It's nice to be able to have access to everything at work. I will be able to fit everything on my 6TB NAS server with room to spare, and have everything backed up twice, one on extra drives at home, another at work. I'm ripping in FLAC with dbpoweramp, correct some tagging and make playlists with Mediamonkey, and listen in three rooms with Squeezebox. Now that I'm digitizing my collection, it's not as big a deal. How old are you? I found that after about 10 years, I bought a lot of albums I previously weeded out by favorite groups. By then, my brain's had enough of the record for a lifetime. Wilco's a ghost is born is my favorite record of the decade, and I've barely listened to it since 2005.
Honestly, though, I usually listen to records I love 30-40 times and then I can barely, if ever, listen to them again. I could never see myself only having a digital collection and nothing else - I'm sure I'll hang on to lots of my remaining CDs for as long as they can be played.
However I've started replacing some CDs with vinyl for home listening and I intend to buy more nof my new music in vinyl form (really grateful to those labels who include a download coupon with the record). The main reason for me buying CDs over vinyl was portability - I've always done a large portion of my listening on the move and I had a CD walkman up until a few years back. I moved earlier this year and I've got slightly less room in the new house which certainly spurred me on and I'll be honest, it feels really good paring things down (I still have loads left though!). That said, I've got rid of/have boxed up to get rid of 350+ CDs this year, basically things I've gone off. This is partly because I like the physical object and partly 'cos the CDs I do still buy are mostly very cheap secondhand/bargain bin ones so it's cheaper just to rip from the disc. I've got pretty much my entire music collection in digital form on a 500gb hard drive (with another one as backup) for iPod purposes - however I only really buy singles digitally rather than whole albums. Is anyone else actively maintaining a digital record collection or planning on doing so? Where are you buying from? How are you storing and organizing everything?Īs I said, I'm sure that the audience for this thread on this board is relatively small, but I'm hoping there might be at least a few others out there who are going this route, and perhaps we can get a discussion going. I think that soon enough more and more artists will start going this route as CDs sales continue to tank. (5) A lot of artists are starting to do the whole LP + mp3/FLAC thing, and I have no desire to start collecting LPs. (4) There's a lot of stuff that's difficult for me to easily acquire where I live, and I've been able to find some stuff that I've had a lot of difficulty tracking down in brick-and-mortar stores on Amazon mp3 and iTunes. (3) I need less shit in my life in general.
(2) I have a lot of books, and I'm not a fan of eBook readers, so I plan on acquiring many more books than I already own, and I don't want to maintain two physical media collections. I buy a CD, rip it into iTunes, and place it on my CD shelves, where it sits forever. (1) I'm 22, so I'm of the generation that sees CDs as nothing more than a storage medium. Most of the new music I buy is from Amazon mp3, although I'm currently searching for some good online stores that sell everything in FLAC. My goal is to eventually have as few physical CDs as possible, and I want all of my digital music to sit on two hard drives. I sold off a chunk of the collection in two batches, and I'm getting ready to sell off a third.
The first step in this process has been culling my CD collection. Recently, I've decided to go (mostly) digital. The majority of posters on ILM seem to prefer their music on LPs and CDs, and I definitely see the appeal in doing that-up until very recently, I had to have everything in CD- but I think there might be a few others who, like me, are starting to purchase most of their music digitally. I'm not talking about buying a CD or LP and then digitizing it, but buying music natively in mp3, FLAC, or some other format. There's been some talk about digital music collections in the past on threads like The Data Migration Thread, but I wanted to start a new thread! dedicated solely to those of us who are actively building up (legally acquired) digital music collections.