How many of you are storing most if all of your music on your computer?

i miss the artwork. i try to get jpgs at least.

i know im a very bad person

Yes, it is a lot of work. But it seems worth the time; it only takes a few minutes to rip a disk. Plus I can organize things, make instant playlists, the kids can't "sort" them for me, etc.

The good (or bad) part is that as I acquire stuff from now on, instead of it going in the "eh...maybe" pile that eventually gets filed but rarely listened to, those CDs will just get ripped and I will sell them with no fear of not being able to impulsively listen to them someday.

At first I was going to rip a larger portion of my CDs but it is too much work. Even selling them off takes fucking FOREVER and it's a big hassle.

My point is that I see this as the future. Five years from now you're not going to be hearing about people who still have a thousand CDs in their collection. It's all going to be digital storage.

I'm getting back into Vinyl too - I like the aesthetic of the format as well as the artwork. Its fine as long as you have a decent turntable and souncard... They are on my list...

I've stumbled into putting everything on HDDs purely to preserve the original CDs and for tidyness/convenience it provides. I can't bring myself to flog my CDs yet, but I may do when I buy a DVD writer (i.e. when the 'fail-safe' argument starts to become too flimsy ;)).

Well then I must be extremely lucky to have a large number of CDRs from 1993 that are all still perfectly readable.

fanless Imac is completely quiet
imac is the all-time winner in aesthetics
easy access to everything
playing itunes at random with crossfade employed is amazing, especially when you have thousands of songs
etc.

As the owner of (at last count) over 1400 CDs, I now consider myself to be someone who would like to own a LOT LESS of the damned things. A lot of things were no-brainers when I asked myself if it would be difficult for me to part with the actual physical object ("Eh! Do I really need or want 9 Stereolab discs?"). So a lot of things of that iffy nature I simply ripped into the machine and sold off the discs. Very few things I felt were worth or even necessary to preserve in full quality: LAME 256 kb/s mp3 or AAC at 192 kb/s are more than adequate.

My goal isn't to avoid CDs all together. Instead, I would like to rid myself of CDs that I feel I really don't NEED to have. The result: more shelf space, a little pocket money, more peace of mind.

As for backing it all up ... DVD-R works well enough (as does CD-R). If you are really concerned about longevity, make sure to back up anew every year or so. Maybe even make two sets of backup discs if you are truly concerned about it. Discs don't cost much (DVD-Rs are quickly becoming as cheap as CD-Rs) and it doesn't take up all that much time to burn them.

I think that if you follow a simple back-up plan, you should have no worries. And a little stack of DVD-Rs in a drawer somewhere vs. an entire shelf of (mostly) unloved CDs is a big advantage, at least for me.

Call me crazy or old fashioned but I'll never give up my days mopping my closet I call my kitchen to the sound of whatever album I'm really into at the time.

I don't want to sacrifice quality, and even though ripping ACC files at 192 is very much passable (especially compared to all the tapes I still have, the bootlegged concerts on cassette that I haven't ported, the mediocre turntable I have, etc.) there is something snobby about wanting to have the best quality. I feel like I'm shortchanging my stereo (which I bought off another CD whittling spree several years ago.)

CDRs losing their quality is highly, highly debatable. I've got literally hundreds that are over 2 years old, and probably at least 50 that are more than four years old. Granted, I've haven't tested them all yet but I can assure you even the oldest ones haven't degraded because I have read off of them in the past six months and they were fine.

Hard drives can and do fail (though I've never had one fail in my 12 years of owning them) but the data on them is almost impossible to erase unless you physically harm the drive. For the ones that fail, getting the information off of them is not difficult or even relatively expensive. But again, as Ian mentioned, the archived stuff is going to be my secondary listening stuff and not my obsessive beloved stuff. I will be impressed with myself if I can even unload 300 of my CDs. (And since I know from past experience that I will average greater than $6 profit per disc sold, I'll bite off a huge chunk towards the new computer.)

Again, I think what Matos is doing is a sign of the future--if codecs were lossless, you'd be seeing the conversion to harddrives coming a lot more quicker. The kidz of tomorrow aren't going to give a rat's ass about physical liner notes or big albums they can hold up and look at. They'll be able to get all that on their iPods, and probably get video/games/porn as part of the package.

About 70% of the time. You will nevah evah beat this!!!

http://www.hifiplus.com/images/content17-1.jpg

Maybe his CD player was crap or maybe it was rerip of a CDR that had already come from MP3 or.. hang on - you were comparing them on the same equipment, yes?

My view (and subsequent practice) of all this is pragmatic. If physical digital sound carriers exist, they ought to be as flexible as possible - which is why I've come to prefer MiniDisc more and more. That particular format is at least somewhat aesthetically attractive (far more so than a CD), robust, small(ish) and, most importantly, easy to alter/erase/etc. Hey! MD as renewable resource!Zapping an album I no longer want to have on MD is empowering. No waste generated - just record on it again. (Please don't say "CD-RW" - they hardly work at all.)

(Am I the only one who feels somewhat squeamish about tossing out CD-Rs? I suppose I was conditioned to believe that waste is a bad thing; the very prospect of landfills stuffed with millions of plastic CDs something I have occasionally thought about. Do I really want to contribute more to that?)

Well perhaps I'm projecting. I grew up in the vinyl era, after all. Maybe there are people out there who actually do fetishize the CD and its flimsy booklet, evil jewel case, so-so digipak, insert card and miniscule graphics. But I really think that they must be an odd minority. Granted, some CD designs look nice (I own a few), but at the end of the day it's really not that that much of a big deal to me. I long ago came to the conclusion that no matter how prettily the CD is dressed up, the medium remains what it is (a characterless data carrier, etc.).

And music as digital data isn't necessarily a terrible thing. The positive side of this is just that: digital data. Meaning that you can move it around, mix it up in infinite ways, transfer it to this and that device. Why not?

That said, I am really not willing to pay money for mp3 files. At least no more than I am already paying for my monthly internet fee.

As for sound quality, properly encoded mp3 at a high enough bitrate (though lately I've decided that AAC is a better codec) is in almost all cases (there are exceptions, of course) audibly transparent - particularly with rock/pop productions which hardly ever feature a great deal of air and dynamic range. I am very demanding when it comes to sound quality, and I have tested this extensively. To hear audiophiles tell it is another matter, of course, but keep in mind that these are the very same people who can never consistently differentiate the full quality file from the compressed file in blind tests.