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BlackheartSauron
Metal newbie

Joined: Fri Nov 19, 2004 11:15 pm
Posts: 198
PostPosted: Fri Dec 11, 2020 3:13 pm 
 

My musical collection is getting more and more expensive over the years, except... I don't really own it.

The more releases I buy on platforms like iTunes Store and Bandcamp the more I think of what happens to all that after I die. Would my hypothetical children be able to inherit these like I had inherited books and vynils from my paretns? Definitely not.

So, would it not make more sense to just buy and rip CDs instead, when the price is comparable? On iTunes store releases cost often close to CDs, but they don't even provide a lossless option. As for Bandcamp, it's not backed by a huge company, so it may actually go down even during my lifetime. I haven't checked what it says in their TOS, but I'm pretty sure my collection goes away if they go bankrupt.

The CDs, however, are not very durable as well - they are only supposed to last for around 10 years or so.

And vynils (yes, that's what I call them) are just not good. They're not digital to begin with, they endure time well but only if not used. However, if used - they wear off as well. They're brittle and impractical, and - wait for it - they're literally TOXIC (it's a health hazard to live in a house that has vynils - google it) and not environmentally friendly at all.

So what would be a good option?
Looks like M-Disc is something that is supposed to last for years, is digital, and at CD size a capacity of up to 100GB! (BD-XL). I would much prefer the minidisk-like form-factor though, where disk is stored in a cartridge and is thus much less prone to damage during use and storage. And with 100GB capacity for full CD size the minidisk like size or even smaller could be more than enough for music distribution.

Of course there is no industry around that and it would be hard to, so to speak, push it into existence.

However, I would really like for something like that to happen. I wonder if anyone else feels the same.

I reckon there should be something like true digital music collectors' movement - TDMCM - that would promote this and make this a reality. What do you think?

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severzhavnost
Something Stupid

Joined: Sun Oct 12, 2008 10:16 pm
Posts: 2952
Location: Ottawa
PostPosted: Fri Dec 11, 2020 4:11 pm 
 

There’s no reason why your hypothetical chlidren won’t be able to inherit your digital music library. Even after iTunes and Bandcamp disappear, you could just keep backups of all your files somewhere else. I’ve finally accepted that my laptop is almost dead, and just transferred everything onto a USB flash drive to plop onto the new laptop. (Whichever of my children inherits that flash drive will know he or she is my favourite :p)
Also I’m sad that you discussed every form of music recording except cassettes. I love those little guys!
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~Guest 361478
Metalhead

Joined: Tue May 19, 2015 4:55 pm
Posts: 1930
PostPosted: Fri Dec 11, 2020 4:14 pm 
 

BlackheartSauron wrote:
The CDs, however, are not very durable as well - they are only supposed to last for around 10 years or so.


Just one thing there - my oldest CDs are over 30 now, and are totally fine - just like with vinyl, tapes, or even harddrives - it's all in the storage.

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BlackheartSauron
Metal newbie

Joined: Fri Nov 19, 2004 11:15 pm
Posts: 198
PostPosted: Fri Dec 11, 2020 7:10 pm 
 

Methuen wrote:
BlackheartSauron wrote:
The CDs, however, are not very durable as well - they are only supposed to last for around 10 years or so.


Just one thing there - my oldest CDs are over 30 now, and are totally fine - just like with vinyl, tapes, or even harddrives - it's all in the storage.

Lucky you. I have some CDs that cannot be properly read now, especially bad the ones with unusual colours.

And even if they would live for 100 years or so (which they won't because there is dimming happening in the plastic itself), they still lack capacity of M-DISC and practicality of minidisk-like cartridge-encased optical disk. They're pain to ship without getting anything broken for same reason as well.

But yes, for the time being this seems like the best option.

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BlackheartSauron
Metal newbie

Joined: Fri Nov 19, 2004 11:15 pm
Posts: 198
PostPosted: Fri Dec 11, 2020 7:20 pm 
 

severzhavnost wrote:
There’s no reason why your hypothetical chlidren won’t be able to inherit your digital music library. Even after iTunes and Bandcamp disappear, you could just keep backups of all your files somewhere else.

There is a very good reason - it's the law and Terms of Service.
For all intents and purposes for anyone but you yourself those files are as good as downloaded from illegal torrents.
Which you might be fine with, but I would much prefer it to also be legal.
We all know how copyright mafia can lobby harsh laws (like extension of copyright times to unrealistic terms - which already happened) and may enact harsh punishments for "piracy" to make an example of someone, because they want your children to buy it all again from scratch (you can be sure of that).

And the question of storage still stands - you've got to put those files somewhere anyhow for archiving. I guess M-Disc is still a best option so far - best combination of capacity and durability.

severzhavnost wrote:
transferred everything onto a USB flash drive to plop onto the new laptop. (Whichever of my children inherits that flash drive will know he or she is my favourite :p)

Google says flash drive will only last for about 10 years or so as well. Not suitable and not recommended for long term data storage.
I guess exact amount of years depends on a specific technology used for memory cells, but it will loose electric charge over time for sure. Also files may not completely disappear but get partially damaged. CDs are good in that regard because they have some redundancy with CRC or similar codes AFAIK. But Flash drives don't have that.

severzhavnost wrote:
Also I’m sad that you discussed every form of music recording except cassettes. I love those little guys!

Oh these are the worst!
Carried it near something magnetic accidentally? Say goodbye to your recording.
And playback suffers from mechanical issues, like speed of rolling changing will affect speed and pitch of music playing.
And the tape wears as you play. And the "side B" can bleed into "side A" a bit. Etc etc. So many issues!
I remember the times of magnetic tape cassettes very well, and hell I don't wont to ever go back to that.

Also these are analog, and I'm interested in digital (there is digital tape though I guess, but it requires professional equipment to handle, and longevity is a question - I guess the really durable one is the most expensive and with most expensive recording equipment).

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~Guest 361478
Metalhead

Joined: Tue May 19, 2015 4:55 pm
Posts: 1930
PostPosted: Fri Dec 11, 2020 7:31 pm 
 

BlackheartSauron wrote:
Methuen wrote:
BlackheartSauron wrote:
The CDs, however, are not very durable as well - they are only supposed to last for around 10 years or so.


Just one thing there - my oldest CDs are over 30 now, and are totally fine - just like with vinyl, tapes, or even harddrives - it's all in the storage.

Lucky you. I have some CDs that cannot be properly read now, especially bad the ones with unusual colours.

And even if they would live for 100 years or so (which they won't because there is dimming happening in the plastic itself), they still lack capacity of M-DISC and practicality of minidisk-like cartridge-encased optical disk. They're pain to ship without getting anything broken for same reason as well.

But yes, for the time being this seems like the best option.


I did look at the M-DISC, that's not something I've heard of before now - high capacity disks for archiving purposes sounds really handy - much better than replying on spinning harddrives & so on. Really enjoyed this article too, in which the guy tortures a blu-ray to death to prove how good the M-Disc is - I'm really, really impressed.

http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/indexmag.html?http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/artsep16/mol-mdisc-review.html

Also - agreed, I got lucky with my CDs, completely. I like the idea of a super-high capacity disc-type medium - It'd be handy to net my whole CD collection to a couple of discs for transport / archiving, especially long term given the inherent instability in harddrives.

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jimbies
Noose Springsteen

Joined: Thu Jul 21, 2016 2:52 pm
Posts: 4144
Location: Canada
PostPosted: Fri Dec 11, 2020 10:09 pm 
 

I pretty much stopped buy physical copies of albums in early 2018. After almost 4000 cds, and 1000 vinyl, I had no more room and just did not want to have to move that stuff. Yes, the logical answer is to sell or just get rid of some of the stuff I didn't care for, but I can't bring myself to do it for some reason.

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BlackheartSauron
Metal newbie

Joined: Fri Nov 19, 2004 11:15 pm
Posts: 198
PostPosted: Sat Dec 12, 2020 6:51 am 
 

jimbies wrote:
I pretty much stopped buy physical copies of albums in early 2018. After almost 4000 cds, and 1000 vinyl, I had no more room and just did not want to have to move that stuff. Yes, the logical answer is to sell or just get rid of some of the stuff I didn't care for, but I can't bring myself to do it for some reason.

I did pretty much the same. But I'm having second thoughts for a while now.
The more you learn about those copyright bullies and the ToS of service providers the further you want to stay away from them.

I have around 750 CDs, and 1500 releases bought on Bandcamp. The latter might include some bulk sales at discount, but still, in total I think what I bought on Bandcamp already cost me more than all my physical CDs. Maybe the same if I include shipping.

But - none of this is resellable or transferable. Moreover, I've noticed at least one release that just disappeared from Bandcamp. I've bought it, I should own it, I never got a refund - but it is no longer on Bandcamp, so again, my downloaded files are as good as downloaded from torrents (except I also have email from bandcamp which may or may not count as a "receipt").

Yeah, this is a phenomena I forgot to mention - the whole service might be alive and thriving but individual releases you've bought might be taken down off it, and there is nothing you can do. You paid money for that stuff and they just took it away from you. Good luck in court now if you want to get, say, that $10 refund. Do you think your lawyer expenses will be less?..

The physical CDs on the other hand can be re-sold. Sometimes at much higher price than they were bough for in a first place. This is just a better deal, don't you think? Especially when digital and physical releases cost similar or the same.

P.S. The funny part is that those physical CDs I'm mostly buying second hand via discogs now. So artists won't get any money off such purchase for sure. Yet for me this is a better deal.
These stupid artists do nothing about this - nobody even speaks about this subject in music "industry" be it dependent or independent. Because they don't even think about the listener. They're all focused on themselves exclusively.

As a result, a lot of releases are hard or even impossible to find. They're either on streaming subscription-paid Spotify (which already rips artists off, it is notorious how little money Spotify pays to artists - yet they all still allow it to use their music!), or iTunes store at best - which is very tied to single platform (good luck with iTunes on Windows for example), sells shit quality lossy files (and you don't even know the bitrate when you're buying), and often costs as much as physical CD.

So the only place where I can find those releases are second-hand CDs on Discogs. Or nowhere at all - except torrents and piracy sites. Which also I hate for obvious reasons.

And then these people dare to complain about piracy!

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KrigareTjovane
Metalhead

Joined: Mon Mar 18, 2013 2:06 am
Posts: 543
Location: United States
PostPosted: Sat Dec 12, 2020 9:19 am 
 

I have a rather large CD collection and yeah, shit gets hard to store after a while. 99% of the time I just buy digital now, but I make a point of buying a CD at every live show to support the bands which has... well... sadly not happened in a while.

Now that my PC doesn't have a disc drive to transfer CDs to digital, not sure how that tradition's going to hold up though. Between shirts and maybe a poster, I guess that'll just have to do it for physical, in-person support.

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BlackheartSauron
Metal newbie

Joined: Fri Nov 19, 2004 11:15 pm
Posts: 198
PostPosted: Sat Dec 12, 2020 9:31 am 
 

KrigareTjovane wrote:
Now that my PC doesn't have a disc drive to transfer CDs to digital, not sure how that tradition's going to hold up though. Between shirts and maybe a poster, I guess that'll just have to do it for physical, in-person support.

There are external USB drives. I own an Apple superdrive for my Mac (though I know how to make it work under Linux, even with Raspberry Pi) and an LG GP65NB60 which works with Windows and Mac out-of-the-box (but not always able to read all old disks that Apple superdrive can read) - specifically for the purpose of grabbing CDs I've bought via Discogs.

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Slater922
Metalhead

Joined: Tue Apr 14, 2020 6:24 pm
Posts: 2338
PostPosted: Sat Dec 12, 2020 10:02 am 
 

I only even download music digitally if I can't get ahold of a rare album. After all, why should I shell out $500 for a rare black metal vinyl? When you download digitally, you should always make sure they're in good quality and are stored properly. The copyright laws may be imitating, but unless you're deliberately selling the music as you're own and doing other shady crap, I won't worry too much.

As for storing physical media, M-Discs are the best option, since they can apparently last for 1,000 years. I've owned a couple, and they're really good. If you need to get some more, I recommend getting them at Amazon. They're a little pricy, but the CDs themselves are in excellent quality and are durable.
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jimbies
Noose Springsteen

Joined: Thu Jul 21, 2016 2:52 pm
Posts: 4144
Location: Canada
PostPosted: Sat Dec 12, 2020 10:10 am 
 

Re: Digital storing of albums you've paid money for:

Ever since around 2002, every time I have purchased a CD, I ripped the tracks onto my computer. I back the files up on a hard-drive every year or so. A quick check right now tells me I have over 77,000 songs in my catalog and over 229 days of music.

Hey, should I spend 2021 listening to the entire thing?!

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Empyreal
The Final Frontier

Joined: Thu Nov 30, 2006 6:58 pm
Posts: 35139
Location: Where the dead rule the night
PostPosted: Sat Dec 12, 2020 10:20 am 
 

Your digital collection can't go anywhere if you back up the files and just move them from computer to computer like I do - I buy heavily from bandcamp now and just have the files on my computer, move 'em around with connector cables or flash drives. I know iTunes has that thing where you have to be "approved" on the computer to access the files, but that's why you shouldn't buy from them if you can help it.

I'm doing a lot of digital buying for space reasons - just need to save space and already have a bunch of CDs. I love buying CDs but don't have a lot of space and am planning to move soon.
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BlackheartSauron
Metal newbie

Joined: Fri Nov 19, 2004 11:15 pm
Posts: 198
PostPosted: Sat Dec 12, 2020 12:33 pm 
 

jimbies wrote:
Ever since around 2002, every time I have purchased a CD, I ripped the tracks onto my computer

I do the same, but onto NAS with RAID.
HDDs die. HDD is NOT a backup.
Technically even RAID is not a backup, because it's not location distributed (in the event of fire, all disks in RAID burn together) - but this is already much closer (hopefully flooding, earthquakes or fire are not that likely in your house, unless you life in California or something).

There are only 2 types of people: those who do backups and those who don't do them yet. (C) Folklore

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severzhavnost
Something Stupid

Joined: Sun Oct 12, 2008 10:16 pm
Posts: 2952
Location: Ottawa
PostPosted: Sat Dec 12, 2020 1:40 pm 
 

BlackheartSauron wrote:
But - none of this is resellable or transferable. Moreover, I've noticed at least one release that just disappeared from Bandcamp. I've bought it, I should own it, I never got a refund - but it is no longer on Bandcamp, so again, my downloaded files are as good as downloaded from torrents (except I also have email from bandcamp which may or may not count as a "receipt").

Yeah, this is a phenomena I forgot to mention - the whole service might be alive and thriving but individual releases you've bought might be taken down off it, and there is nothing you can do. You paid money for that stuff and they just took it away from you. Good luck in court now if you want to get, say, that $10 refund. Do you think your lawyer expenses will be less?..

So the only place where I can find those releases are second-hand CDs on Discogs. Or nowhere at all - except torrents and piracy sites. Which also I hate for obvious reasons.

And then these people dare to complain about piracy!


When the services pull that bait-n-switch nonsense, there ceases to be any logical argument against piracy. I bought it, I’m keeping it, one way or the other.
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jimbies
Noose Springsteen

Joined: Thu Jul 21, 2016 2:52 pm
Posts: 4144
Location: Canada
PostPosted: Sat Dec 12, 2020 2:22 pm 
 

BlackheartSauron wrote:
jimbies wrote:
Ever since around 2002, every time I have purchased a CD, I ripped the tracks onto my computer

I do the same, but onto NAS with RAID.
HDDs die. HDD is NOT a backup.
Technically even RAID is not a backup, because it's not location distributed (in the event of fire, all disks in RAID burn together) - but this is already much closer (hopefully flooding, earthquakes or fire are not that likely in your house, unless you life in California or something).

There are only 2 types of people: those who do backups and those who don't do them yet. (C) Folklore


That's how my film work is stored.

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morteal47
Mallcore Kid

Joined: Wed Nov 25, 2020 4:25 am
Posts: 18
PostPosted: Sun Dec 13, 2020 7:58 am 
 

I hardly buy digital albums, only when its the only media available for a release/ can't find a cd for it online. I prefer to own an actual hard copy of an album but I rip it onto my computer.

Over the years it has grown to 400+GB worth of music and have backed it up on a few different sources. NAS, external HDD, blu ray and recently a 512gb sd card in my phone.

With my NAS I make it my central data storage location , from there I can connect my phone wirelessly by my home network and upload any new music to my sd card.
Then just do a periodically back up on an external drive.

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From_Wisdom_To_Mabt
Metal newbie

Joined: Fri May 06, 2005 4:04 am
Posts: 258
Location: United States
PostPosted: Sun Dec 13, 2020 1:40 pm 
 

I could never rationalize buying digital anything, unless I had absolutely no other way of obtaining it. If I've spent a few hundred dollars on music, I want to be able to actually physically own the fucking thing.

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jimbies
Noose Springsteen

Joined: Thu Jul 21, 2016 2:52 pm
Posts: 4144
Location: Canada
PostPosted: Sun Dec 13, 2020 5:30 pm 
 

From_Wisdom_To_Mabt wrote:
I could never rationalize buying digital anything, unless I had absolutely no other way of obtaining it. If I've spent a few hundred dollars on music, I want to be able to actually physically own the fucking thing.


I agree with this MOSTLY. Part of it is, I no longer have the disposable income I used to. If I still had the income I used to have, I'd probably be more inclined to drop money on bandcamp every once in a while.
When I did have more financial freedom, I would purchase physical music every single week. Now (well, pre covid), I would rather save my money and see more shows.

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