Rediscovering my CD collection
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Over the last week or so I've been digitising my CD collection. The vast majority of it I built in the 1990s and 2000s. After that I didn't buy many CDs anymore, and later mostly bought music digitally. Only recently I started to buy physical CDs again. Besides CDs that I bought myself back then, I also have a number of ripped albums and mix CDs that I got from friends and family members. Especially with the latter group it's been a fun dive into my past.
Some examples
- It's fun to see what my younger cousin loved 20 years ago and passed along to me: Bands like Bloc Party, Bright Eyes, Fleet Foxes, or The John Butler Trio. I haven't listened to those in about as long as I've had their songs in my possession. LOL She also introduced The Shins to me, and I went on to buy a few of their other albums afterwards. Though I haven't listened to them in a long time either.
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While at uni, a fellow student introduced me to albums by the label Putumayo. They publish compilations with music of musicians from around the world and of all kinds of genres, always put together around a theme. E. g. there are titles like "Acoustic France", "Global Soul", "Mali to Memphis" etc. Two of my favourite albums are "Music from The Tea Lands", and "Arabic Groove". It's good stuff!
Their album art is very beautiful, the CDs used to come in digi packs, and the booklets were substantial with information about each artist. From their website I am not sure if they still sell CDs though, or if they turned to only selling digitally. Also, there isn't a back catalogue that I could find. All the albums I have from them do not seem to be available anymore at all. But it looks like they are still making new compilations. - As a teenager I was a huge fan of Take That. I still kinda am, though I never really found back to them after their reunion. I only have their third album on CD (the first two I still got on cassettes!), but in addition I have a few Maxi CDs. Oh how much fun it was to listen and sing along to them again! Some re-mixes, some live versions, some other songs.
- Ripping the mix CDs was an adventure of itself. Some did not come with a track list and my ripping programme could not provide one either. So Shazam was once again my friend in those cases, in addition to some websites like Discogs and Wikipedia for further clarification.
Digital vs. physical
Though this isn't a thing of "what's better?" for me, I do think about it from time to time. Should I keep my CDs, especially now that they are digitised, or should I get rid of them? Sell them, recycle them, give them away, or find a better (= space saving) way to store them?
I buy media in physical form (CDs, DVDs, paper books), as well as in digital form. How I decide which form to buy, I cannot say. It's got little to do with artist or author, but more with... vibes, I guess. There are certain albums, films, or books I'd like to own in physical form, and others will do just fine in digitial form only. E.g. cookbooks I only buy in paper form, audiobooks however I only buy digitally.
I got rid of a good portion of my CD and DVD collections years ago in trying to reduce the amount of stuff I own, and I wanted to buy more digital from that time onward. But with how twisted some sellers' definition of "buying" and "owning" is, and with how streaming works on top of that, I found that there are good points to be made in favour of physical media, especially with films and tv-shows. While I still buy music, books, and audiobooks digitally, I do want to (re-)build physical collections of my favourite artists and films/ tv shows. All the while trying not to overdo it and keep to favourites. I do have a serious problem with stuff I own and I don't need to add to it more than neccessary. So that thinking about reducing the amount of physical media I own will continue.
Repackaging CDs
My CD collection as it is today is not big. I haven't counted, but I don't think it's more than 100 CDs. They all (except for a few very new acquisitions and two big box sets) fit into a box, approximately the size of two shoe boxes, maybe a bit less. So after deciding to not get rid of them for now, and while having them out of the shelf, I wanted to use the opportunity to at least get rid of those big CD cases. Many of them are scratched at least, but a lot are also broken in various ways. I saw this video about a space saving way to store CDs and decided this is how I wanted to store my CDs, too. So I put all CDs that came in plastic cases in the plastic sleeves shown in the video. That some special editions and digipacks step out of line so to speak does not matter. They are beautiful and don't bother me at all.
I am now planning to do the same with most of my DVD collection. (There are some box sets that I'd probably like to keep as they are. At least for now.)
Looking forward by looking back?
Last year was very much about Italian pop music for me. Now that I have my whole CD collection digitised, this year could be all about what I listened to 20+ years ago. LOL
I also have a box with cassettes... But digitising those will not be so easy, and I wonder if it would actually be reasonable at all. I think buying those albums digitally or on CD, like I already did with the first two Take That albums, is probably the way to go in those cases.
- Elena.
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