so I'm planning on unloading my CD's
 

I've got boxes of CD.... most of them I've already moved to iTunes. They can be backed up on an External disc, etc. and I haven't touched a CD in years other than to burn custom mixes for the car (again iTunes).

Anyone got rid of all of their disc yet..... ya' know it's inevitable. DVD's are next to be irrelevant. Anyone planning on getting rid of them or anyone already and have regrets?

.... oh, and I really wouldn't mind keeping them, but I'm making space in a cluttered room.

I actually buy most of my albums digitally now. But I try to back em all up to CDRs which I then keep cataloged in paper sleeves on a gigantic Ikea shelf. I just feel I'd be devastated if my external HD crashed.

always and i mean ALWAYS back up any single hard drive....it's not if, but when it's gonna fail.

buying a digital download is madness if you ask me

I've had the same hard drive for 10 years. Not a single problem. Running on ME, even.

....I still back that shit up all the time.

I've been in the process of putting ALL my cd's on external drives too. I don't compress them either. I've just about got it done and when I do, I'm gonna mirror each HD to another that I WON'T use, as an archive. I'm keepin my cds though...will stash them when I travel though. I'm all touchy-feelie about my cd's and won't get rid of them.

I use Seagate mini's 320gig, they're the size of a deck of cards !! :)

I put my entire music collection on my friend's external drive. And when I say "entire", at that point I probably had a good 20,000 albums.. give or take.

About 2 weeks after I did, the fucking thing crashed, he sent it in to get "fixed" (to LIGHTSCRIBE I believe) and the entire thing was wiped. Hours.. no.. days.. worth of ripping cd's/copying off discs/downloading from one computer to the other/etc ... gone. I still blame my friend though. He's TERRIBLE with shit. He bought a $1600 laptop and it stopped working like 4 months later. He's awful..

FreshChops:
Maybe you could sell some of them off here? I'm sure you'd find lots of people are interested. I snagged Unwound and Polvo's discography from this place, once.

Does anyone else look at threads like this and think 'I'm not really seeing this convenience line'?

Huh? I certainly don't agree with purchasing anything digitally. The only stuff I download is the music I only have on vinyl and cassette, so I can have a more easily accessible digital copy of said music without having to make one myself. It's a bit of a hassle to keep flipping wax and tapes over when I just want a bit of background music while I'm writing or painting or cleaning or whatever, so having the more time-consuming mediums digitized is helpful sometimes.

HOWEVER I still would never just have a digital copy of something. I need to have it in my hands too, or on the shelf, so it can become a more tangible item of my ownership. I'd be lying too if I didn't like showing off my big collection of records/tapes/CDs when I have people over to the flat. It's seriously more impressive than "look how much time I spent downloading music". I see the convenience but I think it comes at a cost of not getting the whole piece of the artist's work- the sleeve of the record makes as much an impression on me as the music within, sometimes.

I've had this discussion with my girlfriend about a million times- I'm apparently far too reactionary, whereas I think if you own about 8 CDs (as she does, one of which I'm only a little bit annoyed isn't in my own collection) and have the rest of your collection completely digitized, something is amiss. I don't know what it is, but it just feels strange. Justice was served to my argument anyway, when I accidentally crashed her laptop and she lost everything. Oh how I laughed.

I don't know where I'm going with this.

Yeah, the thing for me isn't that a lot of people have digital collections, it's the thing of getting it from point A (CD/ wax/ tape) to point B (computer) and then providing the means of preserving point B via auxillary station C (regular backups). I don't have a problem with downloading things but I suppose, like you, I'd always give precedence to the more tangible formats.

I suppose my main point is that if, like me, you had a fairly large collection (massive in comparison to the 10-20 album average, I suppose) by the time the digital world comes along it seems like too much of a ball-ache to digitise the collection, and threads like this do nothing to help.

Oh well I see what you mean now. I don't backup my digital shit, as its all in real format on my shelves.

Well I've been doing about 20 cd's a session and it takes a couple of hours to rip to HD. Needless to say it's taking weeks and weeks. I'm doing it in case my cds rot...or I mistakenly fuck them up. I just don't want to buy that music AGAIN !! It's a labor of love, nothing about ego, just time consuming practicality and preservation.

i moved recently, and altho i unloaded some of my less desirable cds, i couldnt bring myself to get rid of them all. part of it is sentimental, and the other part is that i like collecting them and having the physical case around to see.

vinyl are great because you have the album artwork in a large format. cds are fun though, theyre like toys. some albums have such great packaging, from a designers standpoint.

i like having them, and unless something goes wrong and they all got burned or stolen i'll be able to get joy out of them forever

and the chance of bad shit happening to them is pretty low, my grandparents still have tonnes of crap they bought anywhere from 20-50 years ago.