Continuing with CDs?

says random internet reply guy who doesn't really know what he's talking about

I'm entirely here for it - you know more than me! Looks like I need a UK plug, aye. It has the correct, er, wires etc so should be fine.

hey koogs, I can help you out! ilx-mail me again with your email address

I finally got the last of my CDs that had been in storage at my folks' place for 18+ years. For me, this is 31 years of my life, all brought together for the first time.

https://musicophilia.files.wordpress.com/2024/04/20240425_234708.jpg

Getting them all organized (and reuniting the discs eith cases with booklets--I used a dozen of those binders back in the 90s to early 00s) brought a flood of memories of times, people, places, versions of myself. I was amazed how often I could remember what shop I got an album in, and when...

But I think it also cements the reality that, at this point, I'm really *not* "continuing with CDs". Because I've been 95%+ digital purchases since Covid, and almost none of the shops sell CDs in my region anymore, and--well, the shelves are completely full now.

Anybody succeeded in instituting a one-in-one-out policy with physical media?

I have, but it definitely requires some effort in the culling. I have to do it in batches where I'll go through and think "what have I not listened to in a while and may not want to keep?" I'll end up with a little stack of CD's and that'll be my primary listening for a few days. Either it'll be a nice way of rediscovering something or it'll be one for the sell pile.

@ Soundslike - that is an absolutely beautiful photo.

I got rid of my CDs about ten years ago and rather regret it. Luckily I've been able to repurchase a few given the bargain-basement second hand prices right now. Although if I did still have them I really don't have the wallspace to showcase them as lovingly as Soundslike, they'd probably be in a box/binder somewhere.

I love unboxing stuff ive stashed away somewhere for whatever reason (space, moving, travel, no current interest in etc). 18 years is a long time!

I've forever given up physical media, but pictures of full CD racks brings back the memories/feelings.

^^

love seeing your photo, Soundsalike

Two copies of Nashville!

daughter has just started doing a college radio show (streaming) and she's been going CD only, so maybe a sign of them being cool with the kids (retro!)(that looks great, Soundslike!)

getting new shelves on Monday, looking forward to having my CDs all sorted in one place for the first time in ages

I figured if anyone in the world would appreciate seeing thousands of CDs in 2024, it would be my fellow ILM oldsters in this thread! Haha!

But I love hearing your daughter is using CDs on her radio show, Bulb! Even if it means my youth is now "retro"--so it goes heh. There are a couple CDs on those shelves I "borrowed" from my college radio station when I had a show circa 1998... Do they actually still have a CD promo library at your daughter's school?

Bamboohouses, I'm sorry to hear of your regret at ditching your CDs. Based on living my whole adult life in small apartments, I'd considered ditching mine--the ones from age 24 to 41 had been schlepped around the country and stored in bankers boxes, literal useless weight... But I just hate all the streaming companies, and much as I've loved Bandcamp we see that can be precarious... So I just kept holding on. At least if/when you move, you'll have a much easier time compared to me!

Birdistheword, that's kind of what I did this time--recently bought a my first CD player in 25 years, a little discman-like (much chunkier/uglier than they were back in the late 90s, but with rechargeable built-in battery), and just put on the discs I was considering culling while I did the tedious work of rejoining discs/booklets/cases. Heard a few I liked better now than then (i.e. Flipper).

Here's what I culled--mostly duplicates (ones I bought again in later reissues), and some I'm just ditching. Not sure the best thing to do with them, but in the past I've given CDs and DVDs to the bookstore I live above who have a nice little curated vinyl-only music section. Just makes me happy to see CDs in a shop anymore--and I think they sold them all!

https://musicophilia.files.wordpress.com/2024/04/20240426_101958.jpg

Seeing that Wilco CD makes me think of the numerous Xth Anniversary Remastered Reissued Box Sets I've acquired over the years, and how I still can't seem to rid myself of the now redundant original versions of same.

I’m sure those felt 2-fers made someone very happy!

I had the same tendency, Henry. And have held on to a couple original CDs simply as mementos (like my first copy of This Heat's 'Deceit' for which I hunted far and wide in the early 2000s). And a couple where the reissues suffered from the brick-wall "remaster" era. But mostly, as with this current batch (including that Wilco, which I bought when it came out at a Best Buy of all places), I'm happy to imagine them living on and having a second life serving some precocious Gen Z music nerd to buys CDs because they're cheaper than vinyl(s) heh

The book shop downstairs said the CDs I gave them before sold very quickly, so thats where this big batch will go.

The CD revival is real! Hahaha

There are a few CDs I sold when I got remastered versions that I really wish I'd held onto. One was a mono CD of Captain Beefheart's Safe as Milk. I sold it when I got the remixed and remastered stereo version, but I've grown to dislike the way they mixed the stereo.

I still love CDs -- second hand discs are so cheap these days (undervalued IMO). I do probably need to purge a bunch of discs I'll never get around to listening to again.

I keep buying more and more cds which I play in the car to and from school so I can educate the kid. Lately he was really into Psalm 69 by ministry. Two bucks in the discount section! A steal!

Fun scanning the first photo for titles I recognize/have, where even if I can't read the spines I recognize e.g. the Can reissues from the color array and the inconsistent placement of the text across the series (I think it depended on what territory you got them from). I recognize some superseded earlier CD issues from the second photo that I got rid of, too. Kept my Stereolabs as I bought the vinyl reissues rather than the CDs, also held on to my '80s Colin Newman A-Z as I found the reissue pretty squashed/loud.

I have that Sister Rosetta Tharpe set.

And I that ESG thing on Soul Jazz, which really stands out, graphically.

Makes me wish I had followed through and bought all of those Todd Rundgren reissues on Sanctuary a decade or so ago, where all the spines formed an elongated portrait of the man, when filed in chronological order.

see also: Asmus Tietchens CD reissue series on Die Stadt

We are all the people who cannot not browse somebody's music library if we visit their house heh

If it helps in identifying discs, everything on the shelves is in pure alphabetical order by artist (though chaos order past that).

that Wilco, which I bought when it came out at a Best Buy of all places

I was explaining to someone recently about how in the '90s you could pick up practically any major label release at a Big Box store, and if you couldn't at your first stop, you could at your second (which was probably across the street/freeway).

I did buy several not used CDs from multiple online retailers last night… consumerism!! grabbed those deluxe reissues of FM’s Mirage and Tango

My favorite big box store back in the day was Media Play, they had locations in Rockford, Erie, and Buffalo. And I'm sure elsewhere. I bought so many CDs at all three locations mentioned above, the one in Rockford was the first location and I went in there and stocked up on so many '90s alt rock CDs. If they didn't have a copy, and they usually did, the Best buy across the street did. They also had a lot of techno cds, I'm pretty sure I bought almost all of my '90s techno albums at one of those. Media play cornered the market on Future sound of London east of the Mississippi iirc.

I used to wonder if Circuit City had some deal with Rykodisc, because my suburban one (opened Fall 1997) had a ton of their stuff: all the Yoko reissues, arcane Zappa stuff like the Francesco Zappa album etc.

I remember seeing the the three (ESP-Disc) Godz albums on CD at Best Buy in like 1998.

A good friend was the manager of a local Barnes & Noble's music and video department back in the late-90s to mid-2000s, and seemingly he was given cart blanche to run it as basically a pretty fantastic independent CD and DVD shop. Got so many crucial albums and films there (with an occasional "family discount"). I remember him saying his B&N media department was like the most profitable in the US or something like that, because he actually made it a legit music geek hub. Then I moved away, and sometime in the mid-2000s it went under centralized corporate control, became unprofitable, and he hated it and quit. Probably the media sections at Barnes & Nobles didn't exist much past then.

That's a pretty awesome selection you've pulled Soundslike - should make a lot of people happy! I would keep the Ray Charles box set though, that's supposed to be the best sounding edition of those Atlantic recordings. (It's too bad they spread it out over three CD's, it can actually fit on just two easily, but having a bigger booklet is kind of nice.)

o. nate, if you mean Sundazed's CD release of the mono mix for Safe as Milk, supposedly they botched that up so no big loss. If you want to hear it in mono, the best digital version out there is here. The mono master tapes may very well be lost forever, so we may never get a proper digital mastering of it. (The vinyl rip at that link is pretty great though.)

Love the photo Soundslike, lots of familiar items in there although it does make me rather regretful that I got rid of the David Thomas 'Monster' set years ago. Seems it's worth a bit too.

Oh and what's that small box in front of the This Mortal Coil box set? The one that says 1981

It’s this https://www.discogs.com/release/10096281-Various-1981 which I believe Soundslike compiled some time ago.

o. nate, if you mean Sundazed's CD release of the mono mix for Safe as Milk, supposedly they botched that up so no big loss.

No it wasn’t that, I think it was the early 90s One Way reissue, but not 100% certain. I know it had the bonus tracks from the Brown Wrapper sessions. The sound quality was a bit lo-fi to be honest. But it seemed to suit the music.

XP - Thanks Dan

Birdistheword, I will be happy to see them enrich other lives! And in most cases, it won't be a loss for me since I have duplicates or superceding releases. But re: the Ray Charles set, I later got 'The Complete Atlantic Recordings' that I guess I just assumed covered all the same material with the same remastering. You figure still keep the other?

Maresnest, glad you enjoyed! I like a lot of those Thomas albums better than the Pere Ubu albums aftet their first three, so I'm glad to have it. I thought they'd reissued it with another added disc, but I guess even that is long OOP at this point?

Oh and yep, that's the '1981' box I made (gulp) *20* years ago! I basically introduced myself to ILM with it after lurking. Amazingly, I *still* occasionally get an email asking if I have a copy of it. I didn't even have one of my own for at least a decade till an old friend gave me his.

It can still be heard here:

https://musicophilia.wordpress.com/2021/01/04/1981-post-punk/

No it wasn’t that, I think it was the early 90s One Way reissue, but not 100% certain. I know it had the bonus tracks from the Brown Wrapper sessions. The sound quality was a bit lo-fi to be honest. But it seemed to suit the music.

If it was the One Way reissue, the Brown Wrapper bonus tracks would sound fine, but they used a poor copy of the stereo mix for Safe as Milk, possibly the same one used for the 1970 LP reissue as they both have clipped intros, dropouts and other defects that weren't found elsewhere. FWIW, there was a UK Castle CD that was in mono, but it wasn't the dedicated mono mix used in the U.S., it's the mono fold-down of the stereo mix which for some reason was originally used in the UK instead of the dedicated mono. Pretty crazy how that album's release history has been so messy.

Soundslike, that 2005 set from Rhino (Pure Genius: The Complete Atlantic Recordings (1952-1959)) is actually a new mastering. I think it's the same team of Bill Inglot and Dan Hersch, and to be fair, it's a more comprehensive box set. They also correct a mistake they made on The Birth of Soul - there's like two songs where Inglot didn't realize the 45 masters he was using weren't the first-generation masters for those two songs. It's usually the other way around, but for those two songs, the first-generation master was on the LP master for The Genius Sings the Blues - the 45 masters were actually dubs that added some reverb. Anyway, that's just two songs, the rest of the box set is excellent and I prefer it because they left the dynamics intact with none of the limiting or compression added the 2005 set.

I would at least rip The Birth of Soul before you give it away. If you want to make an "upgraded" version of that set with a CD burner, you could always replace the two songs they messed up with the mastering from MFSL's hybrid SACD reissue of The Genius Sings the Blues, and on top of that you can easily fit the contents on to two discs instead of three. (Also note The Birth of Soul uses stereo mixes towards the tail end of the set - I prefer the mono mixes of those songs but the stereo mixes aren't bad.)

Wow, thanks! I'll probably keep it for now and A/B some tracks to see if the 2005 approach bothers me brick-wall-wise. I know I'm an odd one out, but I almost always prefer stereo mixes (even with hard panning) to mono, just because unless I'm listening to voice-and-instrument music (like 20s-30s blues) mono just sounds so small and unatural, as I do 95%+ of my listening with headphones.

I will say the call-and-response can be really fun in stereo! Also forgot that Robert Palmer wrote the liner notes and they're great. He wrote some of the best box set liner notes from that era - besides the Ray Charles set, there's also the Bo Diddley Chess Box and the Ornate Coleman box set of his Atlantic Recordings.

I don’t like Ornate Coleman; his playing is too fancy.

lol

A good friend was the manager of a local Barnes & Noble's music and video department back in the late-90s to mid-2000s, and seemingly he was given cart blanche to run it as basically a pretty fantastic independent CD and DVD shop. Got so many crucial albums and films there (with an occasional "family discount"). I remember him saying his B&N media department was like the most profitable in the US or something like that, because he actually made it a legit music geek hub. Then I moved away, and sometime in the mid-2000s it went under centralized corporate control, became unprofitable, and he hated it and quit. Probably the media sections at Barnes & Nobles didn't exist much past then.

― Soundslike, Friday, April 26, 2024

This was my experience! I bought so many Rykodisc reissues at B&N in the late '90s/early '00s: Big Star, Richard Thompson, for example. I could always find a more obscure Dylan album like Planet Waves. Bought some Robert Wyatt too.

"Probably the media sections at Barnes & Nobles didn't exist much past then."

they still have dvd/cd/vinyl sections at B&N.

they all suck unless you are really jonesing for a criterion title and can't wait for the half-price sale that they have every week online. (okay, not every week, but it seems like they have one every week. and you want to ask...maybe make those half price prices your regular prices...???)

They only officially do the half-off Criterion sales twice a year, but they are always doing sales on other labels or doing BOGOs, 3 for 2's, stuff like that.

I actually haven't been in a B&N since the pandemic, but by then the music selection was mostly vinyl, and a small selection of CDs, with a emphasis on budget ($5-7) catalogue titles.