- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
- usa@midwest.social
- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
- usa@midwest.social
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CDs are BOOMING? Quick! STOP making Them!
-The BRILLIANT minds at Sony!
Might be people are not dumb and will go back to cd and dvd to escape the slop from subscription services.
Everyone in this thread completely misses thr point of media like this: you own it, you can sell or trade it later, and the community building aspect is really fun. You dont get any of that with files.
Same with games. Look at the 2and hand market. Growing up, everything i got was 2nd hand. Sad that poorer folks won’t have that anymore.
the community building aspect is really fun. You dont get any of that with files.
Back in the day I was huge into music communities on Soulseek. Files can build just as much community, just saying.
Sure but theyre a lot more underground, and illegal if your ISP sees what youre doing, so people are scared of that.
Illegal depending on your jurisdiction. In the US it’s still a civil matter unless you’re facilitating.
They can still ruin your life if they want to. Not worth it.
You do get most of those with files : owning it, trading it, and you can build a community around file sharing. The problem is not in the file concept but in the capitalistic ecosystem built on top of it, where they try to prevent you from easily accessing or using the files.
I can see that viewpoint. The issue there is of the ~40 IRL people I know and regularly talk to, not a single one of them has a clue what you just said. Normie’s understand “CD have media. CD go in player and worky”.
Files are great for us super nerds. But here’s the issue. Now you have a storage medium that then needs to be plugged into a PC of some sort, now you have an os of some sort and possibly internet on said device, Now you need a media player, now you need a DAC to send it to your stereo/headphones etc.
For me, CD go in and worky is peak.
Good point, CD are easier to use. But to be honest, people around me all know how to install a program or put mp3 in the music folder, from my grandparents to my younger brother, and they’re not nerds. I can see how it could be a problem if there was a little less tech literacy though.
Maybe you aren’t american. The tech literacy where I am is so utterly low I’m baffled people can sustain day to day life.
Its also a pretty high quality version as well. Streaming gives you lossy mp3, you can make a decent flac out of a CD. Not 24 bit, but much much better than streaming. Oh yeah and I own it forever.
Streaming also only works with solid internet connections.
you can download it to listen to offline
Yeah also you don’t need complicated backup etc
Having grown up with cassette tapes and CDs later on, I just want digital.
Yes, it is nice to hold a physical thing, but it’s also nice to just play any song on your phone that you have on you 24/7 anyway.
Owning more things really doesn’t sound appealing to me personally. Also, CDs were never very portable, they scratch and these little tabs on their plastic cases break.
Sorry for sounding so negative, I’m glad they are having fun with their music. I just think the current CD trend could be 2nd hand nostalgia for today’s teens and young adults who just didn’t learn to loathe them yet 😅
Nah. Give me both. Thats why a CD is the best. You get physical, and it can be ripped. I prefer records but the expense is too high for a lot of them now.
CDs never got old man. Still the best.
New computers don’t even have a cd though, and every single cd and dvd player outside of laptops and game systems is defective garbage.
Think what you want. All my computers have disc drives. If they dont, I have external ones.
I am still using disc drives from the 90s with zero issues. I actually take care of my shit unlike most people so maybe thats why. One of my DVD players sat in a storage shed getting covered in dust for like 8 ish years (not climate controlled either), had stuff dropped on it, still works fine. Thats a heavy metal body onkyo though with component out. Any DVD player with HDMI only out is pretty much shit and cheaply made.
VCRs are even better. Ive rarely found one I can’t get working with minimal effort.
I am still using disc drives from the 90s with zero issues. I actually take care of my shit unlike most people so maybe thats why.
I mean maybe in standalone devices but you certainly aren’t using a drive on your PC from the 90s without a whole lot of work for a slow shitty jury rig job.
Managing switching a PATA connection to SATA is a pain imho.
Sorry, those old drives I was referring to are just CD players of various types. The ones in my PCs are like 15 years old.
I’ve had an external dvd player for years now and never had an issue. Maybe because i only use it once a month or so ? But it does not seem like defective garbage, and at the time i picked the cheapest one i could find.
They have few parts. Motor , laser, laser carriage. And a controller. Not a lot to break.
CDs were never very portable, they scratch and these little tabs on their plastic cases break.
What? CDs were highly portable, only scratch when mishandled, and “disc wallets” were a widely used thing.
“disc wallets” were a widely used thing.
I was there 3000 years ago
Still have one in my car.
when the ancient music was written
Pure digital these days means streaming. Rightholders don’t want to give you a file you can copy or store indefinitely, they want you to rent
You can still buy DRM-free music you can download and keep. And not just from places like Bandcamp; Apple hasn’t stopped selling music, and Qobuz even has FLAC downloads.
Which means they don’t understand how files work and spend a lot off wasted effort on DRM. They give us a file whether they intend to or not.
Physical you can make digital, and stream it, put it on your phone. I have many cars, that doesn’t mean I pack them with me. I make them digital and then stream them to my own devices.
Its the exact same thing, just I don’t have a subscription that could end or a corporation license that expires. Unless you buy your music DRM free, I can respect that.
Yeah I used to do all that stuff. Get a CD, stick it in computer, rip contents to files. Make sure files and directories are in good order and named properly.
Now don’t forget to copy what you want to some storage device that you need to take with you. I guess you could dump the files on your phone, but you could also use a streaming service. Same output, a lot fewer steps.
Did all this ages ago, I have no need to do it again. I’m OK to pay for a service that does it for me.
I mean, I use jellyfin and stream it to my devices for free. I pay $10 once for the CD, and then I have the same convenience but no monthly fees.
Clearly the driver here is to own your stuff, not excitement of carrying 100 CDs around with you
We need more clarity for what digital ownership is or isn’t with laws to back it up.
I’d guess audio CDs are a tie in to games on physical media which is an obvious hot topic today. Corporations don’t want you owning anything, and it gets a lot easier when you don’t have something you can hold in your hand!
I am of a similar vintage, but I never gave up my CDs. For a while there, I did just go digital because of the convenience and depth. Then Covid came along and I got into records. That tapered off in the last couple of years and I’ve been buying CDs again because they take less room.
I still mostly listen to my music digitally, but now I’m hosting my own server and keeping a curated collection.
Self-hosting makes a ton of sense.
I do like the variety that comes with streaming. Getting notified about new releases from your favorite artists and then just being able to listen to them right away is a joy.
But one day, when my music streaming service will invariably get enshittified, I will self-host, too :)
Getting notified about new releases from your favorite artists and then just being able to listen to them right away is a joy.
There’s a whole stack of self hosting services that allow you to do exactly this. The *arr stack.
Mine automatically grabs the new releases, downloads them to my plex server and I can stream anywhere with Plexamp anytime I want.
To be fair I bought a lifetime Plex Pass back when they were $45.
Records produce better music quality, don’t break as readily, and don’t scratch as such. Tapes were better than CD’s really.
I’m sorry, are you trolling? As a realistic audiophile, vinyl isnt technologically better. Is it way cooler and more fun? Yes. Is stuff usually mastered better for it? Again yes. I have several albums of the CD and the record and all of them the record is better because the CD is fucking brick walled to hell.
Also records dont scratch? Lol microscopic dust blowing around from a slight draft scratches them. The needle destroys them actively while playing it.
Cassettes are “neat” but they sound like rubber cat shit. Theyre tough as nails though.
If you mean reel to reel tape, youre correct. Nothing I’ve ever heard really sounds better than rtr tape. But its so old now its nearly impossible to get.
Well said
ITT: lemmings hate CDs.
interesting to see cds booming after how much it failed cause of the crap drm. i guess its realitely easy to get a player, and it doesnt take up too much space per disc, and you get 1411kbit/s.
If CD quality is less than ideal, is there a world where we sell like… Game cartridge sized USB drives with lossless audio files instead? Wouldn’t it be cool to have a new form factor that allows for the feeling of physical ownership but is modern and more universal.
I’d bet quite a lot of money that nobody here could consistently tell the difference between raw uncompressed audio and CDs in a blind test.
I’m not entirely sure anybody could.https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/how-well-can-you-hear-audio-quality
Try the quiz, see how well you do. I have tried it several times and i rarely get but a handful right.
Ever since this humbling experience, I have stopped worrying about top-tier digital audio quality.
CDs are considered lossless.
“Lossy” and “lossless” are descriptors applied to data compression systems. So no one referred to CDs as “lossless” until MP3 (which is lossy) became popular, because there was nothing to contrast it with. CDs are not compressed at all.
If you buy music on BandCamp, FLAC (lossless) is often (always?) one of the download format options. FLAC is decompressed into a bitstream that matches the original exactly. You can put those files wherever you like.
Sorry, I should have said a Hi-Res format (which tbh means lossless compared to the best recording to me or colloquially lossless).
Who said that cd quality is “less than ideal”?
Game cartridge sized USB drives with lossless audio
Lossless is a weird term here. Digitised audio is lossy by definition but CDs have been designed to be as good as our hearing, so their quality is usually considered to be the baseline of “lossless” that other media compare against.
Wouldn’t it be cool to have a new form factor that allows for the feeling of physical ownership but is modern and more universal.
No, because CDs are widely adopted and are a good form factor. MiniDiscs have already tried and failed to establish a new, better medium. What do you need that CDs can’t deliver that would have significant advantages over the convenience of streaming?
I guess I’ve always heard that CD quality wasn’t the “best” and upon Kagi’ing it, that seems to be correct as there’s a tier above it called Hi-Res formats. Now, you make a point that CD’s are as good as we can hear, but I’m not exactly sure that’s true in all senses (assuming perfect audio equipment). Either way, wouldn’t it be cool to have the ideal (best) format in a form factor that our audio players can actually play (phones).
I would much rather carry around a Nintendo style game cartridge case that carries mini USB-c drives that stored an album or an artist’s collection. That to me is pretty cool. At least to me, the combination of CD’s being not Hi-Res audio, a format that’s hard to play in my main music devices (phone or home theater, which in this case does not contain a CD player (although it does contain a vinyl player, go figure)), and that subjectively isn’t a cool form factor in the same way Vinyl or Game cartridges are makes me long for a more retro-scifi form with modern transfer mechanisms.
Most humans on this planet aren’t able to audibly hear the difference between a redbook CD and a ‘high-res’ format in a blind test. The same is true for DACs and Stereos. There’s an incredible amount of audiophile snake oil that companies pump out because it makes insane money from people tricking themselves they can hear a difference (psychosomatic effect from spending so much).
What is readily perceivable is the difference between a good mastering and a poor mastering, which can effect any format. An old vinyl with its 60db of dynamic range has an inherent limitation of how loud music can be mastered which normally was a downside, but became an asset when CD’s began to go through the loudness wars in the 90’s and 2000’s (where CD’s were mastered to ‘brick wall’ the audio, removing dynamic range in favor of boosting gain so it would sound better in cars or poor equipment), so for music from that loudness war era, the vinyl often sounded significantly better just due to the better mastering, despite the worse theoretical specifications.
It’s also pretty much impossible hear to the difference between a high-bitrate compressed format (like 320kb mp3, vorbis ogg, or opus) or an uncompressed FLAC (I’ve tried, I couldn’t perceive any difference, try it yourself in a blind test where a friend switches between them), so either will be ideal for a phone, where you’re unlikely to be carrying around big bulky headphones that could take advantage of those high-res formats anyway.
Obviously you can be better than CDs. The signal is sampled 44100 times per second, each sample being stored as 16 bits (twice, to have stereo). Increase either of these numbers and you’re immediately better than CDs. Increase the former and you’ll be able to store higher frequencies, increase the latter and you’ll have a higher dynamic range.
None of that answers why you would want to carry around a case of physical media though. With today’s tech it’d be easy to put high res audio on sd cards or create a new medium (and yes, please use the minidisc form factor for that). But with the storage capacities of rewritable memory being easily in the terabyte range even for consumers and broadband connections being widely available, why would you want to create the distribution network this would require instead of just letting people stream and download the music? Especially as you’d be limited to releasing new music that has been mastered in high res (as you obviously can’t get higher resolution data from CDs), so you’d only have a few artists on board and a few albums available.
You’re conflating my intentions with wanting to replace streaming or what you carry on the go. I do not want to replace streaming with CD’s. I want to replace owning my own music with streaming and I don’t like that the most prevalent option for purchasing physical copies of music is CD’s and vinyls - both of which have drawbacks in my eyes.
So I’m day dreaming about a new format that is essentially a cool SD or thumb drive in disguise that could host an album or an artist and be accessible via my phone in a way that vinyl and CDs are not.
You’re writing a lot about a topic I’m not talking about. CD’s are coming back, I don’t love CD’s, wouldn’t it be cool if there was a better version of physical music we could buy. That’s the whole Convo.
I still don’t get it. If you want a small device to physically store your music, why don’t you copy your music to a small sd card or thumb drive? If that’s inconvenient you could just buy it digitally and move it to a drive without having to rip it first, there are a bunch of providers for drm free high res music files.
Physical media had their time when read only media could be produced much cheaper than writeable storage. With people routinely buying thumb drives that could store their entire music collection and having data plans that could transfer said collection within half an hour, I fail to see where physical media (beyond what’s already there) would have any advantage. That doesn’t mean I don’t see any appeal. Having a small case for a bunch of sd cards you could just insert into your phone to listen to some music would offer a tactile experience. But with the cheap and available rewriteable media you could just do it yourself while I guess few to no people would be willing to spend 20 bucks on a 500 MB thumb drive just because it has a tiny album artwork printed on it.
I stand by my point that the MD was peak physical media and the CD offers all the quality humans could possibly need. If you’re so keen on physical media but want to be able to literally insert them into your phone, there are USB-c drives that are barely bigger than your phone’s port. Get one, put your music on it and plug it in. I still don’t see who would buy single albums on overpriced thumb drives instead of getting a single one for the price of two or three albums and putting enough FLAC files on it to keep them listening until they’re pushing daisies.
I don’t miss carrying around or worrying about having stolen my cd collection, so smaller definitely would be better imo. I really liked the size of mini discs but they were too thick. Maybe about a quarter of that size and thinner cartridges made with solid state technology, made bigger than current tech allows in exchange for longer lifespans.
It sounds like by “quality” you are talking about the physical fragility of the CD. True, a more modern format might be nice, with a bump to 24 bit depth. I would want something a little more collectible than a thumb drive though.
I say this as an avid CD buyer who rips full quality to a Plex server. Also download from Bandcamp.
I agree, I want something more collectible than thumb drives but better (and cooler) than CDs. Ideally something with a retro sci-fi aesthetic and modern transfer capabilities (USB C).
The kids are stupid!! Streaming for life!!!
I hope you live in an area with perfect internet. I sure as hell don’t.
Don’t have to dummy. Spotify literally lets you download unlimited sounds for when you are” without service “ lmao “without service” where do you live?
