replacing albums

[cellio]

Dear LazyWeb,

Dani and I have a lot of albums and cassettes that we don't play any more, so we have begun the process of figuring out how to upgrade to digital media (while culling the stuff we don't care about any more). Some albums exist as CDs or downloads; others we'll have to burn ourselves (we have hardware for that). Mostly we're replacing albums, we think, and not just grabbing the "good tracks". But not all albums were reissued as CDs, so there are some individual tracks in our future assuming we can find them. (We're only through "folk, A to C" so far so expectations could change, but this is what it's looking like now.)

Even though most of this is going to end up as MP3s anyway, I prefer to buy physical CDs where we can. Yes, it's extra work to then burn them and we have to store the CDs, but I want both the liner notes and the security of knowing that some digital nanny isn't going to prevent me from moving that album to a new computer or iPod. It's also easier to browse; cover art and location on the shelves are meaningful guideposts for me, and iTunes' "genre" is not nearly rich enough for sorting; I need multi-level catagorization.

First questions: where besides Amazon should we be looking online for reasonably-priced CDs, some obscure? Is anybody beating Amazon on price consistently enough to look into? (I realize that the Amazonians among my readers might not want to answer that. :-) )

Now, about downloads. We haven't bought much music in this form before. We want it to be as easy as possible to play whatever we buy on multiple computes and iPods, including future ones and future tech. Sometimes this is prevented (DRM, I presume) -- I bought a song from iTunes and we were unable to play it on Dani's computer. Other times things appear to work fine -- Dani bought a song from Amazon and I could play it just fine. Next questions: are these typical experiences for those two vendors? Are there other vendors we should look at?

Thanks.

Comments

Transfering records...

[tc-tick.livejournal.com]

I have 55,000 tunes (13,000+ albums (or pieces thereof), but I still have a cabinet full of albums that are not on my iTunes -- I'm not sure it is worth the 100's of hours it would take to transfer them (partly due to the condition of many of the records, partly because I have 183 days worth of music already on iTunes and I haven't made it all the way through the 60 hours I have on my iPod.

I too like having the physical CD's, but I've run out of room for CD shelves, and many of them are now sitting in boxes in the garage -- not likely to be played anytime soon, so I've mostly given up on the physical media and just make lots of backups of the database (about 260GB worth). Great to have cheap, large, external hard-drives.

Re: Transfering records...

[cellio]

Yeah, we decided our spare time is worth more than the cost of the CDs, even if we were willing to settle for the lower quality that we would get versus the CD.

Some of our albums/tapes are definitely in the category of "if we ever decide to care we'll buy it then", but others are ones we would actually listen to if we had a convenient format and don't now. Most of my Eric Bogle is still on vinyl, for instance, and there's some wonderful stuff there.

Looming in the distance, and I'll delay this as long as I can, is dealing with the roughly 40 hours of recordings I have of Clam Chowder concerts. Much of this material made it onto their albums and later CDs, but I know that in there somewhere are some gems that I'm going to want to rescue. This would be a lot easier if I had a cassette deck in my car. I might have to get a cheap boom box (they still make those, right?) so I can play those tapes in my office while I'm doing other things.

Re: Transfering records...

[jducoeur]

Yaas. I'm in the process (very slowly) of ripping my Clams tapes over to MP3 so that I can listen to them again. I'm uncomfortable about passing those around due to copyright considerations (ripping my own tapes for personal use is one thing, distribution another), but we might want to talk to the band about it sometime and see how they actually feel about it...

Re: Transfering records...

[cellio]

Talking to the band would be good. I would be uncomfortable distributing too, though not to people who were at, and taped, the very same concerts. So if you were at any of their Darkover performances, maybe we can collaborate a bit there. Why rip essentially the same tape twice? (I have some scattered non-Darkover tapes, but mostly Darkover.)

Re: Transfering records...

[jducoeur]

Ah -- I'm talking about the "commercial" recordings that were actually sold, not private tapes of specific concerts. (I didn't do any recording myself...)

Re: Transfering records...

[cellio]

Ah. Yes, I have those two (tapes and some vinyl). Much of this was re-issued on CD later, though not album-for-album and I have to check for what's missing.

Re: Transfering records...

[jducoeur]

Yeah, I've got the CDs, but it's an inexact match. (And I wish I knew where my copy of the vinyl has gotten to -- I *know* we owned a copy of For Here Or To Go, but it's wandered off...)