The end of physical media.

[mark_in_manc]

(My kids were watching a fantasy film yesterday, and from the front room I heard the unmistakeable wails of Led Zep's 'Immigrant Song'. But I had forgotten the name, and so have a lot of other people as the search 'Led Zeppelin aaaahhhh song' auto-completes in the search box! I was about to play it to them on the PC, but elder daughter (16) said 'do you have the record' - and I do, so we listened to all of it. And they played with the round-ey thing on the sleeve (LZ3) and asked me if this is what we did before the internet ).

[MurphyNut]

Originally Posted by Richard_FM

I've got 500 odd CDs & no desire to give up on them. All have been ripped to my hard drive.

Add to that at least 200 DVDs.

I'm in the same boat, countless hundreds of CDs in my collection and I keep buying them for next to nothing and all have been ripped to my hard drive.
CD's are now almost worthless, even my local charity shops don't take them anymore!

[Nuvistor]

Originally Posted by MurphyNut

I'm in the same boat, countless hundreds of CDs in my collection and I keep buying them for next to nothing and all have been ripped to my hard drive.
CD's are now almost worthless, even my local charity shops don't take them anymore!

With that number of CD’s there must be hundreds if not thousands of hours of content on your computers. Do you just dip in and play whatever takes your eye or have you a system to rotate them? Is there any that get forgotten about?
I had a spell of buying from charity shops and the 3 for 2 at HMV, after looking at what I had accumulated it was obvious that a large number were not listened to either on the computer or the CD. That provoked a clear out, luckily charity shops were still accepting them.
Not suggesting you do the same just interested in how you listen to them.

[Paul_RK]

Originally Posted by Nuvistor

Do you just dip in and play whatever takes your eye or have you a system to rotate them? Is there any that get forgotten about?

CDs here are shelved more or less alphabetically by artist, within a few very broad genres, and one day a few years ago, conscious that there were many I was never likely to hear again, I resolved to set aside an hour each evening for listening to one of them, starting at the beginning of the alphabet. I wasn't even close to reaching B before enthusiasm for continuing had died.

We must have something over a thousand CDs, and something like four thousand books. I'm sure there are a great many I'll not turn to again, the problem would be to know which they are, and it finds me thoroughly in the dark - there's hardly anything I've found rewarding to listen to in the last 50 years and don't now - so no clearout is in prospect. If I'd followed the prescription I recall hearing from one anti-clutter guru, of getting rid of whatever one doesn't use in the course of six months, I suspect there are plenty of CDs I'd have bought a dozen times by now.

Paul

[greenstar]

I tend to do this in reverse. A lot of music online that I like. I have a drawerfull of cassettes I bought from the tip years ago when they were actually recycle-reuse centres, rather than crush and send abroad with dubious practices but spin correct places. I record from computer to cassette, great to listen to in my car. I find in practice I do not trust digital storage, having lost a year's worth of photos in one back up, and now and then find empty folders where past backups have not succeeded.

[Uncle Bulgaria]

We have CDs, tapes, DVDs, records and thousands of books. All are in use. One aspect of physical media that is overlooked is their bodily memory.

In discussion with a friend, I can be reminded of a phrase or idea in a book, and go and find it. The act of reading means I have an idea that it was near the end at the bottom of the right hand page, or wherever it may have been. If that were a PDF or on an e-reader I'd have no idea as the act of reading is divorced from physicality.

In a similar way, making a mix-tape I can think of the track I should have next because all the music I have is redolent of a time and place, so I know it all and can put my finger on the physical recorded media.

Books in particular are like artworks - they populate a place. A house without books is uninhabited, in my opinion, no matter how much the entire wealth of knowledge is contained on an electronic device somewhere. I can open a 200 year old book as easily as one published last week, which is of course not the case with digital files.

[Welsh Anorak]

I thnk if you grew up with physical media, which most of us here did, then the prospect of simply having a 'licence to listen' is a bit un-nerving. Most younger listeners/viewers have no such problem. I used to buy a good few CDs a month, so my subscription to a streaming service is easily justified. However i still have all my CDs and LPs, (and books, come to that) so I can listen when I choose and, since my car is relatively old, take a CD off the shelf to listen to on a drive - often a CD I have rarely listened to which can surprise me.
One thing is the concept of an 'album' is fast vanishing. I grew up with LPs which ran for 40 minutes and had tracks arranged by the artist to form a whole. Ditto CDs which could run longer and didn't need turning over. Now you get to stream single tracks, so it's in the artists' interest to make an 'album' of singles and you lose the narrative flow. Fine for some music, not fine for others.

[Vicboduk]

" I can open a 200 year old book as easily as one published last week, which is of course not the case with digital files."

For me this is the main issue, as the recording medium gets more complicated so does the player technology. Once all the lasers in our CD, DVD & Blu-ray devices fail, how do we recover the data?

However, I’m sure I could cobble up a turntable and stylus maybe even a rudimentary head for magnetic tape but I know the optical system for CD’s,DVD’s & Blu-ray would be beyond me.

Vic

[GMB]

I have yet to us use a streaming service. I am unsure how they work in a situation where no Internet connection is available.

But if I did, will they deliver CD quality (i.e. uncompressed) data?

[duncanlowe]

Originally Posted by Vicboduk

" I can open a 200 year old book as easily as one published last week, which is of course not the case with digital files."

Vic

To be fair, that's not quite true. Paper deteriorates. Bindings disintegrate. Ink can fade. Not suggesting that digital media are better in any way, simply that books are also not immune to ageing.

[Paul_RK]

Originally Posted by duncanlowe

To be fair, that's no quite true...

It's perfectly true of a number of 200, and even a few 300, year old books here, but, yes, the quality of materials used and the storage conditions have to be right for deterioration to be that slow. Early days yet with digital recordings, I doubt many of us will live long enough for playing a CD or reading an MP3 file to become difficult to arrange, but in both those cases the usual storage media are less than wholly dependable to last a few decades even when stored on a shelf in a dry and temperature-controlled environment.

Paul

[GrimJosef]

Originally Posted by GMB

I have yet to us use a streaming service. I am unsure how they work in a situation where no Internet connection is available.

But if I did, will they deliver CD quality (i.e. uncompressed) data?

I have a number of Squeezebox 'Touch' streamers around the house and workshop, connected by wifi to my router. But I don't subscribe to a streaming service. I just use them to play the music files that I have ripped from my CD collection, which reside on my desktop computer's HDD.

The streamers need software, which could be downloaded for free, so an internet comnnection was needed to set the system up initially. But after that it would, in principle, run independently and indefinitely. A complication is that the streamers access the music files via the desktop machine's operating system (Windows) and very occasionally a consequence of a Windows update will be that I have to download an update of the streamer software too and an internet connection is needed for that. But it would have been needed for the Windows update in the first place.

The streamers will handle a number of different music file formats. These include FLAC, which is somewhat compressed but is lossless (that's what matters for quality) and which I use to store all my music. The streamers don't introduce any music information loss of their own. Each one's buffer seems more than adequate for dealing with any information-flow fluctuations caused by my wifi.

A downside is that Squeezebox were bought out by Logitech and after a short time they (Logitech) made the decision not to support the 'Touch' any more. I believe the software is now maintained by enthusiasts.

Cheers,

GJ

[G6Tanuki]

I guess it's all a matter of personal preference: in recent years I've really got to like the ability to type a couple of lines of lyrics into my phone and get offered several mixes of the track containing them, along with details of their different releases, what albums/singles they were on, how many they sold/their top100 placement in the UK and US, what movies the track was used in and what the band-members are doing today.

Try doing that with a wall of CDs/vinyl/cassettes/DVDs.

Equally, with books - their lack of a search-facility is annoying: I've in the past resorted to searching online for a particular bit-of-info to give me hints as to which books-I-own actually contain the full content.

OK, some think it's 'nice' to have shelves of books, but can you find the information you need in a hurry? And can you be sure the information is still correct? [that's the nice thing about the Internet RFC-documents - they come with 'supersedes' and 'obsoletes' so you don't find yourself working from outdated information].

As I'be opined previously, I don't want the burden of storing un-indexed content myself when I can summon it up from somewhere in Japan or the US or Finland at the stroke of a finger.

[Example: right now I'm listening to a version of Scooter's "Hyper! Hyper!" recorded at a gig somewhere in Belgium a decade back, which has never been released on any kind of physical media]

[G6Tanuki]

Originally Posted by GMB

]But if I did, will they deliver CD quality (i.e. uncompressed) data?

"CD-quality" involves significant compression/expansion.... it's an ancient standard designed to be replayed on systems with what are now spectacularly-low in terms of processor-power.

FLAC or similar modern encoding standards can do a much better job, and the 'CPU horsepower' to decode it is dirt-cheap. The 'stuff' I have encoded here using FLAC@320Kbit/sec is rather good.

[GrimJosef]

Originally Posted by G6Tanuki

... As I'be opined previously, I don't want the burden of storing un-indexed content myself when I can summon it up from somewhere in Japan or the US or Finland at the stroke of a finger ...

I'm sure things are improving, but a few years ago the reverse could also be true. I went to a hifi day put on by a chap whose only music source was his subscription to one of the big providers (Spotify, possibly ?). I'd taken a couple of CDs with me and asked if I could play the title track from the King General album Money Run Tings https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTe-s23tc78. "Sorry" he said, "not on my streaming service". Hmmm. Then I asked for Chris Jones' Set 'Em Up Joe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4hegzsIRTI. They didn't have that either. I wandered away thinking "Nul points ...".

Cheers,

GJ

[emeritus]

Older books were often printed using rag paper, which is pretty robust. I have inherited, or been given, a couple of 200-year-old-plus books where the paper is somewhat discoloured, but basically sound, and poor bindings can easily be repaired or replaced by hand using very simple equipment. I did a bookbinding evening class about 5 years ago and completely dismantled, re-sewed and re-bound a mid-victorian "Book of Common Prayer" that had been great great grandmother's that had spent the previous 40 years in a box in the loft.

I entirely agree with the second paragraph of #43. When I was a Patent Examiner, we were still using manual search files , with documents stored attached to cards in columns of drawers. You soon got to remember unusual circuit configurations, and, if someone asked if we had anything like a particular configuration, could often say something like, "Yes, in the third drawer down in the fifth column on the left". Searching for circuitry was usually predominantly visual, as it is difficult to search circuit topologies electronically. I don't know what they do now that everything is stored in computer memory

Paper is normally pretty durable as long as it is kept dry. I still have some computer programs written at college in the 1960's on punched cards and paper tape whose content can be read and transcribed manually (albeit tediously) without using an electronic reader. Retrieving more recent info from floppy disks, optical media, or SD cards can only be done if you have the necessary equipment.

[Richard_FM]

Depending on my listening time I often listen to playlists I've created on Itunes.

The longer ones are normally a few albums with a common theme music-wise, and the smaller ones individual songs on a theme.

[jamesperrett]

Originally Posted by G6Tanuki

"CD-quality" involves significant compression/expansion.... it's an ancient standard designed to be replayed on systems with what are now spectacularly-low in terms of processor-power.

FLAC or similar modern encoding standards can do a much better job, and the 'CPU horsepower' to decode it is dirt-cheap. The 'stuff' I have encoded here using FLAC@320Kbit/sec is rather good.

Seems to be much confusion here...

The 44.1kHz sample rate, 16 bit data recorded to CD has had no data compression applied before being mastered onto the disc. The data will have been encoded with additional error correction bits but that process is transparent to the user. What comes out is exactly the same as what goes in.

Flac is a form of lossless audio compression where the data can be stored in roughly half the space required by uncompressed audio data and the original data stream can be completely recovered when the data is decompressed. Flac doesn't have a set data rate as it depends somewhat on the material being compressed but CD quality audio would be the equivalent of just over 700kb/s.

Numbers like 320kb/s are normally used by lossy compression schemes - in fact 320kb/s is the highest bit rate normally used by mp3.

There are streaming services that will serve CD quality lossless data (I think even Apple are now offering such a service) and even one or two that claim better than CD quality. Whether it is worth going for a better than CD quality service is debateable as the vast majority of the files they would be supplied with are 16 bit, 44.1kHz files.

[jamesperrett]

Originally Posted by GrimJosef

I went to a hifi day put on by a chap whose only music source was his subscription to one of the big providers (Spotify, possibly ?). I'd taken a couple of CDs with me and asked if I could play the title track from the King General album Money Run Tings https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTe-s23tc78. "Sorry" he said, "not on my streaming service". Hmmm. Then I asked for Chris Jones' Set 'Em Up Joe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4hegzsIRTI. They didn't have that either. I wandered away thinking "Nul points ...".

It was probably a specialist service supplying lossless audio as both of those artists are on Spotify with hundreds of thousands of plays in the case of the King General track. Spotify don't offer lossless streaming at the moment although I wouldn't be surprised to see this change in the future.

[JohnBG8JMB]

I THINK IT ALL DEPENDS ON WHAT YOU LISTEN TO.

I don't listen to [ducks behind the crenellations] pop music. I think that it is essentially commercial ephemera, repeated ad nauseum on commercial radio and BBCR1. If you can call it music. But I have 100s of classical and jazz CDs, with sleeve notes, libretti, etc; some of historic performances. Which do get played. AFAIK, this sort of music is not available as steaming stuff; and why should I waste time tying myself to a computer to buy, download and store and then replay the music at the dubious quality of computer audio?

Nor am I interested in head/earphones- decent amp/speakers/comfortable chair please!

But each to his own.

Cheers
John