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?
