Ask Lemmy

I still buy music CDs, and rip them to digital media. CDs are a lot easier to rip to digital media, but vinyl is cooler, but I listen to local music mainly through strawberry media player (or USB stick in a car)

Vinyl is cool and cozy but I couldn't be bothered. It's a bad tech / product overall.

Too much space, too clunky of a tech to not lose interest in a few months and I don't believe there's an audio difference a human ear can notice. So you're just having a bunch of square posters that you sometimes look at - might as well just do posters then.

My wife and I have already started collecting vinyl. My FIL gave us a really nice setup he was using and a few records, and we’ve gone from there.

At first, I didn’t really get it, but then I was reminded of how nice it was to listen to a whole album. I wound up rediscovering songs I loved as a kid that I haven’t heard because you can now just make a playlist of your favorites. It’s also really nice to actually own my copies. Empire is probably long gone, eaten by another company, but my player still works just fine. I can also repair it myself in the unlikely event that it breaks.

I also like going to music stores and browsing again. People in the stores are typically nice and love talking about music and, honestly, anything else you want to chat about. You get to share the experience with strangers face-to-face and be a small part of a moment in their lives.

Like any kind of collecting or niche interest, it’s hard for a lot of people to understand why others do it. Hopefully, this helps.

Also, CDs are typically waaay cheaper, so we will be supplementing with those.

Cassette tapes with a special pencil for each one.

I would collect drm free files. Format mostly doesn‘t matter

Local marketplace had a really nice turntable for an unreasonable price for a bit and I argued with myself for a while about it. (The same person had sold me a nice set of speakers, just upgrades a lot it seems).

Final product, vinyl wears out, the needle wears out, and it’s finicky. It needs to be level and vibration isolated. The voltage produced is so low it’s highly subject to electrical interference. You need a preamp, which vary widely in quality as well as style - it may be high end but is it to your taste? It’s all a rabbit hole I wasn’t willing to go down for what, ultimately, is a lower quality experience than a CD. You have to dust records and have a microgram scale to balance the tonearm. If it’s not an automatic player it’ll wear a groove at the end of playback if you don’t get up to deal with it. If the power supply is slightly off kilter, it plays too fast or slow, or you need to adjust it.

Now, CDs don’t last forever (as audio storage) and have their faults and loudness war outcome, but they do store high fidelity and provide a mindful listening experience in that you need to get up and open a box and place the CD in the player; they have album art; and they have liner notes sometimes.

So I ended up convincing myself to save the money and frustration.

CDs.

How about a new format: large optical media. That way, we get the cover art, lyrics on back, without degradation or wearing out.

Audio laser discs.

Vinyls don't corrode over time. We have vinyl from 80 years ago. Still good. We have CDs from 90s that no longer play. And itunes that have completely disappeared unless than 20years.

Vinyl, since I'm buying something that can't get replicated via other digital means.

I do digital download for most artists. A lot of my favorite acts sell vinyls with a digital download code included, so I do that sometimes too.

No, Physical media is out, at least as means of distribution.

Archiving however is a different story. I burn all my collections to archival grade blurays. As a history nerd, I'm painfully aware how much was lost, and I'm doing my part to give future historians something to work with.

No, I could never I would NEVER. I just see physical media like CDs as a waste of money/space and generally an inefficient way to consume/store media. I would/do horde books though I love books and I luv me bookshelf.

I don't really see a point to cds when you can just buy the music digitally, and store it on a USB key or similar.

I personally buy vinyls, but they are very expensive compared to cds. I think that they're more of an experience compared to cds.

The main advantage of collecting vinyl for me would be to archive rare releases that never got onto another format.

For example, this vinyl rip i found on yt, has the description:

Vinyl rip of my original 1971 vinyl copy of this classic album. It has the paper-style (B.I.E.M.) label and the matrix numbers are 6397020 1+380 A10 and 6397020 2+380 A13, which are the earliest I have ever seen.

Although not worn, it has not always been treated very well during its forty-one years of existence. I have removed as many pops and clicks as I could without audibly degrading the sound quality and destroying the vinyl sound. To my ears, the final result is pretty close to what a near-mint vinyl copy would sound like. Without the noise reduction and compression (applied to all CD and recent vinyl issues of this album), the album sounds more spacious and livelier.

They're right, it sounds great!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9grRaUpDyNk Serge Gainsbourg, Melody Nelson

Easily, with how much people's digital download or streaming libraries are being stolen from them at will by any given storefront.

These days I try to buy either DRM free flax files. If I really like the art or the artist in addition to wanting to regularly actually listen to as an album, then I may try to buy vinyl + flac files. If it's at a show I'll buy whatever is available that I can play because at that point it's more about the merch than music. I'm probably going to pass on the wax cylinders and I may think long and hard before buying a cassette.

I'd very much like to make a custom format. I miss the tactile nature and robust quality of cartridge games for Nintendo and the aesthetic feel of 8-track radio in cars. We have the tech to make it happen, I'd like to encode all of my media into 2.5in sata SSD or something like that. Sure it's bulkier than most options but the satisfaction of popping in a cart and the ability to drop it and not immediately destroy it would be nice.

Is there a vinyl equivalent of disc rot?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot

Neither. Give me files. I have no use for all that plastic. I have 8 TB of music and growing. Mostly freely traded and doesn't have or need a plastic container anyways.

Vinyl is an environmental mess. PVC with plasticizers and lead as a stabilizer. Heavy to transport, bulky to store. Extremely energy inefficient in making. They degrade the minute you play one.

I used to have a record collection (several hundred at some point, maybe nearly a thousand), I am glad to be done with it. Records are way too short.

I've got both and prefer vinyl. If I was starting from zero now I would focus on CDs. Not everything is available in every format but I think CDs have the most coverage.

I don't have any now and don't plan to start now. Physical media just seems so dumb for distributing small amounts of data, I can store so much more on an SD card which takes a fraction of the space of vinyl or CD.

1 CD is what, 700MB? A CDs size worth of SD cards is tens of TBs.