Nooo i just saw a TikTok of someone calling their mom a hoarder cause she has a CD collection and going "i can play these faster on an app" and telling her to throw them away BITE BITE BITE BITE KILL KILL KILL KILL if someone said that to me i would rip them apart with my teeth i would burn them alive the violence that would take place would be unimaginable i would be an unleashed demon hungry for blood and meat. unimaginable horrors. death and destruction. killing. maiming. no one could survive that. it would be a nuclear apocalypse. leave the fucking CDs alone

caparrucia

Okay but if you have an extensive CD collection you need to back it up into digital/new CDs!

And it's not about apps or digital being faster, I'm all up for physical media, but commercially produced CDs from the 90s and early 2000s are reaching the end of their functional lifespan*, and are starting to fail.

If you have a lot of CDs, it would be a good idea to rip them into high fidelity digital audio, to preserve them.

*CD/DVD lifespans are tricky. Some estimates in peak, perfect conditions and maintenance go for almost 200 years. Others calculate between 20 to 30 years in "normal" use, though no one can agree what normal is.

I recommend buying a cheap DVD reader/writer unit -I bought mine for less than 20 USD - and then batch ripping stuff. Surprisingly Windows Media Player works out of the box, just make sure to save things in the correct format (mp3 or MP4) so you're not limited in playback.

You can of course find more robust options online, including VLC, to rip your files. Ripping a CD will not damage it or prevent it from working, it'll just make sure you have the option to burn a new one if your original happens to fail. This is 100% legal and ethical (and would be ethical still even if illegal, because piracy is always ethical in late stage capitalism and corporations are not your friends.)

I recommend redundancy for your backups (remember that time Apple fucked up with people's files by replacing them with itunes shit? Yeah) and if you're really techy, set up a NAS by your router, with your backups.

If your rips are high quality you can feed it to your computer/tablet/phone/any device in your network and always have access to CD quality audio no matter where you are.

Sources!

How Long Do CDs Last? It Depends, But Definitely Not Forever

Preservationists are worried about troves of records stored on what was once considered a durable medium: the compact disc. Many discs can l

NPR.org

Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays — Canadian Conservation Institute (CCI) Notes 19/1 - Canada.ca

canada.ca|Canadian Conservation Institute

The first generation of CDs is already rotting and dying - CDM Create Digital Music

CDs and other optical media don't last forever - then can even rot. But storage can help. Here's what archivists and research can teach us.

CDM Create Digital Music

Burn and rip CDs

Learn how to rip (copy) and burn (create) CDs and data DVDs using Windows Media Player.

support.microsoft.com

How to Rip CD musics with VLC media player (Single and Batch)

Looking for ways to rip CD music and songs? Here are 2 easy methods on how to rip CD musics with VLC media player with ease.

echoshare|Leo

waknatious

AND

Once you rip them, you can put them on a streaming service

FOR FREE

by using iBroadcast

The two-fold benefits of which are, 1) even if the hard drive or NAS you have them on fails or is destroyed somehow, you have copies you can download back ALSO FOR FREE, and 2) you can stream all your own music in that same way that the kiddos stream spookify or apple-doozy or whatever

iBroadcast | Your Music. Everywhere.

ibroadcast.com

#oh hey excellent advice #music #archiving #save for later