Comment by WD-42
2 days ago
I’ve been doing the same over the last few months.
The best part for me is going to record stores again. CDs are SO cheap now, especially used ones. I’ll usually pick a few out of the dollar bin just based on vibes and the cover and rip them when I get home. I’ve found some cool stuff. It’s like a treasure hunt.
Don’t miss Spotify one bit.
To anyone going down this route, there's a surprisingly deep rabbit hole when you look into "how copy the bits off the drive and into a .wav file". There are a lot of places where errors can be introduced: the quality of the CD drive, the condition of the disc itself, how fast the drive is spinning for the rip, etc. I didn't think this was a big issue until I got a load of cheap used discs, started ripping them with my laptop, and later discovered issues with some of the rips, even on discs which looked perfectly fine.
There's a tool called cdparanoia[1] whose goal is to babysit the CD drive and ensure that it gets a complete, perfect, uninterrupted stream of bits off the drive, and will use a lot of tricks to go back and re-read any data that didn't come back cleanly. I always used it with abcde[2], which was a wrapper around it with album lookup, tagging, and ffmpeg support. I highly recommend anyone amassing a CD rip collection take a look at it, both are still packaged in present-day Ubuntu.
[1] https://www.xiph.org/paranoia/faq.html [2] https://abcde.einval.com/wiki/
+1 for ripping with abcde
Make sure you enable its MusicBrainz support. I used to painstakingly input all the band / album / track title metadata but then discovered that people were already doing it for me.
However, then you go down the MB rabbit hole with obscure music that no one has ever inputted. Still, it's a quick and easy way to contribute and then it's available for everyone.
whipper is built on cdparanoia but uses the AccurateRip database to verify the accuracy of your rip: https://github.com/whipper-team/whipper
Or you can run EAC in wine.
Slightly off topic but this describes a lot of what I love about used book stores. I enjoy browsing around and often buy things that just seem interesting since the prices are low. I've found all kinds of great books that would never turn up in a regular curated store.
If you can, find an old tape deck at a thrift store and look into cassettes as well. They're super fun to find and you can buy new ones from groups on Bandcamp usually way cheaper than any other merch offerings and still get the high quality FLAC files. I spent some time last year going through a variety of tapes that were up to 40+ years old and was shocked at how good some of them still sounded.
Yes. But shhhhh about cds, don’t want people to realise…
Also the price of decent (Sony hifi grade, not ES) CD players used is great too.
I did just realize after posting maybe touting how affordable CDs have become is maybe not the best idea.
I can't remember the artist but there's a fun song about how they used to pick up second hand LPs really cheap and then they got popular and too expensive, then discovered second hand CDs are really cheap now.
Frank turner-ish vibes but I don't think it was actually him.
It's completely un-googlable though, and even the LLMs aren't much help on this one.
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The people who really want to stop paying for streaming are going to turn to piracy, don't worry. Physical media will still be accessible for people who are willing to pay with space instead of money.
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:'D
Aren't CD players just reading digits? I'm not anywhere close to a hifi expert but it must be all about the DAC, no? Or do you mean the ones with a built-in DAC?
> all about the DAC, no?
Yes, it is (unless the CD player is so bad that it can't do adequate error correction). What I do is rip the CD to my music server, which is where I listen to the music from. Then the quality of the CD player isn't important, as long as it works correctly.
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I've had a bad experience with this just a couple years ago. I have an old DVD/CD player which at some point I realized I had no way of connecting to my new TV. The old one was a decent looking premium unit, that I got from my parents (who paid good money for it),
The industry has collectively decided that since CDs/DVDs are just about converting digital bits into other bits deterministically, there's no value left to differentiate, and everyone started selling absolutely nasty plasticky junk.
The new Sony unit I got was a loud rattly garbage, that even though it did the things it needed to do, made such an awful noise that I had to take it back. The other one I got (don't remember the brand) was no better.
I took that one back too, and I shelved the issue, but it was kind of remarkably terrible experience for me.
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How common were HiFi CD players without DACs? My recollection is that S/PDIF never really caught on that much so output to the amplifier was almost always analog.
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Yeah, but most of the the old (2000s in particular) mid-range hifi units all had decent-enough DAC's to do 44.1/16bit. And they're cheap now.
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/317751858636 e.g. £65 doesn't even remotely get you close to listenable in vinyl.
>(Sony hifi grade, not ES)
I don't understand this, are you saying higher than ES or lower than ES?
I thought ES was their top "Elevated" Standard?
I second this strategy. My suggestion is keep an eye out for soundtracks and “sampler” type promo discs - some quirky gems! Record labels and their relationships with Hollywood did demonstrate money and drugs and music to great together…see: Spawn the movie soundtrack (1990s).
Also my library card is much better for legacy music exploration. It scales too.
There's something magical about picking music based purely on a cover or a vague vibe and taking a chance on it