CD's make comeback

menamestom

Streaming all the way for me.  I have CD’s in the loft and records at a mates house but don’t have space and don’t care for anything ‘tangible’.  Whilst I have a fondness for records, the sleve, the artwork etc nowadays I just want to hear music with the minimum of fuss.  

In a way, I like it that the footprint of my posessions is reduced, less clutter, less plastic and packaging being produced on my behalf.
The only exception is I’ll always buy a CD from bands at gigs I like because it’s supporting smaller bands.

Records do sound great on the right system, but IMO much of the ‘sound’ of vinyl came from the reel-to-reel tape the source material was recorded on.  To that end it makes more sense to me to record onto tape then stream digitally than record digitally direct into pro tools then press onto record, as though it will add some mojo at the end.

monquixote

I find the idea of wanting to own a physical cd as weird as wanting to draw water from a well rather than have indoor plumbing.

I've had Spotify since the day it came out. I've got crates of several hundred CDs cluttering up my house but I think of them as pretty much worthless and will be taking them to a charity shop soon as I did with my DVDs.

Why you would want to transfer digital data from a piece of plastic in a little box when the same digital data can stream over a network is baffling.

ICBM

monquixote said:

I find the idea of wanting to own a physical cd as weird as wanting to draw water from a well rather than have indoor plumbing.

I've had Spotify since the day it came out. I've got crates of several hundred CDs cluttering up my house but I think of them as pretty much worthless and will be taking them to a charity shop soon as I did with my DVDs.

Why you would want to transfer digital data from a piece of plastic in a little box when the same digital data can stream over a network is baffling.

Because you can get higher audio quality, if you want it - whether that's really necessary in an average listening situation is possibly debatable - and you are not at the mercy of whether you can get access to that streaming either now or in the future, or how much it costs. Once you've bought a CD you own it outright, for as long as you like. You can - legally or not, depending on what the government and the courts say this week - convert it to any other audio format you find useful, now or in the future.

And that's even ignoring that you quite often get some nice artwork and a lot of other information included with the CD, if you want it, or that quite a lot of music isn't available on streaming.

I find it equally baffling that people would want to pay money to listen to music they will never own when radio is free...

Phil_aka_Pip

monquixote said:

Why you would want to transfer digital data from a piece of plastic in a little box when the same digital data can stream over a network is baffling.

I think it's because it makes you dependent on both the network and the willingness of someone else to make the data available. While it is true that you can't buy songs from a band that nobody wants to record or publish, at a record shop like HMV, if they burn the CDs themselves you can still buy them at the gig.

monquixote

ICBM said:

monquixote said:

I find the idea of wanting to own a physical cd as weird as wanting to draw water from a well rather than have indoor plumbing.

I've had Spotify since the day it came out. I've got crates of several hundred CDs cluttering up my house but I think of them as pretty much worthless and will be taking them to a charity shop soon as I did with my DVDs.

Why you would want to transfer digital data from a piece of plastic in a little box when the same digital data can stream over a network is baffling.

Because you can get higher audio quality, if you want it - whether that's really necessary in an average listening situation is possibly debatable - and you are not at the mercy of whether you can get access to that streaming either now or in the future, or how much it costs. Once you've bought a CD you own it outright, for as long as you like. You can - legally or not, depending on what the government and the courts say this week - convert it to any other audio format you find useful, now or in the future.

And that's even ignoring that you quite often get some nice artwork and a lot of other information included with the CD, if you want it, or that quite a lot of music isn't available on streaming.

I find it equally baffling that people would want to pay money to listen to music they will never own when radio is free...

The audio quality argument is a bit bogus as there are high quality streaming services available and CDs are prone to jitter and errors so digital wins on that front.

Radio is not really a valid comparison as you don't get to decide what to listen to and physical formats aren't future proof either as anyone with cassette, DAT, mini disc etc can attest. Give it 5 years and cars probably won't have cd players.

Fretwired

 Anyone tried Pro Studio Masters - they offer 24-bit AIFF, FLAC and DSD / DSF High-Resolution Audio ..

https://www.prostudiomasters.com/

ICBM

monquixote said:

Radio is not really a valid comparison as you don't get to decide what to listen to and physical formats aren't future proof either as anyone with cassette, DAT, mini disc etc can attest. Give it 5 years and cars probably won't have cd players.

I was being a bit Devil's Advocate .

The future-proof argument doesn't hold up though, since you can convert your CDs into any format you like. That will still be true even if optical drives ever become unobtainable, provided you've already ripped and stored the data in a lossless format.

I agree cars won't have CD drives in 5 years. I would expect optical data drives to be available for probably 20 years or more though, there's just too much on the format - not just music, but also DVD - for it to disappear that quickly.

Fretwired

ICBM said:

monquixote said:

Radio is not really a valid comparison as you don't get to decide what to listen to and physical formats aren't future proof either as anyone with cassette, DAT, mini disc etc can attest. Give it 5 years and cars probably won't have cd players.

I agree cars won't have CD drives in 5 years. I would expect optical data drives to be available for probably 20 years or more though, there's just too much on the format - not just music, but also DVD - for it to disappear that quickly.

My car didn't have a CD as standard. I had to specify one. It has USB ports for an MP3 style player and Bluetooth for connecting a smartphone. As it happens I don't really use the CD player. I have a USB stick with MP3s or stream Spotify via my iPhone.

monquixote

Fretwired said:

My car didn't have a CD as standard. I had to specify one. It has USB ports for an MP3 style player and Bluetooth for connecting a smartphone. As it happens I don't really use the CD player. I have a USB stick with MP3s or stream Spotify via my iPhone.

My new car doesn't have one either.

I actually didn't notice that it wasn't on the spec list until I got it, but it doesn't matter as I only used the CD player in my old car once the whole time I had it.

My wifes car only had a CD player so we had to use it, but on reflection it's really not a sensible thing to have something that's so fiddly to change in a car. I think it's really quite dangerous. Tapes were a lot better in that regard.

monquixote

ICBM said:

The future-proof argument doesn't hold up though, since you can convert your CDs into any format you like. That will still be true even if optical drives ever become unobtainable, provided you've already ripped and stored the data in a lossless format.

I agree cars won't have CD drives in 5 years. I would expect optical data drives to be available for probably 20 years or more though, there's just too much on the format - not just music, but also DVD - for it to disappear that quickly.

You can, but that's more of a theoretical "can" than a practical "can".

I have a few boxes with 450 CDs in them. To rip them would take a stupid amount of time and you also have to consider that most CD drives are incapable of ripping CDs without errors. It's been a long time since I was involved in this sort of thing professionally, but back in the day it could only be done with Plextor drives using EAC and took a really long time per CD. Even so over normalised CDs will clip when you rip them unless you are really careful. We once had a Shakira CD at work which was seemingly impossible to get a clean rip out of.

Even though I have all of the CDs available it would still be easier to find a source to download them than to bother ripping them even if I couldn't conveniently stream them from Spotify with zero effort.

Given that streaming is the only thing propping up the music industry I can't see that genie being allowed to go back in the bottle because the only alternative is everyone going back to illegally downloading music again.

Phil_aka_Pip

monquixote said:

Tapes were a lot better

They don't stop playing just because you drove over a bump. On some of Suffolk's roads you might as well listen to the radio because you don't get much fun out of a CD that stops every few bars.

monquixote

Phil_aka_Pip said:

monquixote said:

Tapes were a lot better

They don't stop playing just because you drove over a bump. On some of Suffolk's roads you might as well listen to the radio because you don't get much fun out of a CD that stops every few bars.

My dad had a really early car CD player and that had caddies you put the CDs in so they looked like a giant floppy disk. It made them really easy to load and they never skipped. I can see why the idea didn't catch on though.

menamestom

Phil_aka_Pip said:

monquixote said:

Why you would want to transfer digital data from a piece of plastic in a little box when the same digital data can stream over a network is baffling.

I think it's because it makes you dependent on both the network and the willingness of someone else to make the data available.

Or just download on wifi.  I've probably got more music downloaded to my phone than I had in the form of a CD collection.  Yet most of the time (either on the road or at home) can listen to a whole lot more.   But the sensible thing is to have a load downloaded to listen to should network or data issues prevent access.

mart

monquixote said:
...

I have a few boxes with 450 CDs in them. To rip them would take a stupid amount of time and you also have to consider that most CD drives are incapable of ripping CDs without errors. ...

About ten years ago I ripped my CD collection which was about 5-600 discs then. I just took a rucksack full to work and stuck one after the other in my desktop, letting them rip while I got on with other stuff. It did take a week or two, but not wasting my time since I was doing other things. And virtually none of the rips had any errors.

viz

@monquixote said:

I find the idea of wanting to own a physical cd as weird as wanting to draw water from a well rather than have indoor plumbing.

I've had Spotify since the day it came out. I've got crates of several hundred CDs cluttering up my house but I think of them as pretty much worthless and will be taking them to Viz’s house. 

Why you would want to transfer digital data from a piece of plastic in a little box when the same digital data can stream over a network is baffling.

Corrected