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tunes4046 said:
I can't believe all those CD's I bought in the 80's and 90's still play so perfectly, some are over 30 years old
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I used to store my working CD collection in paper sleeves like 45rpms (no cover art or booklets) to maximize the space. Even like that it would take well over 20 years for any of them to develop signs of meaningful wear.

However, nothing is more deadly to an optical disc than a kid. I'm an certain that if CDs and DVDs were indestructible revenue at Walt Disney would plummet.
 
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Proformance said:
Let me fix that for ya:
I pry yet another cold dead crashed hard drive from my fingers!!!
Nothing lasts forever.
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So for someone like yourself that is obviously a professional, I'm sure you would agree that as a professional you would have a backup plan in place should you lose that connectivity. What would that happen to be? Physical storage media perhaps??? Nope, it was pried from your fingers remember? So please enlighten us as to what plan B would be should you lose that connectivity?
 
DJ TJ said:
So for someone like yourself that is obviously a professional, I'm sure you would agree that as a professional you would have a backup plan in place should you lose that connectivity. What would that happen to be? Physical storage media perhaps??? Nope, it was pried from your fingers remember? So please enlighten us as to what plan B would be should you lose that connectivity?
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You are projecting a false condition to support your own black and white (all or nothing) personal preferences.
I have not indicated that anything I do relies on constantly available connectivity.

I have groceries in my house.
I do not however, stock all the possible things that even I might want. I am not trying to be a grocery store, just a cook.

When you talk about how you manage your music you sound like a grocery store.
I prefer to sound like a chef.
 
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DJ TJ said:
They can have my hard drive when they pry it from my cold dead fingers!!!
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I second that and FLAC shall remain a mainstay in my media library so whatever for Y'all. I just don't see why anyone wouldn't want the best playback quality one can get if they easily can? With all this banter, which of the Industry Standard Pro DJ Software Playback apps does not support FLAC or ALAC? VDJ does, Serato DJ does, Traktor does (except ALAC on PC I hear as per Traktor Dropping ALAC Support: What the Hell, NI? An Open Letter | NI Support Forum) and yes tags work great in FLAC so in my minds eye this is seriously a no brainer. If you are not using one of those three software suites to ply your craft - Whoa!
 
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Proformance said:
You are projecting a false condition to support your own black and white (all or nothing) personal preferences.
I have not indicated that anything I do relies on constantly available connectivity.
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Proformance said:
If such a song is requested in the future I will stream it from whatever next generation unlimited streaming DJ pool is just around the corner. I'm certain that within the next decade there will be no need for a DJ to own any music at all. You'll pay only for access. We are almost there right now. Your internet hot spot will also be modulated into ordinary room lighting (LiFi).
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Hmmmm.
 
Proformance said:
You are projecting a false condition to support your own black and white (all or nothing) personal preferences.
I have not indicated that anything I do relies on constantly available connectivity.

I have groceries in my house.
I do not however, stock all the possible things that even I might want. I am not trying to be a grocery store, just a cook.

When you talk about how you manage your music you sound like a grocery store.
I prefer to sound like a chef.
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I don't agree with this logic at all. He's not trying to sound like a grocery store - he is trying to have what his customers may want. Imo, those with large libraries (and the knowledge) are more like fancy cooks - they can prepare whatever it is you may want - whereas the typical cook only has whatever is hot for the moment (or whatever the people tell him of in advance and cannot prepare whatever the customer wants).
 
ittigger said:
I don't agree with this logic at all. He's not trying to sound like a grocery store - he is trying to have what his customers may want. Imo, those with large libraries (and the knowledge) are more like fancy cooks - they can prepare whatever it is you may want - whereas the typical cook only has whatever is hot for the moment (or whatever the people tell him of in advance and cannot prepare whatever the customer wants).
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You're in Maryland not the Antarctic Circle. You make it sound like you know nothing about the event in advance and drop in out of the sky to a place void of civilization.

I make a point to know what my customer wants before I arrive at the event. I do that with conversation - not by spending all my time and money trying to predict and cover all possibilities before I'm even booked.

I'm making business decisions about the music. I am not holding out my collection to gratify my ego. It's fine to be proud of my collection but, managing collections is not the business I am in.
 
For me, most of what I spin is NOT in the pools (60s-90s), so I HAVE to buy CDs and rip (unless I want to deal with torrents or low quality posts on Youtube). I buy large collections on eBay, rip the discs I think may be played and dump the rest in lots back to eBay. I wish there was a pool service for stuff older than 5 years and I don't want to assume that the CDs will work (having seen many a pitted disc over the years). The pools I use for a handful of current dance tunes and for events for a younger audience.

Maybe my future is Spotify or such .. I don't know.
 
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ittigger said:
I wonder how many were doing this 20 years or more ago.
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I've been at it since 1984.
I do not have any of that original vinyl anymore, nor did I keep any turntables.
I had 5 CD systems at one time. I have one heavily reduced collection of CDs right now, and I'm about to get rid of those as well.

The stuff is obsolete for business purposes. I am not running a museum.
 
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Do you know where most record collections ended up?
In dumpsters.

Do you know most CDs end up?
In dumpsters.

It's not a mistake - they just aren't valuable and not very useful anymore.
 
Handinon said:
Having a pile of CD's stacked in my house works as an archive for me - stuff I rip is for frequent DJ use.


Agreed. It's true we may someday be able to stream everything we need, but how you use it will greatly depend on what kind of a DJ you are. My son is a beta tester for Serato, and Serato DJ 1.9 beta just went live with Pulselocker integration - 44 million tracks! Pretty cool if you're a wedding or party DJ, but if you're a real performing or club DJ, you will still have to put a playlist together ahead of time, do beatgrids, que points, etc., etc.. A lot of time consuming preparation, which is why they are so protective of their libraries. Another example - Stems hasn't even been mentioned on this forum. There are DJ's and there are DJ's, all different and all good, so please do not take this as a judgement call. My point - I just don't see HD's with prepared playlists (filled with FLAC files :djsmug:) going away anytime soon.
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Beat grids, cue points, etc. all of that data process is being automated. Much of the labor you do to process and ready a song for mixing will eventually be encoded into software with great speed and accuracy. You will need only adjust for your personal style or taste if so desired.
 
Proformance said:
Do you know where most record collections ended up?
In dumpsters.

Do you know most CDs end up?
In dumpsters.

It's not a mistake - they just aren't valuable and not very useful anymore.
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Pro,
Nobody is debating about the obsolescence of vinyl or cd's.
The thread was about ripping cd's to a preservable format and the best way to do that because the OP already realizes that obsolescence and wants the convenience of that more portable format.

It doesn't matter how we will do things in the future (streaming or not), he wants to preserve a collection he has already paid for.

There is no obsolescence in that reasoning, especially if you are trying to preserve the sound quality of the original file as opposed to a streaming mp3 pool, whether you can hear the difference or not.

Someday, if and only if we have access to an unlimited pool archive of every song possible in cd quality or better, with any possible connectivity issue overcome, then and only then will I give up my hard drive.

As you mentioned, a lot of us won't be DJ's in twenty years, but even more to the point I believe that most of us will be dead by the time the parameters of what I mentioned above will come to fruition.

So in that regard it's in no way obsolescent to take what you call these time wasting steps now.
It makes sense for us to archive now and probably will for the millennials as well. As for the generation after that, who knows, and really, who cares!
 
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DJ TJ said:
Do you know what FLAC is? It's an open source version of a bit perfect lossless compression format similar to Apple's ALAC.
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I do know what FLAC is. In fact, I spent a month converting many of my own CDs to FLAC files about 10 years ago, even though I had already converted them to MP3 files two years earlier. I stopped for two reasons:

- There was no distinguishable difference in the sound quality between a FLAC file and a 320kbps CBR file, whether I was listening through headphones, in the car, through my home stereo, or through my DJ system. While FLAC may be superior from a technical aspect, I couldn't find anyone who could tell the difference in a side-by-side comparison. This was recently proven again by Yahoo in a review of Neil Young's Pono Player, which utilizes the FLAC format.

- Cool Edit Pro (my preferred software for editing audio, at the time) didn't support FLAC files. If I needed to make a custom edit, I had to convert the file to MP3 or WAV anyways.
 
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I agree that their is no discernible difference and I don't want to turn this thread into a debate on the subject it just makes sense to me that if you are going to the trouble of ripping for archival purposes that it should be an exact bit perfect copy of what you are ripping.
 
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DJ TJ said:
I agree that their is no discernible difference and I don't want to turn this thread into a debate on the subject it just makes sense to me that if you are going to the trouble of ripping for archival purposes that it should be an exact bit perfect copy of what you are ripping.
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Precisely what I was trying to say - giving an inch is akin to giving a mile! Oh right, we r metric here. Give a centimeter, give a kilometer. Why settle when it can be purrrrrrfect?
 
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