Those of you who are long-time readers of The Loafer, and of my column in particular, may recall that in the very early years of it I often reviewed music as well as my regular musings. I am, and pretty much always have been, a serious music lover. What I mean by that is the listening to music and the pleasure and enjoyment I get from it has been one of the great passions of my life.
Even going back to when I was a kid, there exists a home video where I’m three and you can hear my mother remark “You know all he wants to do when he first gets up in the morning is listen to music.” You know I’m an advocate for physical media, and that doesn’t end with movies. I have been curating a large home library of music since I was, not joking, five years old when I was given a stereo with a CD player for my birthday. My home office is full of music on various formats. Cassette Tapes, Compact Discs, and Records.
Some 20 years ago I bought a MP3 player like many people, and as I began to rip my CDs to put on the device, I found I loved it. I used to haul a duffel bag full of CDs with me on vacations and road trips, along with my trusty portable CD player. This did all that, and in one little device that fits in my pocket!? The future is now, kids! Yet, as many people have moved on to being content not owning music and leaving it all up to a streaming service, I am not.
I still like having my music, and though I do subscribe to a streaming service, I still buy music. I also this year began a project to get the most out of my beloved CD collection, I’ve begun re-ripping most of them as lossless files, digital files with audio quality the same as the original CD. Now, you may be asking, why would I do this? Well, there’s several reasons. The biggest one for me is knowing that one day it is highly likely I will own a car without a CD player in it, which feels weird to me, to be honest.
If I have to rely one day on all my on the go and in the car music being on my phone, I want to be able to listen to it in CD quality. Another is that last year I upgraded some of the speakers in my home to ones of higher quality, this is combined with the fact that I also use a home media server, made me think it be nice to dial up my CDs in their native fidelity from anywhere in the house.
But the biggest one for me is to be able to do some digital housekeeping. Some of these files began life in the mid-2000s as Window Media, then that got converted to MP3 as I changed digital players. There’s also a lot of duplicates of things. Somehow I wound up with five copies of the song “My Girl” in there, I’d like to have it all tidied up a bit to where there are less duplicates of things.
I also want to be clear I’m not doing this to get rid of the CDs, I’m keeping those. I’ve curated them for far too long to toss them and I do enjoy playing them in the office on a CD player that’s hooked into my current stereo. I also don’t believe that my CDs will one day suddenly stop playing either, but I do think maybe having a backup of them all in a lossless form is a good idea too.
I don’t know when I’ll be done with this, I’m trying to tackle it all in waves to keep it from being overwhelming, I own around 700 CDs after all. I do know though that when I finish I will be pleased with the results and should, hopefully, never have to re-rip a CD again. It’s a task, but one that I’m enjoying, despite the tedium now and then. See you next week.
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