Speaking of finding one’s inner Luddite ...

I find the “lossiness” that comes with converting CDs to mp3s to be pathetically unacceptable.  This is especially problematic with the jazz portion of my collection Sure you can sample an mp3 at a really high rate, but then storage capacity becomes an issue.  I’d probably need 2 single terabyte HDDs to store my CD collection if ripped with minimal compression.  (Yes, I have a lot of CDs.)  MP3s always makes me want to yell “what’s wrong with you kids!  Sure you can fit thousands of mp3s on your iPod, but don’t you kids give a damn about hearing the full depth and range of your music!  And get off my lawn.” 

I also find the sample rate for iTunes purchases to be pathetic, if a bit better.

Your experience with various media may vary, of course.

I created playlists. One that has every unrated song. One that has every two stars song I listened to over 6 months ago. One that has every three stars song I listened to over 2 weeks ago. One that has every four stars song I listened to over 3 days ago. One that has every 5 stars song I haven’t listened to today. (Note: no list with 1 star song. Which ends up being basically intros and fillers and whatever I *really* hate on a given album.)

Then I built a meta list that is made of all these lists combined, and I put my iPod on random.

And by “I put my iPod on random”, I mean I *always* have it on random. Eventually stuff gets rated. Or re-rated, for that matter (that 2 stars song I actually figure out I like better than I thought when it comes up 6 months later gets upgraded, whatever flavor of the month I was obsessively listening to every day gets downgraded at some point).

Richard, you’re an audiophile; not everyone is so picky. MP3 isn’t the only encoding out there, either, and terabyte-range hard disks are getting cheaper every day—for a few hundred bucks, you could have a network-attached storage device with room enough for all your music and to spare. Of course, then you have to start worrying about backups, but on the third hand, unless you throw away the original CDs, why sweat it?

When it came time for me to cull my music collection, I actually found it pretty simple, but that was largely due to the realization that most of what I had was crap people had pushed on me that I didn’t really like all that much. Your mileage, of course, may vary.

Richard, you’re an audiophile; not everyone is so picky. MP3 isn’t the only encoding out there, either, and terabyte-range hard disks are getting cheaper every day—for a few hundred bucks, you could have a network-attached storage device with room enough for all your music and to spare. Of course, then you have to start worrying about backups, but on the third hand, unless you throw away the original CDs, why sweat it?

Like I said, experience varies.  I don’t have any interest in listening to music on the go, so the portability of mp3s is not a factor for me.  Thus I am trading sound quality (which is important to me) for portability (which is not).  For people who do listen to iPods while taking the subway or walking, I understand the trade off.

I just needed to rant, really.  My only fear is that people are going to start dumbing down music by mixing to the mp3 spec.  This is what happened when the Walkman caught on - where producers started mixing music for use in the Walkman by smoothing out variations in volume.

And I’ll never throw out my CDs - they’ll have to pry them from my cold, dead fingers. 

My only fear is that people are going to start dumbing down music by mixing to the mp3 spec.

They’ve been doing this for years. If I pull out any of the CDs from my college years, they are noticeably quieter than anything I’ve picked up in the last ten years. It’s especially apparent on PJ Harvey albums. The earlier recordings left a lot more head room for greater dynamic range. Everything these days is mixed and pumped to the limit.

I’m an audiophile, but realistically, I was barely listening to CDs and listening to MP3s more.  I have vinyl records, which is probably enough for when I want quality over convenience.

Also, the control you get with MP3s is hard to trade down from.  It’s simply frustrating sorting through all the CDs to hear this song or that—-and I had mine on a 300 disc changer that had digital labels!  MP3s, where you can just search and play?  Much better.  I pipe my music through the Apple TV and it sounds fine enough.  I don’t really listen to much jazz, either.

Egnu is right - the loudness and compression wars have been escalating over the past 15 years. The lowest bass and highest treble data is thrown out for the sake of overall volume, compressed “like the radio” which is brutal in terms of dynamics.

Sure, it may only be an audiophile-nerd’s concern, but my guess is that the lack of dynamics in commercially recorded and released audio will get worse before they get better. CD audio standards themselves are pretty arbitrary, but I didn’t know that until my own band recorded in a real studio, and the engineer had to dumb down the rough mixes, audio-wise, to burn to a CD. Anyway, the only consolation is that, yes, hard drives will get bigger and cheaper, so MP3 doesn’t have to be the only option. As I understand it, FLAC is the best loss-less format, but there are many others.

For better or worse, I’m not a vinyl person. I still have most of my CDs, too, gathering dust, but here’s the thing - for me, the CDs are now a viable hard-copy backup. For the albums I really love, I’ll never dump the CDs. When I do sell CDs off, I rip a loss-less copy of the songs I like, and do it in batches so that there’s enough material to burn onto a data DVD.

And Amanda, I’m sure you know that even your MP3s are still just soft copies. Even if you jettison all your CDs, I’d still make a hard copy backup of all your MP3s. Paranoia in defense of potential data loss (and music library nukage) is no vice in this case.

And I’ll never throw out my CDs - they’ll have to pry them from my cold, dead fingers.

You and me both, Richard.

If I pull out any of the CDs from my college years, they are noticeably quieter than anything I’ve picked up in the last ten years. It’s especially apparent on PJ Harvey albums. The earlier recordings left a lot more head room for greater dynamic range. Everything these days is mixed and pumped to the limit.

Alan Wilder of Depeche Mode on the ‘Volume Wars’ and music in general:

http://www.side-line.com/interviews_comments.php?id=29640_0_16_0_C

If your average song length were 3 min (yeah, that short, I know), it would take about 5.2 straight days (10500 min or 175 hours) to listen to 3500 songs.  Adjust by 1.4 days per average minute of play per song.
Always keep a back up of anything you value.  Hard drives and other soft memory media can brick more easily than many people realize.

Fee Waybill still does that cross dress as trashy 60s/70s country queen thing and it is still awesome.  Only he adds a paper towel roll codpiece because it needs more comedic effect than the cross dress alone can muster ...

Always keep a back up of anything you value.  Hard drives and other soft memory media can brick more easily than many people realize.

Seconded.  I’ve seen whole mp3 libraries wiped out by a bad iTunes install and you don’t want to be caught without extra copies of your source material.

I do find that some of the settings on my new I-touch (finally of the pod) do odd things to certain recordings - like old Red Hot Chili Peppers sounded strange until I turned off the setting that removes noise and turned off the noise cancelling headphones because it was jamming some of what it was supposed to sound like!

Suggestions on culling a collection are welcome.

yeah, there is not much you can do other than be ruthless. For me the cutoff is genre pieces that are anything less than spectacular examples of their genre.

Oh, and we still have at least 1,000 CDs and hundreds of records.

me: what are you looking for?
teen son at computer: Faith no More
me: really?  we might have it
teen son: huh?
me: on CD silly - go look
teen son: oh (pulls out CD).  I guess I should look here first
me: yep

Always keep a back up of anything you value.  Hard drives and other soft memory media can brick more easily than many people realize.

Amen.  I learned that one the hard way.

Richard:

Look, some of us just aren’t as picky as you, so stop giving us FLAC about it, mmkay?

Unfortunately it does not appear that I can put much of a Genius mix together from my recent downloads since most of them are obscure comedy artists…

If your average song length were 3 min (yeah, that short, I know)

As a punk and hardcore enthusiast, I have to say that that sounds long to me.

Always keep a back up of anything you value.  Hard drives and other soft memory media can brick more easily than many people realize.

I already have a backup for my collection. It’s called the Internet.

I don’t cull, but I will load my shuffle randomly, and change it often.  I can’t fit all my stuff on my iPod either, and just tend to rotate it.

When it was close, I tried to keep it in range, but it’s way more than I’ll ever fit, and big iPods feel unwieldy to me, so random shuffle and the hope of rotating through it all eventually is my new strategy.

keir, yeah, I’m actually a pretty smart person.   

I have it backed up in two places.

If your average song length were 3 min (yeah, that short, I know), it would take about 5.2 straight days (10500 min or 175 hours) to listen to 3500 songs.  Adjust by 1.4 days per average minute of play per song.

The final cut, between my CDs and what I already had on file is 12,444 song, which iTunes says it will take 30.5 days to play, and takes up 57.74 GB.

I’m currently on a mission to listen to everything on my iTunes, which would apparently take 56 days.  I’ve tried this before, and failed, so this time I’m listening from the bottom up.  I just started Stravinsky yesterday.

And no recorded format will ever be as good as live performance, so I’ll take portability and easy organization over high quality sound.

I find the “lossiness” that comes with converting CDs to mp3s to be pathetically unacceptable.  This is especially problematic with the jazz portion of my collection Sure you can sample an mp3 at a really high rate, but then storage capacity becomes an issue.  I’d probably need 2 single terabyte HDDs to store my CD collection if ripped with minimal compression.  (Yes, I have a lot of CDs.) MP3s always makes me want to yell “what’s wrong with you kids!  Sure you can fit thousands of mp3s on your iPod, but don’t you kids give a damn about hearing the full depth and range of your music!  And get off my lawn.”

Unless you have a mid-high end audio card/Hi-Fi stereo setup, most would be hard-pressed to notice the differences.  Considering most OEMs in the market load up the cheapest audio chipsets(i.e. onboard AC’ 97) on nearly everything except specific “premium” models dedicated to the hardcore audiophile/multimedia fan, I doubt most would even notice the difference unless the mp3 compression level is very high (i.e. Below 192 Kbps 44 Khz stereo) or the encoding software/encoder codec was crap to begin with and/or the encoding person didn’t know what s(he)‘s doing. 

If you’re listening to audio on your media player using a minijack…..you’d be faced with a similar phenomenon due to the minijack’s frequency and possible outside noise limitations.  There was definitely a qualitative difference between listening to my media player through the minijack earphones and listening to it pumped to stereo speakers through its USB connection. 

Knowing all of this, I still set my itunes to rip my CDs as apple lossless files so I have a viable backup for my CDs because of the imprecision of the audio CD’s redbook standard where error correction is completely dependent on the CD player you’re using. 

I also find the sample rate for iTunes purchases to be pathetic, if a bit better.

I REFUSE to pay the same price for an itunes based album as its CD counterpart so long as it is encoded in a lossy format. 

With the current pricing dynamics, I’d rather opt for the CD with the artwork, insert, and physical CD media rather than pay the same price for a downgraded copy without any of that…..especially when I can get used CDs in good/immaculate condition for less.  Now if they’d consider lowering the price of itunes downloads to account for all that or start selling lossless files….I’d be more than happy to finally buying something from itunes. 

Then again, I have no problem with a lossy version of a song so long as it is lower cost or free as I view them the same way I viewed cassette tapes back in college.

I’m okay with my lossless digital tacks taking up more space.  But it’s not like it takes up terabytes of space; that would be a tremendous number of songs.

However, I need to find a good solution for my mother’s record player, it needs to be replaced, seriously.  I’ve been looking at USB models, but they seem to come and go so quick!

I have a Crosley USB turntable with a built in cd player and tape deck that works wonderfully. It’s a little pricey, but they have a lot of different models if you don’t need all those options.

I’m with Richard Goblin. I can’t stand the sound quality loss on MP3s. I like instrumentation with a big range of color (it’s a technical music term).