What is the point of CD rips?

[restorer-john]

The case for collecting, ripping and storing CDs is a hard one to make in 2024, especially for people who don't have a large collection and are still discovering and evolving in their musical tastes.

For some of us who made the transistion to Compact Disc in the 1980s, when we were younger audiophiles, those physical collections of now rare and original CD pressings are pretty much impossible to replace and represent the authoritative digital versions.

For me, my collection numbers probably 5000+ CDs, maybe more, not sure, haven't counted them since it was about 1500 about 20 years ago. I couldn't make a solid case in 2024 for going the physical route again. But I don't need to, barring some disaster that takes them all from me.

That said, my concern is for the cost of all music going forward. The industry is clearly moving/moved to a consumption based model and with all these gigantic buy-outs of artists' entire catalogues of rights, the cost is only going to continue creeping up for decades as they seek to make large ongoing returns on those investments. Soon the quality will be deliberately diminished for all but the abolute top tiers where people pay the most, just as the streaming video services are doing. 100% ownership of an uncompressed original on a ubiquitous carrier such as CD will disappear completely.

I see streaming pretty much as I did FM radio back in the day, except with a virtually limitless number of 'stations'. A good way to find new music, but not as anything more.

YMMV of course.

 

[axellieb]

I still rip all my CDs, why? Offline availability.
At home i have good fast and stable internet so I pretty much stream everything. But I also travel for work regularly. Often to areas with bad or no internet reception at all. In those cases it is still nice to have my music offline available to me.

A good argument, though a fringe one.

And as I've pointed out, you can also download a bunch of albums or playlists from Tidal and listen to them offline.

 

[axellieb]

When the streaming services consolidate, they will collude and start pricing by the song or buying complete label catalogs and only offer certain material. Just look at TV and movie streaming, one needs half a dozen services to get everything. I'm keeping my physical media and rips, and not just relying on a good internet connection when available in my rural location.

This may or may not come to pass. Until then, we can enjoy very low fees for amazing service, and maybe keep a list of those few albums we discover that are must-buys when the service apocalypse you envision materializes.

 

[axellieb]

Buying used CDs and ripping them to lossless files is my way. My elderly HP tower doubles as my music server -- the files take up most of a physically separate 2TB hard drive that's periodically backed up to my 12TB external drive. It's bad enough that my loved ones insist on multiple streaming subscriptions for TV and movies -- there's no way I'm going pay a monthly ransom for streaming music of dubious SQ when I already own the CDs!

Liked for the added value comment about buying used CDs!

 

[axellieb]

In case of entire internet shutdown, when thinking about potential causes, I think personal CD collections would be the least of our worries

And that goes for major natural disasters, too. If you're worried that you won't be able to listen to your favorite Pink Floyd albums after a 9.1 earthquake because your cable and mobile connections have both been destroyed, you may have slightly odd priorities in life. (Not judging! That's fine but you are the odd one out, not the person who thinks Tidal's 99.9% availability is good enough.) Besides, if you buy CDs, presumably you have a CD player that can stand in when the streaming apocalypse happens.

 

[axellieb]

I thought a CD lifespan was 50-100 years. So, 1982 + 50 = 2032. I don't think that 50-100 year lifespan is gospel by any means. Is that the 1-sigma range, or the 3-sigma range? I'm sure someone knows the actual references for that.

The first generation of CDs is already rotting and dying - CDM Create Digital Music

CDs and other optical media don't last forever - then can even rot. But storage can help. Here's what archivists and research can teach us.

cdm.link

Some CD's started to deteriorate after 20-25 years.

https://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rt/CDservicelife_rev.pdf

Many thanks to you and the other couple of commenters with details about proper backup methods! I appreciate you making the effort. I really do.

But in my mind, the upshot of all this is perhaps not what you intended. Namely, if anything, all this just seems like another strike AGAINST buying CDs.

 

[radix]

Many thanks to you and the other couple of commenters with details about proper backup methods! I appreciate you making the effort. I really do.

But in my mind, the upshot of all this is perhaps not what you intended. Namely, if anything, all this just seems like another strike AGAINST buying CDs.

What you should buy/rent is the MASTER. The way a recording is mixed determines how good it sounds. Some people prefer older masters before the loudness wars or other studio tricks.

It is often hard to get the master you prefer on a streaming service. You can get it on a CD or LP.

I'm not that super-picky to hunt down specific masters. I know some people are and do.

If you have CDs or LPs, I rip them and store the bits in a way that wont be lost. Sure, a brand new CD is unlikely to deteriorate before I do, but there's fires or theft or accidental damage. If you feel you can easily replace it later, then backups don't matter.

Personally, I use Roon, where I can mix my home collection with online (qobuz) in one app. And I do spotify for its selection and generated playlists.

If I'm going to bother with physical media, I generally go with an LP for personal preference reasons.

 

[Multicore]

I thought a CD lifespan was 50-100 years. So, 1982 + 50 = 2032. I don't think that 50-100 year lifespan is gospel by any means. Is that the 1-sigma range, or the 3-sigma range? I'm sure someone knows the actual references for that.

The first generation of CDs is already rotting and dying - CDM Create Digital Music

CDs and other optical media don't last forever - then can even rot. But storage can help. Here's what archivists and research can teach us.

cdm.link

Some CD's started to deteriorate after 20-25 years.

https://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rt/CDservicelife_rev.pdf

Backup != Archive

 

[radix]

Backup != Archive

Sorry, that's a little too terse for me to grok the contextual meaning.

I was responding when you said "The CD is the backup." I would say the CD is the archival copy. But it can still go bad too.

Maybe we're agreeing?

 

[axellieb]

What you should buy/rent is the MASTER. The way a recording is mixed determines how good it sounds. Some people prefer older masters before the loudness wars or other studio tricks.

It is often hard to get the master you prefer on a streaming service. You can get it on a CD or LP.

I'm not that super-picky to hunt down specific masters. I know some people are and do.

If you have CDs or LPs, I rip them and store the bits in a way that wont be lost. Sure, a brand new CD is unlikely to deteriorate before I do, but there's fires or theft or accidental damage. If you feel you can easily replace it later, then backups don't matter.

Personally, I use Roon, where I can mix my home collection with online (qobuz) in one app. And I do spotify for its selection and generated playlists.

If I'm going to bother with physical media, I generally go with an LP for personal preference reasons.

Yes, if the difference is detectable to you and significant, then this is an argument for buying select CDs or LPs.
But now that master quality streaming is becoming more common, perhaps this argument, too will fade over time. We shall see!

 

[mjgraves]

Lost my entire rip collection a few weeks back. Not an enormous collection but probably about 200 CDs. The SD card they were stored on couldn't be rescued and I had no back-up.

Yeah.

Have been playing around with Tidal since then and so far, it seems to suit me just fine. Albums that I can't find on there are very few. Maybe 5% of my collection.

So, my question is: is there even a point in re-ripping my collection that I'm missing? I can't think of one. I mean apart from the few CDs I can't find on Tidal. And indeed, what is even the point of buying CDs at this point, again apart from the rare cases that aren't on Tidal and the like?

Yes. I live in Hurricane Alley. There have been times, post-hurricane, when we had no internet access for several weeks. Availability of local media gets around this. Whether Logitech Media Server & PicCorePlayer or a Tivo with 200 hours of recorded shows. One time it convinced our neighbors kids that our cable TV was working when Comcast was down for the entire neighborhood.

Even moreso now that most people don't have a CD player, or even CD-ROM drive in a computer. FWIW, originally, I ripped my CDs to MP3. Later, when hard drives were larger, I ripped them to FLAC.

 

[axellieb]

Yes. I live in Hurricane Alley. There have bveen times, post-hurricane, when we had no internet access for several weeks. Availability of local media gets around this. Whether Logitech Media Server & PicCorePlayer or a Tivo with 200 hours of recorded shows. One time it convinced our neighbors kids that our cable TV was working when Comcast was down for the entire neighborhood.

Even moreso now that most people don't have a CD player, or even CD-ROM drive in a computer. FWIW, originally, I ripped my CDs to MP3. Later, when hard drives were larger, I ripped them to FLAC.

Admittedly, if you live in a place where sth like that can happen, and perhaps happen several times throughout your life, it is a reasonable argument.

 

[restorer-john]

Even moreso now that most people don't have a CD player, or even CD-ROM drive ina computer.

That's amazing to me. Where did all the players go? So sad if true. Millions upon millions of CD players in landfill? What a waste.

 

[Multicore]

Sorry, that's a little too terse for me to grok the contextual meaning.

I was responding when you said "The CD is the backup." I would say the CD is the archival copy. But it can still go bad too.

Maybe we're agreeing?

Sure! why not?

OP talked about losing a memory card of CD rips without backup so I tried to marshall my McLuhan voice into BBcode and make a deepity.

Then you brought the long life of CDs into the picture, which extends the question to archiving. I wanted to punctuate the distinction. I couldn't find the ≠ sign on my phone's "keyboard". It has a gazillion yellow hieroglyphs I know not the meaning of but lacks inequality!? In this day and age?! The irony!!

Archiving digital materials is complicated when you really think about it, as I did when I switched to digital photography. Put your only copy of your photo negatives in a fire-proof box and you're in pretty good shape for generations. But what to do about digital files? It's so hard in the end I just gave up and do only backups.

CDs are a lot closer to being archival than most digital media. You need to maintain also a system for reading the media and the file formats you extract. You need a schedule for testing that system and another for reviewing if it should be modified because of obsolescent formats, computer interfaces, and so on. For example, just yesterday I was thinking about the Apple Macintosh 512KE that I haven't turned on for donkeys. If I wanted to, how would I prepare a floppy disk to put in it or review the files on the old disks?

CDs are indeed archival compared to that, assuming they were well printed. We agreed!

What about writable optical disks? There are product models that advertise themselves as archival. I wonder how they test that? Accelerated aging labs? And do other products that don't call themselves archival fail sooner? Important questions for the archivist.

 

[mhardy6647]

That's amazing to me. Where did all the players go? So sad if true. Millions upon millions of CD players in landfill? What a waste.

Many of them are in my basement.

 

[Mart68]

Many of them are in my basement.

The rest are in my spare bedroom...

 

[coonmanx]

The case for collecting, ripping and storing CDs is a hard one to make in 2024, especially for people who don't have a large collection and are still discovering and evolving in their musical tastes.

For some of us who made the transistion to Compact Disc in the 1980s, when we were younger audiophiles, those physical collections of now rare and original CD pressings are pretty much impossible to replace and represent the authoritative digital versions.

For me, my collection numbers probably 5000+ CDs, maybe more, not sure, haven't counted them since it was about 1500 about 20 years ago. I couldn't make a solid case in 2024 for going the physical route again. But I don't need to, barring some disaster that takes them all from me.

That said, my concern is for the cost of all music going forward. The industry is clearly moving/moved to a consumption based model and with all these gigantic buy-outs of artists' entire catalogues of rights, the cost is only going to continue creeping up for decades as they seek to make large ongoing returns on those investments. Soon the quality will be deliberately diminished for all but the abolute top tiers where people pay the most, just as the streaming video services are doing. 100% ownership of an uncompressed original on a ubiquitous carrier such as CD will disappear completely.

I see streaming pretty much as I did FM radio back in the day, except with a virtually limitless number of 'stations'. A good way to find new music, but not as anything more.

YMMV of course.

I don't know about the ripping part because I really don't do that. I have three CD players in the house so I can play a CD anywhere. And CDs are super cheap these days and readily available. I don't buy a lot of them but maybe one every couple of months or so. I maybe only have about 50 to 60 discs and that is fine with me. I am also constantly looking at unloading those that I no longer really listen to. And there is a guy locally who can take them off of my hands because he has a head shop/used record and CD store...

Last night I was thinking about why I don't stream anything from a paid service. I was watching this video of Hendrix at the Isle of Wight. Applied a bit of EQ using Easy Effects in Linux and it was amazing to watch. I found that by exploring, not having something fed to me. And that is sort of how I look at it. Streaming is more like laying on your back with a funnel in your mouth as music is poured in. What I do is exploring, searching the internet for content that I like and have previously possibly not seen. And last night I ran across that video. Sadly he would end up dead about 18 days after that concert. Man, what a loss. He was truly inspiring...

And of course, the music that he played at Isle of Wight is available on both CD and DVD. So maybe I will get it. It is on my radar for sure. But we will see. I already have a few Hendrix CD's...

 

[coonmanx]

That's amazing to me. Where did all the players go? So sad if true. Millions upon millions of CD players in landfill? What a waste.

LOL. I have four different CD players, plus a DVD drive that can play CDs in the computer...

 

[coonmanx]

I'm not too worried about backing up any of my CDs by ripping them to the computer. If a disc fails then I can simply go online and get a replacement easily and most likely for under $10.

 

[The Equalizer]

I had ripped all my CDs, but then I started buying new ones and I got lazy about ripping the latest acquisitions.

I don't subscribe to any music streaming services at the moment. Are there any provisions for liner notes? For digital downloads it's a bit spotty - I bought a couple of albums that came with a pdf, and a couple that didn't.

"Everything I know I learned from liner notes."

Well, not really, but it makes for a nice quote.

Unless someone already covered this and I missed it: on a streaming service, the company knows what you listen to, how often, and when, and can do whatever they want with that information. Most customers are fine with that. I haven't decided if I'm fine with it or not.