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What do you do with CDs after you've ripped them?

TomB19

TomB19

Active Member
I'm an older man with roughly 1200 CDs in big packing boxes in the basement. We are now considering moving into a condo. It will be a huge downsizing. I'll have to give up a couple of my stereos and probably trim down the home theater system.

I've always considered physical media to be proof of ownership. Any ideas on what to do with all of these CDs? I'm not too worried about going to jail. Perhaps I should just throw them out and not worry about it?
 
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Cherry pick any that are worth selling online and toss the rest.
 
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Getting rid of the big, bulky cases they came in would reduce the physical volume by a lot. Paper CD cases would help. Not sure I would get rid of them as usual, any storage device has its own pitfalls. I am at present, loading my collection of roughly the same size onto my new Western Digital 2T hard disc drive. I started a week ago and am going to start on the "C" category. Of course I'm loading them onto the 2T at full 44.1, but even at the max bit rate, I'm hardly using any volume of the disc drive.
 
I don't rip them. Ripping them maybe a perfect digital numbers copy, but then after you have ripped it is the DAC you are using as good as the DAC that was in the CD player or your HT processor. CD players improve all the time just as do DAcCs, but what are the end results. I will probably stick with CD's until I pass on.
 
WaynerN said:
Getting rid of the big, bulky cases they came in would reduce the physical volume by a lot. Paper CD cases would help. Not sure I would get rid of them as usual, any storage device has its own pitfalls. I am at present, loading my collection of roughly the same size onto my new Western Digital 2T hard disc drive. I started a week ago and am going to start on the "C" category. Of course I'm loading them onto the 2T at full 44.1, but even at the max bit rate, I'm hardly using any volume of the disc drive.
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Make sure you have another full copy. In the digital domain, if you don't have two copies, you don't have it.

Then donate the cd's to your local charity.
i use milk crates. they're really strong, last near forever, and hold a ton. My entire collection is four or five of the long milkcrates, same for my dvd/blu-rays
 
twiiii said:
I don't rip them. Ripping them maybe a perfect digital numbers copy, but then after you have ripped it is the DAC you are using as good as the DAC that was in the CD player or your HT processor. CD players improve all the time just as do DAcCs, but what are the end results. I will probably stick with CD's until I pass on.
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I will probably also stick with physical media and streaming as well but that’s not the question here. If it gets to the point of having no choice I will have to slim down the library. The idea Wayne had was good, the paper sleeves take up much less space. I am having to give records away to make room for recent purchases. It’s ok because a lot of stuff is not played often enough to warrant keeping.
 
Mine are on indefinite loan to the local library system after ripping them using dbPoweramp which does a great job at capturing metadata.

I have no fewer than half a dozen copies (one stored at wifey's office) with the primary NAS running a RAID 1 mirror. One copy lives on this. ;)

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If you lived near me, I would tell you to sell them (the ones that I was interested in anyway) to me for dirt cheap... I'm one of those weird folks that collect those things, even though I fully realize that in terms of sound that there's no difference between them and a digital dub. I'm not convinced that vinyl really sounds better than CDs (particularly with inevitable scratches and variances of pressing quality) but at least one can make the case that they do sound a bit different than any kind of digital file...
 
twiiii said:
I don't rip them. Ripping them maybe a perfect digital numbers copy, but then after you have ripped it is the DAC you are using as good as the DAC that was in the CD player or your HT processor.
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Absolutely no question. My DAC uses quad chips in dual parallel for lower noise, has separate clocks for 44.1/88.2/176.4 vs 48/96/192, separate power supplies for digital and analog sections, uses zero feedback, class A JFETs for the balanced output section and supports USB to 192/24. No op amps in the signal path as is the case with all Mac gear and my processor (like most)!

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Don't forget the effect of the transport. CD players must perform error correction on-the-fly as they spin at 300 RPM. My bit perfect content (including LOTS of 24 bit high resolution recordings) lives on a NAS with a 6 GB cache. It doesn't take long before playback is directly from memory. Instantly accessible across multiple systems.
 
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