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There Is No CD Revival

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Re: There Is No CD Revival

#171
I think journalists are forgetting that vinyl has a distinct sound, also to millennials, they are simply cool as fuck. They come in giant sleeves you can hang in your wall, bookshelf. CDs are just burned digital data. Maybe someday they’ll gain a retro appeal, but for now they have this ugly recursive consumer status. They’re reminiscent of the dial up era where you had no choice but to compress to MP3 to fit on your 2gb SanDisc player.

To me, CDs were always a burden. We’ve just been fortunate enough to have larger bandwidths and more storage to do away with them.

I get the appeal of box art, photos, and lyric sheets, but who wants to put up with changing discs and physical conditions like scratches and finger prints?

>They can’t take ‘em away from me!

Same applies to local storage

Re: There Is No CD Revival

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're being a little harsh, but essentially correct. I worked at a newspaper for about five years, even wrote a weekly column for a couple. Lemme tell you, coming up with something interesting to say every week is really hard . "CD sales are up a tick? Oh, something to write about, which incidentally is my job, thank god." That's it.

This is something that frustrates me about large news/content sites. So much of it reads like it was written because someone needed to write something and not because this particular thing needed to be said.

I realized a while ago that a good 90%+ of news stories are about a) things that affect my life in 0 way whatsoever and b) things that I have absolutely no control over.

I thought, if something fits these two criteria then what exactly is the point in me spending time reading about it? So I no longer read the news.

Re: There Is No CD Revival

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had ~1100 CDs in 2000. Now I have close to 0. I don't even own a device I could play a CD in nor rip it. None of my 4 PCs (3 Macs, one Gaming Windows Box) have a CD (nor DVD nor Bluray) player. Instead I have about 9000 mp3 files. I find streaming services frustrating because their recommendation algorithm suck. I tried playing "Swing" and it gave me "Volare" by Dean Martin. (that's not Swing), I pick Prince Radio…

If you can organize and manage 9k mp3 files could you not just as easily setup your own playlists on spotify?

1. This presumes Spotify will still be in business in the next 10, 30, 50+ years.

2. This presumes 100% of the music collection is on Spotify. Personally speaking, 60%~ of the music I listen to ISN'T on Spotify.

3. This presumes music is only desired to be listened to when an available internet connection is available.

Having to shuffle my media collections around whenever a third party went out of business or pivoted was such a massive headache that it was the inspiration for just managing my own media collections locally.

Re: There Is No CD Revival

#174
I've been buying albums off of iTunes for 10 years now. I've verified I can playback the AAC file on a machine not having my Apple ID setup. Apple claims you "own" the music you purchase from iTunes and this test verifies the claim. I have all those files backed up.

I typically buy an album every two weeks, so I've been buying 26 or so albums per year. I'm old-school - I still like to own my music. I used to have a large CD collection but now that's all been ripped and imported into my digital music library.

I typically use my iPhone for playback. I've now taken to playing back through BT speakers at home, BT headphones while mowing, and my BT sound system in my car. It's highly convenient and I've been listening to more music than ever.

I don't understand the infatuation with physical media, or analog for that matter, but if the medium helps you better connect to the music then that's cool. Different people enjoy music in different ways.

I grew up with vinyl but I really enjoy going to my uncle's house and listening to his reel-to-reel tapes of classic 70's rock. I really wish those clamoring for analog skipped vinyl and created a resurgence in reel-to-reel. They sound better than anything. BUT - I can't really listen to a reel-to-reel while mowing the lawn, can I? But boy it'd be nice to have for a few special albums!

But CD's? What's the point?

Re: There Is No CD Revival

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it's so difficult to find any hardware anywhere that respects that flag that hacker forums are filled with questions asking if anyone ever saw such a device. Every modern copy or backup program ignores it, and it looks like none ever used it.

It was used on standalone audio recorders.

Yep, very few, and likely nothing anyone is using now to copy/backup CDs with.

In forums where people look for such things out of curiosity people mention they existed, but I've not yet found someone that owns one to play with.

And zero of them stopped the analog hole on those old devices.

Now, as to the actual bit(s). There were two bits, one said copyrighted work, one said is this a copy. Almost all CDs shipped with the copyright bit set and the "is a copy" bit set to 0. This meant you can make one copy of the CD (by law). The copy should have the "is a copy" bit set, meaning no more copies of the copied disc.

This means you can actually copy the original CD as many times as you want, since it always looked like an original, hence copyable.

Remember Sony hardware sold an order of magnitude more in value than Sony music :)

Again, a non-issue. To recap:

1. Very few CDs even bothered to set the bits. 2. None (?) set both bits, meaning you can copy any original CD, even with bit respecting hardware. 3. The bit(s) in no way changed the audio. 4. No copy software on PC I have ever heard of even looked at the bit. 5. Very few pieces of hardware respected the bit.

Did I miss anything?

Re: There Is No CD Revival

#176
post #45

I still buy Music CDs. Why? Because once I have the disc in my hand, no-one can legally take it away from me. I can enjoy the contents legally until I'm dead, all for a single one-off payment with no-expiry. However, my households use of streaming media (mainly Spotify) has increased for 'casual' listening, so I think there is a balance, and I hope that buying physical media for music wont disappear completely any ti…

Nobody can take them away, but the problem that I've found with with physical DVDs (I can't comment so much on CDs) is that they deteriorate after just a few years. For a while in 2010, my wife and I routinely borrowed DVDs from a library, but we gave up when it seemed like half of them were unplayable; sometimes from the beginning, sometimes freezing an hour into the movie. Over the next five years, we found that ou…

That's weird. Are you sure wherever or however you're storing them isn't damaging them somehow? Or maybe your player is on the way out? I've played some very old discs that work just fine. I haven't had any issues with DVDs despite having a few from the early 2000s.

Library discs are another story. Those are abused to hell and back.

Re: There Is No CD Revival

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had ~1100 CDs in 2000. Now I have close to 0. I don't even own a device I could play a CD in nor rip it. None of my 4 PCs (3 Macs, one Gaming Windows Box) have a CD (nor DVD nor Bluray) player. Instead I have about 9000 mp3 files. I find streaming services frustrating because their recommendation algorithm suck. I tried playing "Swing" and it gave me "Volare" by Dean Martin. (that's not Swing), I pick Prince Radio…

Same... literally. About 1200 CDs in 2000, I ripped them at some point and sold them when I became a digital nomad. I have no idea where those rips are; I think I may have just liked them all on Spotify and kept a folder of obscure albums I wasn't likely to find online. But I'm not sure where that folder is. I bounce between Spotify and Youtube Music and Apple Music. I recently got into Apple Music library curation b…

Did you notice how tracks and whole albums sometimes disappear from Spotify?

If not yet, you're in for a unpleasant surprise.

Re: There Is No CD Revival

#178

I think journalists are forgetting that vinyl has a distinct sound, also to millennials, they are simply cool as fuck. They come in giant sleeves you can hang in your wall, bookshelf. CDs are just burned digital data. Maybe someday they’ll gain a retro appeal, but for now they have this ugly recursive consumer status. They’re reminiscent of the dial up era where you had no choice but to compress to MP3 to fit on your…

> vinyl has a distinct sound

Aside from the cracks and pops, it's because it's mastered that way because of limitations of vinyl. But I agree that vinyl makes sense as the last physical medium because the playback technology is so simple and the covers make them large enough to be statement pieces.

Re: There Is No CD Revival

#179

If I'm buying physical media in 2022 that I actually need to find from a shelf and put into a player it either needs to be of higher quality than the digital option or have something else going for it. Thus, it's LP's for music in my case. The cover art alone is worth it. For movies and TV, I have the cream of the crop on physical Bluray or DVD, the ones that I want to see even if there is a license pissing contest b…

LPs are not higher quality.

"it either needs to be of higher quality than the digital option or have something else going for it"

LPs have the "something else", which is gorgeous cover art and the ritual of listening - for me at least.

Re: There Is No CD Revival

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are only about a few dozen records in the world worthy of the ceremony to me, to be honest. They're the ones you can listen from start to beginning in order every time. The ones you never get bored of and if you do, you have a need to listen to them again pretty soon. The chance of me grabbing an LP off the shelf and listening to 6 Underground by the Sneaker Pimps from their Becoming X album is exactly is zero.…

My favorite band is Queen, so only counting their studio albums, that already gives me more than a dozen LPs I will listen to all the way through over and over again. Then there's their live albums, the band members' solo albums, singles/45s... I also think listening to one side of an LP and then switching to a different one isn't that much more work than flipping it over, so it's OK if only one side is flawless. I w…

I do have stuff I like, but don't love. I just mostly listen to those on digital, as they're not worthy of the Ritual - yet at least =)
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