i suspect this has been done to death before – so apologies in advance.
i am currently re-ripping my CDs using dbpoweramp into my QNAP TS251+. I actually didnt realise i had that many CDs!!! Its ridiculous!!
All the CDs are in the loft and its not trivial to retrieve them – i’m a bit feeble these days !
As i was doing this, a question came into my mind – “do i need all this music?” i think the answer is NO. But i guess the easier question is “do i want all this music” and the answer YES. why? please dont ask!
Technology has solved the problem of having to clutter your house with physical copies of anything. There’s no sensible reason to own a personal physical library unless you’re in to the collecting part.
That should trigger some reaction
Is a collection on a hard disk or SSD physical? There’s certainly good reason other than being a collector for keeping a personal collection. However, it is clear that there are many forum members who enjoy a hobby of collecting music as well as a hobby of listening and of hifi.
If you live in the UK and you are ripping your collection to a NAS drive or other drive, as @KenC has indicated he is, then legally, I believe, you have to keep a physical copy.
i have a legacy NDS and dont fancy making any changes to my streaming solution now. so i will use what i have – physical CDs
as it happens, i came across a CD called “Songs from the Loft”. oh dear!! i must be getting very slow in my old age – i thought nothing of it at the time … !!!
enjoy/ken
I adopted a very simple ripping strategy to make sure that I ripped the CDs I actually wanted to listen to. When I wanted to listen to an album, I ripped it instead of playing it. 4 or 5 minutes later I could play it over UPnP.
A Unitiserve made this very easy, as there was no need to save files to any particular location, and editing could be done later. Just hit play when the CD was ejected.
sounds good. i just want to get this over and done with. and i really dont want to pay for a streaming service when i have more music in the CDs that i will ever need… and i havent fully explored my current collection!!!
True if you have the time. I also have a large collection of ripped cd’s but they were ripped over a period of years. I wouldn’t want to have to do them again now. 7 days is a long time to be without the internet for a regular service outage?
If the streaming service has the albums you like (and if they do, keep the CDs against the day when they change their catalogue or disappear and another one doesn’t have the one’s you want). But why on earth pay for streaming if you already own a copy so can play free?
Yes, the outage was unusually long, I essentially never have them otherwise. Was during some lockdown, apparently a critical part was taken out and they had big troubles sourcing a replacement. I could make do with 4G though.
But bless the lockdowns coming at a time when I needed to rip my CD collection!
I don’t. I pay for streaming of music I don’t have. It does of course include music I do have on the streaming service.
If I didn’t want any new music I wouldn’t have signed up.
I ripped all my CDs as a retirement project several years ago, when streaming services were nowhere near as sophisticated or high quality as they are now especially on the legacy streaming platform. The CDs are stored away and no longer cluttering up the living space. Once ripped I see no reason to get rid of any, even ones I rarely or never listen to. Who knows, perhaps I’ll have a yen to listen to something I haven’t heard for years and it’s good to be able to do that with just a few taps on the iPad. Many of my most treasured albums are not available on Qobuz or in several cases on any streaming platform and I reckon local streaming often sounds better, though it’s hard to be sure they’re the same masters.
For me a combination of local and internet streaming is ideal.
How and whom is checking this, there is no mechanism in place to centrally manage that.
It’s the same ripping a CD you don’t own and keeping the digital copy.
I used to borrow CD’s from the library and keep a digital copy for example.
I think the key point here is the living space vinyl and cd’s (and tapes?) demand. There’s no requirement today to distribute individual copies of anything, not least the manufacturing, materials, distribution amd so forth.
Having your own digital library that is local and file based is in many respects the most capable library, assuming you back it up and protect it sufficiently.
It also happens I have lots of tapes, vinyl and CD’s, a local ripped library and multiple streaming subscriptions!