Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

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A few years ago, my daughter got a turntable for Christmas and I started taking her to record stores. While I was there I realized that I too liked physical media, but vinyl just wasn't my thing. I did have a hundred or so CDs in the attic. Maybe it was time to see if they were still any good?

Turns out, CDs are pretty durable. Even though my attic gets crazy hot in the Texas summer, none of the CDs (some 35 years old!) failed. Next thing I needed was to buy a CD player (again). I was somewhat surprised by how few companies are still making players, but I got an Onkyo unit that I'm happy with.

Now I have a pretty great sounding setup and I have little booklets to examine while I listen. Browsing the collection for something to play is fun.

I'm back to buying CDs and it's actually a great time to be buying this stuff. New and used is cheaper than ever (lots of stuff is the same price it was 30 years ago) and so much stuff is available online and off. I love going to Waterloo Records in Austin and flipping through the stacks to buy a couple titles from my list and probably another title or too because I liked the artwork on the case or the guy at the counter recommended something.

I also bought a small bookshelf system for my desk because popping in a disk then having some music for maybe an hour then having to get up to change it works well for me. If I'm streaming from Spotify I end up working for too long, often unproductively. Taking a break every hour or so and shifting my attention (take the dog outside, make some tea, change the CD, then back to work!) seems to help my problem solving skills. I look at it as a healthier version of a cigarette break.

The only problem I've had with my disks is that a couple of them seem to not be balanced perfectly and they make a bit of mechanical noise in the player as they spin.

This is a testament to how well Reed-Solomon encoding/decoding [1] can detect and correct errors! I remember even heavily scratched cd's would work if you cleaned them with toothpaste of all things (?) [2]

This is unlike blowing an NES cartridge, which actually had a detrimental effect due to blowing spit on the pin contacts and oxidizing them.. [3] I do remember Babbages/KB Toys/etc did actually sell NES/SNES/Gameboy cartridge cleaning kits though [4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-interleaved_Reed%E2%80%9...

[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=clean+cd+rom+toothpaste

[3] https://www.denofgeek.com/games/nes-cartridge-blowing-air-ur...

[4] https://www.thevintagegamers.com/2012/11/vintage-gaming-clea...

> I remember even heavily scratched cd's would work if you cleaned them with toothpaste of all things (?)

I've had even better results with this three-step stuff that's actually meant for plastics, with most scratches not needing more than step 2: https://novuspolish.com/

That works great for bottom-side scratches, but sadly it's not usually possible to repair any damage done to the label-side of a Compact Disc due to proximity between the label and the reflective data layer underneath. It's really common for well-intentioned people to remove discs from a drive and (in absence of the case) set them upside-down to "protect" them not realizing it's the worst possible thing they could do. All-over-print labels add an extra margin of protection over discs that leave the label's negative space as bare disc silver: https://cdn.hswstatic.com/gif/cd-crosssection.gif

You can indeed polish all sorts of things (aluminum, silverware, car headlights…) with toothpaste. It's an abrasive.

For what it’s worth - Sensodyne uses a finer grit abrasive than many other brands. Might be a better choice if trying to repair cd scratches.

The US Sensodyne (sans Novamin) or the regular Sensodyne that every one else gets?

I am in the USA. Wasn’t aware there are different types under that name.

Novamin turns into hydroxyapatite, like in Japanese toothpastes. Fluoride and nanohydroxyapatite work better together than either alone, for carries at least. The approval process is too expensive to get through here, even though nanohydroxyapatite is used regularly in many countries.

> I love going to Waterloo Records in Austin

Adding this to my list. I've definitely ramped back up into the CD game myself.

I think I have spent $2k between la-la-land and Discogs this year already...

The biggest catalyst for this was Spotify removing content from their platform, presumably due to licensing issues. I don't like the idea that someone could memoryhole a piece of art that I had previously experienced.

Is there an app out there that tracks which things have been deleted?

An app? How about a website?

The enforced break is one of the nicer things about old-time music (beyond consuming an album at a time).

> beyond consuming an album at a time

That's the other thing I realized - I love finding great albums of music rather than individual tracks. Concept albums are especially great.

It's great that your CDs in the attic weren't damaged. However, please don't store your CDs there.

Since you're in the Austin area you might also want to check out Astro Records in Bastrop (30 minutes east). Very friendly and knowledgeable owner. Vinyl is the bulk of his inventory, but he also has a decent collection of CDs for sale.

I've been there! The wooden bar in there is amazing.

The attached bookstore is pretty nice too if you like a certain type of book.

I used to have a large CD collection. I bought them and I sold them. I bought second-hand and new. It was fantastic.

And then one day I moved overseas and one of my CD boxes got lost in the mail.

And then, some other day, the bottom box of my CD boxes that were temporarily stored in a basement got flooded and destroyed.

Now I don't give a shit about CDs. I have unapologetically pirated the music from CDs that I used to own but got lost or destroyed, and for all my new music I bought it online and back up the digital files to the cloud. I'll never lose music I paid for again.

CDs are legacy media for a reason. All other legacy digital media will follow it, except for the small group of people who fetishize it for nostalgic reasons. There is a tiny argument that still exists for buying legacy analog media - the "it sounds warmer" argument. But honestly, you could just pipe your digital files through a filter and get the same effect, so, meh.

> There is a tiny argument that still exists for buying legacy analog media - the "it sounds warmer" argument.

There are more arguments than that. For some people, it's all about collecting and community. For others, they love the large format artwork. I'm not playing analog media, but I still like the physical interaction part. Many of us also like that, for some artists, buying a record is a way of supporting them. Then there's the fact that playing a record or CD doesn't require an internet connection and that means nobody is tracking the records you play today in order to better sell things to you tomorrow. There's also the gear part - it's an excuse to put together a great audio setup. For those of us who still buy physical media, I don't think the "it sounds warmer" argument is terribly common.

All of this stuff is fun. There's not a lot of joy in tapping "dylan blonde" into a search box and pressing play.

I completely understand the hobbyist appeal - it's the same reason why people still buy hard copy books and comics - but from the average consumer perspective there's no real reason to do it since you can easily buy the same or better quality tunes direct from digital distributors.

Nowadays I most only buy music on Bandcamp, and if I want to throw more cash to the artist there are other venues like Patreon or even just a Paypal account where I can do that. Paying for physical media or merch is of course another indirect way to funnel money to the creators, but if getting money to the creator is the main goal, there are often more efficient ways to do it too.

> the same or better quality [...] direct from digital distributors

Not wanting to object fundamentally, as enough of my recent music purchases have indeed been digital downloads, however I'm still glad that at least for now CDs still exist and provide an alternative option:

- Some digital releases have been somewhat mangled in a very minor (the mouse squeak at the end of 3:47 EST is missing) or somewhat more major (several live albums/albums with live content of Bob Dylan's Bootleg Series are missing the pre-gap material between the individual tracks) fashion. Okay, in the former case I've simply grabbed the squeak off a Youtube recording and edited it back on, but in the latter case just getting the CDs is the most sensible option.

- Cover art beyond the front cover and liner notes are mostly missing. Okay, sometimes they're forgettable anyway and after all the music is the main thing, but sometimes it's still a bit of a shame to miss out on those things. In principle at least Apple/iTunes does have facilities for including a PDF booklet together with an album download, but in practice at least for the kind of music I'm interested in, encountering such a thing seems to be the exception rather than the norm. The Bootleg Series again is being a culprit here – personally I find the liner notes definitively interesting to read, but online you're getting none of that. (On the other hand kudos to whoever made sure to include the booklet for the Traveling Wilburys Collection on iTunes!)

- Occasionally (not often, but definitively sometimes), the (new, not used!) CD turns out to cost noticeably less than the digital download.

- Remasters are par for the course (though in some circles even those can provoke heated discussions about whether a certain remaster is really better or not), but with remixes the difference is more immediately noticeable even to someone like me. Sometimes remixes are being offered as an alternative version, and you can still buy the original version if you prefer that, but sometimes the remixed version is replacing the original albums. Online that means that subsequently piracy is your only choice of still obtaining the older mixes, whereas with CDs you've still got a chance on the second hand market.

- Where live albums are mastered with a pre-gap between tracks, it turns out I sometimes (e.g. especially when there's some stage banter related to the upcoming song) prefer the pre-gap to be tacked onto the beginning of the next track instead of the end of the previous track as seems to be the usual standard. When ripping a CD myself I can easily adjust that, when buying a download less so. (Having the pre-gap at the start of a track does have the trade-off that the music doesn't start playing immediately, but on the other hand during shuffling it means that any preceding stage banter remains together with the track it belongs to, and personally I find the latter more important.)

Though I guess you can classify some of those objections as somewhat "hobbyist", too… :-)

I generally agree on all of your points. Trust me, some of the CDs I lost in that flood were extremely rare and don't exist anywhere to purchase or download. They were tragic losses. For years I had a discogs.com account that I meticulously updated with everything in my collection.

I get that there are differences between what is legally available as the "best" remastered version of the album and the original version as it was released on record or tape or CD back in the day. But if your goal is not to give money to the artist and instead just find the best version of the song, you can usually better do that through piracy. The artist doesn't get any money either way - whether you bought a second-hand album from your local record store or downloaded a version online - who cares?

The one case where original media is interesting is if nobody made a version available online via piracy. And that's a sad state of affairs. As I mentioned earlier - I have lost dozens of CDs that never got released online, because they were small runs on indie labels or just independently released back in the day before the internet was a thing... Well now every time one of those sorts of CDs gets destroyed in a flood, it's one less copy of that song in the wider world. If anything, people should be uploading the fuck out of all they got, because otherwise all those great indie artists of the 90s (never mind the decades prior) will disappear into obscurity and what's the point of their music then?

Digitize everything is my opinion. Digitize it, upload it, share it. It's the best way to preserve the culture of past years/decades/eras.

> Then there's the fact that playing a record or CD doesn't require an internet connection

Are you not aware of this crazy idea of actually storing digital audio files on a local storage medium, and playing them from there?

Were you listening to those CDs or eating them for breakfast??

It's a world 7B+ strong, there's room for everyone. Even those who like to appreciate holding a music medium in their hands.

It's ok. You can move on.

Is there, though?

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