Anyone gone exclusively digital?

MetalGuy71 wrote:

Eyesore wrote:

MetalGuy71 wrote:

S.D. wrote:

I've said it before and I'll say it again...CDs ARE digital!!!!

That cracks me up almost as much as people saying they buy "vinyls".

I trust my cds not to lose their data. Not so with a computer. Working with computers for 15+ years now, I know how easy it is to lose everything in the blink of an eye. I don't trust 'em enough to go fully digital. Even backing things up, I'd never trust them completely.

But you rarely lose files on computers. Most people just don't know how easy it is to recover them.

Sometimes. But we've lost plenty of data over the years here at work. I remember one computer literally was burning up. Smoke coming out the back and everything. I don't know that I could ever let go of that concern, no matter how many times I've backed things up.

I'm also working on a lap-top right now because my regular desktop here at work is crapping the bed since last Friday. I'm having a RAM issue and even though the engineers are working on it and I probably won't lose any data, the computer is still out of comission till Monday at least. If I were all digital and had all my music on it, I'd be screwed.

No thanks.

Nope. And I don't plan to.

T-Roy wrote:

ZombieHavoc wrote:

T-Roy wrote:

Eyesore wrote:

I still have my CDs, but everything but most vinyl and cassettes is ripped. So I've gone like 98% digital but still have all my CDs.

My CDs are all in totes, though, so for all intents and purposes I've gone digital.

99% of the time, I listen to my music on my iPod. Including in my car....and besides getting really nice "bud" earphones, I really miss having that big sound from a car stereo. I drive an old civic with a stock am/fm radio. I wonder if it would be worth dropping the 50 bucks on one of those converter boxes I can attach deep in the bowels of the dash behind the stereo....or put in a nice Kenwood CD deck I've had sitting in the garage for years. Practicality tells me I should just use the ipod?

Be interested to hear how allot of you guys listen in the car....

You gotta get an iPod-ready deck (I've got an alpine). It's got a little "jack" in the back, where you run a cord into your glove compartment, and plug your iPod in through dock connector. It is as close to CD sound as you can get out of an iPod when in the car.

If that's what you meant.

Yes...that's what I'm talking about I think. So you like the sound? When you're listening to it, you're not wishing you had the CD for better sound?

I do like the sound quite a bit. Before I got this deck, I was first using a radio-tuner thing to play my iPod through (terrible), and then just plugging a cable from the iPod headphones plug to a little auxillary plug on the dash (a little better, but still very hollow sounding).

Once I got the deck with the iPod cable attached, the sound improvement was insane. It is not quite as good as listening to a CD. There's no denying that. But it still sounds great, and you get the convenience of your whole collection being in the car with you. So I don't really miss listening to the actual CD too much.

If you copy your CDs in ALAC format (Apple lossless) to your ipod then the sound is identical to the CD.

i went from being almost entirely hard copy to almost entirely digital, and had to sell off my hard copy collection for rent/food when i was between jobs. these days, i primarily download (free stuff, stuff for purchase, stuff no one would be getting paid for whether i downloaded it or not), if im motivated enough to get music at all, but with the return of income i have gone back to buying cds, and rebuying some of what i used to have, though mainly just limiting myself to stuff that is deeply discounted. sadly, its only in the past year that ive switched my target quality parameters for digitization and downloads from 320kbps to lossless, though. never really had the space before. (not that i have the space now for a full conversion....~70,000x~50mb? waiting on an affordable petabyte solid state drive...hah)

physical cds and packaging are nice, but not essential, and more and more material is being offered as digital only. tapes piss me off, really...i almost never listen to music using something that can readily play a tape, and their durability is problematic, yet the underground music scene is obsessed with them. i mostly avoid owning tapes, and records as well. i prefer the flexibility of digital---i download digitized versions of anything that i cant rip from a cd. this results in the loss of an experience, and not just an aural one, but also the gaining of an experience, and that trade suits my lifestyle.

T-Roy wrote:

Eyesore wrote:

I still have my CDs, but everything but most vinyl and cassettes is ripped. So I've gone like 98% digital but still have all my CDs.

My CDs are all in totes, though, so for all intents and purposes I've gone digital.

99% of the time, I listen to my music on my iPod. Including in my car....and besides getting really nice "bud" earphones, I really miss having that big sound from a car stereo. I drive an old civic with a stock am/fm radio. I wonder if it would be worth dropping the 50 bucks on one of those converter boxes I can attach deep in the bowels of the dash behind the stereo....or put in a nice Kenwood CD deck I've had sitting in the garage for years. Practicality tells me I should just use the ipod?

Be interested to hear how allot of you guys listen in the car....

I do believe it's illegal to drive with headphones, sir.

In the car, I used to hook up my 30GB MP3 player, but a tiny wire inside the stereo's faceplate broke where I plugged the MP3 player in, and me being a worthless handyman couldn't fix it. So now I just have an assload of data CDRs, with like 15 albums on each.

I still buy some CD's that I deem essential but I do get some on MP3 as it's cheaper and I can afford more music that way.

MetalGuy71 wrote:

MetalGuy71 wrote:

Eyesore wrote:

MetalGuy71 wrote:

S.D. wrote:

I've said it before and I'll say it again...CDs ARE digital!!!!

That cracks me up almost as much as people saying they buy "vinyls".

I trust my cds not to lose their data. Not so with a computer. Working with computers for 15+ years now, I know how easy it is to lose everything in the blink of an eye. I don't trust 'em enough to go fully digital. Even backing things up, I'd never trust them completely.

But you rarely lose files on computers. Most people just don't know how easy it is to recover them.

Sometimes. But we've lost plenty of data over the years here at work. I remember one computer literally was burning up. Smoke coming out the back and everything. I don't know that I could ever let go of that concern, no matter how many times I've backed things up.

I'm also working on a lap-top right now because my regular desktop here at work is crapping the bed since last Friday. I'm having a RAM issue and even though the engineers are working on it and I probably won't lose any data, the computer is still out of comission till Monday at least. If I were all digital and had all my music on it, I'd be screwed.

No thanks.

I've never lost data. Just pull out the the hard drive, buy one of those external USB hard drive connectors, and connect it to a new computer. You'll be able to access all the folders, as they rarely are corrupted when something goes wrong on a hard drive. Then just transfer everything over.

You can buy those connectors for like $15.

Eyesore wrote:

T-Roy wrote:

Eyesore wrote:

I still have my CDs, but everything but most vinyl and cassettes is ripped. So I've gone like 98% digital but still have all my CDs.

My CDs are all in totes, though, so for all intents and purposes I've gone digital.

99% of the time, I listen to my music on my iPod. Including in my car....and besides getting really nice "bud" earphones, I really miss having that big sound from a car stereo. I drive an old civic with a stock am/fm radio. I wonder if it would be worth dropping the 50 bucks on one of those converter boxes I can attach deep in the bowels of the dash behind the stereo....or put in a nice Kenwood CD deck I've had sitting in the garage for years. Practicality tells me I should just use the ipod?

Be interested to hear how allot of you guys listen in the car....

I do believe it's illegal to drive with headphones, sir.

In the car, I used to hook up my 30GB MP3 player, but a tiny wire inside the stereo's faceplate broke where I plugged the MP3 player in, and me being a worthless handyman couldn't fix it. So now I just have an assload of data CDRs, with like 15 albums on each.

Ha! Actually it's illegal to drive with "full" head phones here. Not earbuds as technically you "can" drive with only one in....which OF COURSE is EXACTLY what I do!

Quote :

I've never lost data. Just pull out the the hard drive, buy one of those external USB hard drive connectors, and connect it to a new computer. You'll be able to access all the folders, as they rarely are corrupted when something goes wrong on a hard drive. Then just transfer everything over.

You can buy those connectors for like $15.

That still doesn't address the myriad of other issues that computers encounter on a daily basis.

The problem I described above was a RAM issue and the computer radomly showing me the old "blue screen of death" then re-booting itself. Now the computer is down in a workshop, awaiting parts. I can't access anything at the moment. Hooking up an external drive might have worked, but I run the risk of it shutting down mid-transfer and corrupting files.

You've never lost data? Bully for you. Congratulations. I have however. Plenty of times and so have other folks in my depatment because of computer failure, even before exteral drives were an option. We used to back hard drives up on magnetic tapes. Good times!!

I will never fully and completely trust computers. Noone is going to convince me otherwise.

That would drive me bananas. I have to crank the tunes when I'm driving.

T-Roy wrote:

Eyesore wrote:

I still have my CDs, but everything but most vinyl and cassettes is ripped. So I've gone like 98% digital but still have all my CDs.

My CDs are all in totes, though, so for all intents and purposes I've gone digital.

99% of the time, I listen to my music on my iPod. Including in my car....and besides getting really nice "bud" earphones, I really miss having that big sound from a car stereo. I drive an old civic with a stock am/fm radio. I wonder if it would be worth dropping the 50 bucks on one of those converter boxes I can attach deep in the bowels of the dash behind the stereo....or put in a nice Kenwood CD deck I've had sitting in the garage for years. Practicality tells me I should just use the ipod?

Be interested to hear how allot of you guys listen in the car....

I use a Griffin Roadtrip Ipod player. The ipod goes right into the player which then plugs into either a cigarette lighter or power jack.Tune the player to a radio station with dead air and you got yourself your music playing over your car stereo. I really like it.

MetalGuy71 wrote:

Quote :

I've never lost data. Just pull out the the hard drive, buy one of those external USB hard drive connectors, and connect it to a new computer. You'll be able to access all the folders, as they rarely are corrupted when something goes wrong on a hard drive. Then just transfer everything over.

You can buy those connectors for like $15.

That still doesn't address the myriad of other issues that computers encounter on a daily basis.

The problem I described above was a RAM issue and the computer radomly showing me the old "blue screen of death" then re-booting itself. Now the computer is down in a workshop, awaiting parts. I can't access anything at the moment. Hooking up an external drive might have worked, but I run the risk of it shutting down mid-transfer and corrupting files.

You've never lost data? Bully for you. Congratulations. I have however. Plenty of times and so have other folks in my depatment because of computer failure, even before exteral drives were an option. We used to back hard drives up on magnetic tapes. Good times!!

I will never fully and completely trust computers. Noone is going to convince me otherwise.

And you shouldn't, because all those things happen. I've been using my laptop for a few months now because my desktop PC crapped out on me. Stop errors, blue screens, video card failure, memory errors. I've been working in IT since 1995, so I know all too well what happens.

I wonder if you're understanding what I mean, though. You take the hard drive out of the bad PC. The file structure on hard drives rarely become corrupt, meaning all the folders and files are fine, you simply can't access them because it won't boot or whatever.

So you buy one of these connectors, which simply connect to your "bad" hard drive, then you plug the USB cable into a good computer. The "bad" hard drive is then like anything other external hard drive. I wouldn't use it as such, of course, just go into it and take what files you need and then discard it, burn it, whatever you do.

But in nearly 20 years of doing this, seeing countless PCs go down, I've never seen it where the data cannot be retrieved.

Quote :

Tune the player to a radio station with dead air and you got yourself your music playing over your car stereo

That's how I used to do when I had sattellite radio. I could tune any radio in the house to "dead air" and pick up the signal.

I still buy CD's and will continue to as long as they make them but I download stuff from itunes as well.I dont have a problem with digital,I just dont feel the connection to a digital album like i do the CD.

MetalGuy71 wrote:

Quote :

Tune the player to a radio station with dead air and you got yourself your music playing over your car stereo

That's how I used to do when I had sattellite radio. I could tune any radio in the house to "dead air" and pick up the signal.

Is that what that baby urangatang is doing? Searching for "dead air?"

Quote :

I wonder if you're understanding what I mean, though. You take the hard drive out of the bad PC. The file structure on hard drives rarely become corrupt, meaning all the folders and files are fine, you simply can't access them because it won't boot or whatever.

So you buy one of these connectors, which simply connect to your "bad" hard drive, then you plug the USB cable into a good computer. The "bad" hard drive is then like anything other external hard drive. I wouldn't use it as such, of course, just go into it and take what files you need and then discard it, burn it, whatever you do.

But in nearly 20 years of doing this, seeing countless PCs go down, I've never seen it where the data cannot be retrieved.

I get it. I've never done it myself, but I've watched our enginners or IT guys pull hard drives and transfer files. And I've seen some come back from the dead and some things gone forever.

I just can't see myself going fully digital with my music unless there was no other option. That's just the way I am. Hell, most of my technology upgrades in life have only been purchased when I had no other choice. I'm happy with compact disc technology and see no reason to change it.

T-Roy wrote:

MetalGuy71 wrote:

Quote :

Tune the player to a radio station with dead air and you got yourself your music playing over your car stereo

That's how I used to do when I had sattellite radio. I could tune any radio in the house to "dead air" and pick up the signal.

Is that what that baby urangatang is doing? Searching for "dead air?"

Yup. Playing a little "Tune in Tokyo"

Quote :

Hell, most of my technology upgrades in life have only been purchased when I had no other choice.

Same here. I didn't even make the switch from cassettes to CDs till 1992 or 93, by which time they'd already been "the standard" for a number of years. The only reason my brother and I finally went halfsies on a CD player was cuz every time we went to Tower Records we noticed that the cassette department was getting smaller and smaller while CDs kept taking over more and more floor space, and we saw the writing on the wall.

If my wife hadn't gotten a kick-ass deal on a DVD player back in 2000 or so I'd probably still be watching movies on VHS. At the rate we're going, we'll probably move up to Blu-Ray around 2015 or so.

Fat Freddy wrote:

Quote :

Hell, most of my technology upgrades in life have only been purchased when I had no other choice.

Same here. I didn't even make the switch from cassettes to CDs till 1992 or 93, by which time they'd already been "the standard" for a number of years. The only reason my brother and I finally went halfsies on a CD player was cuz every time we went to Tower Records we noticed that the cassette department was getting smaller and smaller while CDs kept taking over more and more floor space, and we saw the writing on the wall.

If my wife hadn't gotten a kick-ass deal on a DVD player back in 2000 or so I'd probably still be watching movies on VHS. At the rate we're going, we'll probably move up to Blu-Ray around 2015 or so.

I'll probably upgrade to a touch-tone phone once I'm sure it's not just another passing fad.

Fat Freddy wrote:

Quote :

Hell, most of my technology upgrades in life have only been purchased when I had no other choice.

Same here. I didn't even make the switch from cassettes to CDs till 1992 or 93, by which time they'd already been "the standard" for a number of years. The only reason my brother and I finally went halfsies on a CD player was cuz every time we went to Tower Records we noticed that the cassette department was getting smaller and smaller while CDs kept taking over more and more floor space, and we saw the writing on the wall.

If my wife hadn't gotten a kick-ass deal on a DVD player back in 2000 or so I'd probably still be watching movies on VHS. At the rate we're going, we'll probably move up to Blu-Ray around 2015 or so.

Same here. I didn't get my first cd player till the early/mid 90's either for the same reason. Less and less tapes at Tower. I only finally broke down and bought my first cell phone 4 years ago because we had kids and my wife told me I had to get one. Speaking of kids...

I have one exception to make about cd technology being fine as it is. I'm replacing broken jewel cases at an alarming rate thanks to my children. I don't know what they are doing while I'm at work, but I assume they are working with the Ipod people to force my hand to go digital.

I held off on CDs until about 1992...I was all cassette/vinyl up to that point.

I guess nobody uses Play or Match, then?

I went to Blu Ray when I realized: 1. the high, high quality releases you can get (though as with a lot of things, sometimes you gotta do some research), and 2. I got my player and my beginning collection for 1/2 what it would be, because I sold my DVD's when they were still worth something, good life lesson to keep there.

I've gone digital. I got tired of getting crappy digipaks time and time again. I never really looked at the artwork/inserts all that much anyway. My music is backed up to the cloud on both amazon and google music so I don't worry about hard drive crashes. I stream music from my phone to my car stereo via the Amazon player so I have access to my entire collection wherever I go. It's generally cheaper as well.

I still buy cds but I am seriously considering a switch to digital. I can buy an album a lot cheaper on-line and not have to wait to get it.