Starting to think I want rid of them
A company that buys them from you and then loads all to itunes would be nice, but cannot find such.
Anybody ditch their CD's ??

J.

why would you get rid of them, s'not they take up a lot of room.
Audiograbber is your friend, but if you want to pay me to do it, I will…

I'm of no use to you as I love cd's. Old fashioned but nothing better than getting some new ones in the post. (Always buy them online)

Sold all mine. 500-ish. Got a quid each for them at the local 2nd hand record shop. Absolutely no need for them with Spotify and all the stuff I have in digital formats.

I still use CDs as I am not into losing half the detail of every album to cr4ppy mp3/i-tunes file losses.

It seems everyone wants a billion albums on their tiny player yet doesn't give a cr4p about quality any more.

There is the physical thing about CDs that falk mentions too and the fun of discussing your/someone elses music collection if someone comes over for the first time.

IMO i-players/etc are fine for personal players or maybe in the car. For home hifi, unless you buy daft priced upscaling software, you may as well listen to the radio.

Still playing them as it stands.
Just need more rrom in the flat.
J.

Hmm,
Was not aware of the quality loss – figured it was all digital.
Changes things a bit.
J.

I don't have many (c.800), so they don't take up an awful lot of room. Ripping them lossless nd storing digitally would be a PITA, and liable to hardware and software failures without backups.

Instead, I suffer low quality rips for the convenience of ipod use, know I have the real thing as a back up and listen to them on my stereo when I have a chance.

http://www.musicmagpie.co.uk/

I took mine to the local record shop. Went in with the intention of making money, but came out owing them money. Doh ! At least I got some new stuff.

EDIT : loads of other sites out there doing similar stuff btw

Considering the hours I spent happily listening to cassettes, MP3s are just fine.

Personally I'm trying to design a product that will use beautifully circular pieces of polycarbonate, in a structural fashion. Nowhere near.

Surf-Mat – Member
I still use CDs as I am not into losing half the detail of every album to cr4ppy mp3/i-tunes file losses.

It seems everyone wants a billion albums on their tiny player yet doesn't give a cr4p about quality any more.

There is the physical thing about CDs that falk mentions too and the fun of discussing your/someone elses music collection if someone comes over for the first time.

IMO i-players/etc are fine for personal players or maybe in the car. For home hifi, unless you buy daft priced upscaling software, you may as well listen to the radio.

What he said ^

The MP3 compression algorithms lose a lot data whilst compressing the CD sound.

Instead, I suffer low quality rips for the convenience of ipod use, know I have the real thing as a back up and listen to them on my stereo when I have a chance.

Amen.

Surf-Mat BIG +1…

Encoded them all years ago.

Exact Audio Copy is great for this, as it can separate out the ripping and encoding – so it can take in a CD, extract the data and put it in a queue for encode. So it can read and spit out a CD in a minute or two (if you've got a decent CD drive), I just did it over a few weeks, took a big stack to the PC when I was doing some browsing and just fed it disc after disc. The encoding takes longer but it would just catch up in between times.

Didn't bother with lossless, just very high quality VBR MP3 which is fine to my ears. As a test, encode with your preferred settings, convert back to WAV and burn that as an audio CD. Get someone to do a double-blind test with you and see if you can tell the difference. Most people can't actually tell them apart once bitrates exceed 128k. Crappy players can have an effect – so just don't use them for home hifi use.

The CDs themselves just live in boxes in my parents' attic. Been thinking of getting rid but I can't be bothered to sort them out only to get a pittance for each one. New music I tend to buy from Amazon's MP3 store where they're encoded in the same way as I use for my own rips.

the sound quality of my cds and cd player are ten times better than on the PC.

Was not aware of the quality loss – figured it was all digital.
Changes things a bit.

You won't notice it. People pretend they do, but then some people think they can tell the difference between bottled and tap water.
🙂

The MP3 compression algorithms lose a lot data whilst compressing the CD sound.

I bet none of you could tell the difference between a 320kbps MP3 and a CD in a blind test. Probably not even a 224kbps VBR MP3.

the sound quality of my cds and cd player are ten times better than on the PC.

10 times eh? Well that sounds pretty scientific.

you could use this if you're worried about loss of quality
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lossless

You won't notice it. People pretend they do,

Old argument. Lines well drawn.

FWIW, a friend who listens to music on her computer, MP3 player and portable "music centre" and who has no pretensions in the HiFi direction whatsoever, complains that she doesn't like the way that tunes on the MP3 player seem to "stop suddenly" at the end…

I'd be interested to hear what a "ripped" CD sounds like on my home system, but music on an MP3 player just sounds dead and lifeless to my ears. No telling how much the hardware is contributing to this, of course.

imho the higher the volume and the better quality your hifi, the more the low quality starts to stand out with mp3 files and the like.
i pods are great on earphones on a noisy train, but not so hot on a quality home set up..

Few comments there.
Is there a company that will buy your CD's and rip them for you at high quality, so you get a hard drive in return.
Must be surely.

J.

You won't notice it. People pretend they do, but then some people think they can tell the difference between bottled and tap water.

Yes they do. It depends on the type of music you listen to. Put on some average rock tune or some RnB cr4p and you might not notice; play something with a bit of "feeling" to it like an epic classical symphony or something bassy like dubstep and the loss of quality utterly ruins the sound.

Good music reproduced badly makes me angry – yet somehow it's "fine" because you have 324533455234 albums stored on a player the size of a mobile phone. It isn't and IMO it's killing music quality.

I've played music from my laptop (ripped from CDs and on-line radio), from i-players and from dedicated mp3 players through my stereo and they sound UTTERLY dreadful.

People that don't notice the difference are partially deaf and usually using some pants Dixons special hifi system that would make Vivaldi sound like a primary school band.

If you're SERIOUSLY interested:

http://www.naimaudio.com/hifi-products/type/2

imho the higher the volume and the better quality your hifi, the more the low quality starts to stand out with mp3 files and the like.

This is true, but 320kbps MP3s are an accepted standard for music played by DJs in clubs, on very loud and (sometimes) very good soundsystems.

This is true, but 320kbps MP3s are an accepted standard for music played by DJs in clubs, on very loud and (sometimes) very good soundsystems.

Try and get hold of 320kbps music yourself though – very expensive, very hard to source.

People that don't notice the difference are partially deaf and usually using some pants Dixons special hifi system that would make Vivaldi sound like a primary school band.

Funny that because I make my living from music, including recording and mixing bands, sound engineering gigs etc – and you are talking nonsense. You are either kidding yourself or you have low bit-rate MP3s.

Try and get hold of 320kbps music yourself though – very expensive, very hard to source.

If you've got the CDs you can rip them at 320 yourself 😉

But there are plenty of places you can get 320 MP3s from if you know where to look. To the OP, it's actually much easier just to use torrent sites to get rips of the albums you already have on CD. Not strictly legal but morally ok imo.

Ripped about 600 to lossless format over the last few weeks. I just sat with laptop on knee of an evening working through them. Of the 600 there were only about 20 which I will never, ever want to listen to again. Once finished, I backed the whole lot up to external storage too.

Plan now is to get a big Ipod for me and an Ipod Touch for her. I'll put a large subset of the music on mine and she'll have a smaller subset on hers. Sadly neither car stereo takes an Ipod easily (and I've been underwhelmed by FM transmitters) so we'll have to change the car stereos. Then we'll replace the hi-fi CD player with a decent Ipod dock. Then all the CDs can go up in the attic.

Or maybe we'll just keep using CDs for a while?

What is everyone doing with music CD's

Some of us are still listening to vinyl. 😯

Seriously, why would anyone want to dispense with them? Apart from the obvious better sound quality, do memories not play a part? Or knowing who is playing a particular instrument? Or who actually wrote the words?

(Apologies for again sounding off like an old fogey).

Funny that because I make my living from music, including recording and mixing bands, sound engineering gigs etc – and you are talking nonsense. You are either kidding yourself or you have low bit-rate MP3s.

Well thanks for the lame attempt at a smackdown there but I guess you use 320kbps not the usual 196? CDs are (usually) 256kbps so the quality if far better. I can imagine that 99.9% or more of MP3/i-tunes downloaders plump for 196.

So well done – you really showed me then didn't you? Oh and the majority of CDs are recorded at 256mbps…

Higgo – sounds good.
Just maybe a lot of effort.
J.

Vinyl will always be king (and I'm not even old)

but I would never sell my CD's I have spent years looking for some of them but every one is a happy memory.

If music meant nothing to me then maybe I could see the logic of getting rid. I have been tempted to sell some of my rarer CD's but then once the money had been spent I think I would regret it.

Jerome, in actual answer to your actual question, it's illegal to store digital copies if you no longer own the original media, so companies that buy your CDs and then give you the digital copies of them wouldn't last very long!

Having said that, I started to sell off my CDs at the weekend – am averaging about a quid a CD. In my head, it's great to get the money because I've got them on my hard disk because I don't want them any more, but in my heart it's a bit gut wrenching seeing my music collection go for a pittance.

Considering the hours I spent happily listening to cassettes, MP3s are just fine.

Exactly.

Or knowing who is playing a particular instrument? Or who actually wrote the words?

You can look all that up on the internet though 🙂

But seriously – I can see the aesthetic appeal of vinyl – I've got loads of it upstairs and the feel/smell/artwork etc are definitely part of the appeal.

But little plastic jewel cases and CDs? Not for me.

CDs are (usually) 256kbps so the quality if far better.

Oh and the majority of CDs are recorded at 256mbps…

Eh?

The bunk – fair comment – so I will shelf that business model.
Back to Higgos plan.
J.

CDs are (usually) 256kbps so the quality is far better.
Oh and the majority of CDs are recorded at 256mbps…

Yes – they are recorded at 256 so the quality is better than the usual mp3's bit rate of 196. Not really that difficult to understand.

Studio quality MP3s are recorded at 320kbps – but aren't what 99.9999% of people use. They want 12412341414 albums but don't care what they sound like.

Yes – they are recorded at 256 so the quality is better than the usual mp3's bit rate of 196. Not really that difficult to understand.

It would be easy to understand if it bore any relation to reality.

CD bit rate is 1411 with a sample rate of 44.1kHz, 16 bit depth.

Studio quality MP3s are recorded at 320kbps – but aren't what 99.9999% of people use. They want 12412341414 albums but don't care what they sound like.

That's a different issue. You were making silly sweeping statements about all MP3s sounding rubbish when what you mean is that low bitrate MP3s sound rubbish.

Audio CDs are 1.4Mbps not 256kbs

Sold them at a car boot sale. Age of my ears has reduced the necessity to preserve the entire audio spectrum, so MP3 is fine 🙁

To be honest, it all sounds like a chimpanzee playing a kazoo unless you've got directional speaker cables.