Cherry Hinton Blues

Occasionally Updated. Rarely Rated.

Thursday, July 01, 2004

Throwing out the CDs? Maybe

I read an article today about how quickly hard-disk-based music had changed
the author's outlook on his music collection, and I realised I was in
complete agreement. Six months ago I'd have been of the school which said
"downloadable music has its place, but unless it has a massive cost
advantage or something, I'll always want proper CDs". After all, it was a
wrench to go from nice big vinyl album sleeves to pokey little CDs; I'm
hardly going to give them up completely, am I?

Well, I'm beginning to wonder. The author of the article said that since he
got his iPod and started using his computer as a music source, his CDs had
begun to gather dust. And I have to say, so have mine. Do we really
appreciate all that cover artwork so much that we're prepared to forfeit a
living room wall to house it? Do we really want a physical CD so much that
we'll wait for our next trip to town (or wait a couple of days for
delivery), rather than having the album right now via a download?

Don't tell Mrs R, but I think if she now suggested that I pack up the 500
CDs on our living room wall, and dismantle the display shelves, I'd probably
do so. Even our living room music source is now a combined DVD/CD player,
and since I put my entire 500-CD collection on six DVDs as pretty reasonable
quality MP3s, I tend to use those when I want to play an album anyway.

Oh, it's all a bit confusing. I'll read this and laugh one day though.

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