on vinyl), you would think CDs would be meaningless to me and I too would lose the dead weight.But not so! I came out of that process (of starting to build an elaborate system, a dedicated machine streaming music, with a lovely interface known as MP3Toys which retains the “pick the album by its cover” approach (google it) — I loathe iTunes) abandoning the whole thing, recognizing that my digital library will just be ONE media library for me and not THE library, and instead, going back and buying more CDs than ever. I can admit, yes, I’m not the most sane person in the soup…So what and why? Vinyl is unique, it’s analog and you cannot make identical copies of it at home. That is an easy argument. But CDs? You can duplicate them without loss (lossless baby), and the digital data is all over the Internet.Simply put, it’s THE format for music archeologists. For the people who want to get and hear every obscure track, and every mix or remaster (and not so much The Collector who will/can pay ridiculous money for that One Lost ’45). CD is clearly going to be the last dominant physical media for audio distribution. There’ll be formats to come but they’ll be niches like BD, DVDA, etc. And they’ll never get the saturation where the most obscure, unfashionable, or unpopular artists will ever see the light of day. There might be some best of’s, but you’re unlikely to get the coverage CD got in its prime.There are plenty of stuff out there which doesn’t circulate on the Internet. It’s not popular enough or the people who care about it are too stuck in their old dog tricks to break onto all this convoluted ripping encoding seeding streaming sharing science baloney. The last time they made the effort to collect it all and put it somewhere was on the CD medium. These are now popping up used or in bargain bins. Now in theory, eventually this stuff too will get uploaded into the cloud … but I’m not seeing it for some time. For the abandoned child, for the lesser loved ones, some of them may well be stranded out there… and even when they make it up, they’ll be drowned out by the loud noises of today.I’m still buying CDs for the orphaned music.And it’s also partly the same reason I still buy books. I believe in a physical representation of what matters to me. I think everybody’s two heads will agree that they love-lust and enjoy the physical representation. Why deprive?Of course, it’s a luxury for those of us with little mexican huts and shelves to hoard all these treasures… and some of us (dear Mr. Judd) have a more freewheeling lifestyle to carry… and I do envy that, and curse the baggage that keep me pinned… so it’s a win/lose thing as always…
@idlehead @horringbone I love it. We are all in agreement that something is happening here, but we’re still not sure what the hell it is. OK, I like this…we have some serious music heads playing with the idea of future-proofing and ubiquity of their collections. I am getting good ideas now on how to augment my plan. What do you guys use for external drives…any preferred brands/product? I have a 1tb Apple Time Capsule & an old portable hard drive (needs replacing). Cloud services…too soon to decide. Not enough competition & waiting for music-first products & services. @Kip…good, no, GREAT call on the off-site. Giving one to Jules to take to her office tomorrow. @Idle “orphaned music”…agreed. It is hard to find the super-cool-stealth stuff online. That’s OK, we don’t want all of the fun taken out of the hunt & the buy. I’ll buy these types of CDs, too. Yeah, you’re system is soupy, but if it works…cool. Thanks for the advice & tips.
@thefrontloader Good idea…get more that one back up. Also, check out what @horringbone has to say on off-site back-up. Go team!
I forgot to say in this and the other thread that I do actually believe in the value of the stream… I just don’t believe in using it to *replace* the collection. The stream for me (be it xm radio, pandora, internet, torrents or what have you) is a means of discovering new music, not the medium for me to digest them. So I will step to the stream to catch the fish, but I won’t be standing there with the water up to my armpits, trying to cook and devour said fish… it just isn’t possible to give it the attention and patience it deserves with all those other fishes nibbling at your toes and the current bashing into your eyelids.
A serendipitous reply, Juddster. Your Southern Thang mix is belting out seriously fucking loud in the background as I type — am up to the DBT’s kick ass almost title track now. Hang-on, here comes Lu’s bleeding fingers. Man I love the guitar on that track! Yes, I should be barrelling down a highway, but thanks anyway for being the curator yet again, Judd!Loved idlehead’s post, particularly his views and usage of the FLAC format. Yes I’ve heard the amazing difference in quality, but the mega file size is totally prohibitive for me. Yes, drives are way cheap now — here come The Band and their tales from Acadie — but I’d need to shop for a petabyte drive to future-proof my collection. But I guess they’ll be $100 in five years!? Here comes Pete & Mick . . .Ultimately though, chaps, I love being in this period of aural flux. Sure I want it to hurry up sometimes, but the ride sure is fun right now. Here comes Ryan . . .
@idlehead Yes, the “replace” button is in no danger of being pressed by me (or you & @horringbone, either), but it is there…waiting for us. The stream..I was streaming through one of the oh-so-poupar apps du jour (Soundcloud), trying to listen to the @RonnieWoodShow and the damn thing kept crapping out on me. Now that mayu be the carriers fault (Vodaphone), but my 3G signal was full-bar…but my listening experience was FUBAR.As we’ve discussed…we need all technologies to converge to give a seamless, simple and satisfying experience before we hit the stream button.Keep fishing, Idle…