What do you do with your CDs collection??

Anything musical that will not fit into the above fora
Post Reply
soh choon wee
Pianophiliac
Posts: 288
Joined: Wed Jan 13, 2010 12:57 pm
Music Scores: No

What do you do with your CDs collection??

Post by soh choon wee »

For the older generations who started collecting CDs since 1980s, they must have tens of thousands CDs in their collection. Yes, and also VCDs, LDs, LPs or DVDs...... (don't forget our beloved printed scores).

It comes to a time that they occupy too much space...... i roughly make an inventory check, i have nearly 100,000 CDs......

I have some idea (but it will be horribly needing a lot of time) to digitized and keep in storage media.

Yet, what could i do with the physical copies of CDs ????? After digitizing them, do you discard them away?

And, in digitizing the CDs, what do you do with the booklets??? Do you also scan them (and more time needed)..... I wasn't like 1970s when i purchased LPs, i would carefully read the notes (which provides lots of education)..... nowadays, the documentation of CDs are not as good (i am not sure if i am biased).

There is always a fear that the digitized media (even FLAC or LOSLESS) may corrupt, or disappear into obscurity..... unlike actual physical CDs, when they are on the shelves, they get some attention.....
bingo
Site Admin
Posts: 534
Joined: Sat Aug 22, 2020 11:57 pm
Instruments played, if any: piano
Music Scores: Yes

Re: What do you do with your CDs collection??

Post by bingo »

I ripped all my CDs (and many LPs and cassettes) to FLAC over a long period. I bought my first CDs in 1984 (Mozart and Ella Fitzgerald as I recall) and got to some thousands over a 20yr period.

Initially I moved all the CDs off bookshelves into binders, but even those started taking up too much space. So I started lending them to friends and "forgetting" to ask for them back. I've kept maybe a hundred collectibles, signed items etc.

Since then 99% of my purchases have been (lossless) digital,and they usually include a PDF of the booklet, if any. I have a number of backups, but I keep the working copy inside a Dropbox folder on my media server. That way everything is automatically available to my phone and other streaming devices. The PDFs are fully text indexed now by cloud storage services, so I find everything much more easily. Some cloud services also OCR scans the front and back covers.

I've lost many hundreds of CDs over the years to theft, "loan" and deterioration of the CD substrate. I don't lose the digital copies, as they're fully backed up, and in many cases I can re-download copies from the vendor for free.
Post Reply