Music consumption?

[43st]

I'm 34 and very much enjoy music, it's been an important part of my life. In high school I had tapes, and mix tapes. That transitioned into CD's, and a lessor extent mix CD's. At the heart of my music enjoyment has always been the album format, I enjoy good albums, I'm not much of a singles person that is to say. If I do listen to a single repeatably it's on a mix of some sort.

So on to my problem...

I've had various Ipods for 5-6 years and a digital library of sorts, maybe 12-15 Gb. in various quality levels. This is also mirrored on my hard drive. The thing is I just don't like my music this way. Maybe it was the ritual of flipping through tapes and CD's, and then putting into a stereo system. I don't want to think about the 'library', I just want to find something and listen to it. Using Itunes has been a huge pain in the ass, it puts compilations under individual artist, which required renaming the titles to include the compilation or soundtrack name.

So my wife and I have been playing CD's again, through our Oppo dvd player, through the stereo. And now we're talking about using CD's again and opening our old dusty CD boxes up.

So how do you guys consume music? Is it all digital now or is there still people out there using CD racks? Has anyone gone back to CD's after going completely digital?

 

[destrekor]

Ever since I got an mp3 player, it's been all digital. Prior to that, I tended to make mp3 mix cds and play them in my truck (have an mp3 cd deck). But now, I use my Zune, and have a dock hooked up in my truck and manage all my music on my computer. My entire collection goes with my everywhere, either when I'm in my truck, or when I'm walking around campus, or is a click away when sitting at my computer.

As for library management, I absolutely love the latest releases of the Zune software.
As long as you tag you're music collection properly (ID3 tags), music will show up where it is supposed to. But the issue with compilations, you're keeping the tags as-is, meaning they contain the data of the original albums. What you need to do for compilation cds, is put them all in a playlist name that playlist what you called your compilation, so that you know what it is.
Zune has a separate section for playlists that is awesome, though I rarely, rarely ever use playlists, just not my thing... I hate structured music listening I more often play my entire library on shuffle or just listen to specific artists and pick and choose or listen to entire albums.
The separate panes in the main view is awesome, because you can separate by artist and then view all album covers of that artist, or you can just browse by all albums, or even just browse by all songs, and can change sorting easily. And it's pretty minimalist but is sleek and easy to use, and the now playing screen, while still lacking true visualizers, does have its own touch of sheer genius, and I love just leaving the Now Playing screen up.

 

[Nohr]

I rip all my CDs with EAC and listen to them on my PC with a digital output connected to my receiver. It's a lot more convenient to find what I want to hear this way, plus it keeps the CDs safe from wear & tear. I create playlists for each album so I can play them in their entirety along with getting scans of the album art.

 

[Tiamat]

I do kind of a hybrid. Certain music is arranged so that the computer-as-source works best (playlists) while other specific music I really just pop in the CD in my CDP. If I just want "music as background" the computer works best. If I want a something specific, the CDs work best.

 

[43st]

Originally posted by: Tiamat
I do kind of a hybrid. Certain music is arranged so that the computer-as-source works best (playlists) while other specific music I really just pop in the CD in my CDP. If I just want "music as background" the computer works best. If I want a something specific, the CDs work best.

I relate to this.. Something that's occurred with me is I prune my digital music, I guess it's some type of nerd impulse to keep the data uncluttered. One reason I like browsing CD's is that I'll come across something I haven't heard in a few years and I'll want to listen. You never get that with digital unless you keep it all, and in my case that would be hundreds and hundreds of gigabytes, which I'd never want on a hard drive (probably 400-500 CD's worth).

 

[thomsbrain]

Even through I have a hard drive hooked to my PS3 with dozens of gigs of MP3s, a 100-disc CD changer packed to the gills, and an Audyssey-equipped receiver setup for listening positions on the couch, I think I most enjoy listening to music hunched over on the floor in front of the CD player and record player, feeding in disc after disc by hand. The tactile experience cannot be underestimated.

 

[43st]

Monday bump..

 

[destrekor]

Originally posted by: thomsbrain
Even through I have a hard drive hooked to my PS3 with dozens of gigs of MP3s, a 100-disc CD changer packed to the gills, and an Audyssey-equipped receiver setup for listening positions on the couch, I think I most enjoy listening to music hunched over on the floor in front of the CD player and record player, feeding in disc after disc by hand. The tactile experience cannot be underestimated.

No doubt. As much as I like all my music in a digital collection, I do still enjoy popping in a cd from time to time in a nice setup. It just lends to enjoying the music more, preps the mind for a different experience... an idea that is difficult to communicate, but some will know what I am talking about (and seems you enjoy that experience too).
However, I do it rarely, and that might because I come from a time where CDs were basically it, and quality CD playing isn't exactly a phenomenon.
Now, I've been interested for a long time in albums and getting a nice record player, but to get a good one is expensive, and I don't want to start the experience off wrong by getting a cheapo player, so I continue to hold off until I can do it right. In a few years I imagine, once I'm commissioned, I'll get a record player and do it right so its hooked up to my home theater properly. Get that all hooked up and spin a few great albums and just relax back on the couch. That's my goal at least.

 

[Booty]

A few years back, I purchased the original Squeezebox and ripped all 400+ of my CDs to MP3. It was definitely time consuming, but the server software for the Squeezebox was great - it was nice to have everything on a central server instead of having client software maintain my library.

Now that I'm married, my wife (also a music lover with about 500 CDs of her own that we're working on ripping) wants/needs access to all the music. The SlimServer still worked alright, but browsing using the Squeezebox isn't the greatest, and using the web console to control the player (or the java-based software player) is a little bit of a pain for her. Plus, what she REALLY wants is to be able to pull up some music and then be one or two clicks away from burning that to a CD for her commute to work. Vista Media Center has that, so now I'm working on moving everything there (even though I still like the Slim Devices server and hardware). I definitely admit that it's easier to browse through our collection on VMC - I guess I probably just liked that I could run the other stuff on my FreeBSD server...

Anyway, what's nice about both interfaces is the ability to just play everything, or a specific genre, on shuffle... sometimes it's fun to flip through CDs and pick and choose what I want to listen to, but with about 500 albums currently ripped and nearly 1000 by the time we're done, it gets old flipping through the pages. Plus on random every now and then a song comes on and I'll be like "wow, this is great... uh... who the hell is this?". Kinda fun...

I'm still looking for a standalone media manager that does what VMC now does for us... right now I have my dad using Songbird to play and manage his music, but using a seperate CD burning program confuses him. He doesn't quite get the whole playlist creation thing, and I haven't found any software I like that supports playlists (Nero does, but I'm not a huge fan of that software anymore). I'm hoping they build the burning feature into Songbird soon... but even then, the VMC interface is MUCH easier for the average user to navigate. Too bad it's not a standalone product I could buy for him...

 

[erwos]

Manage my music? Rip to WMA Pro (lossless) or download from my Zune Pass, and then stream to my 360 or push to my Zune. As long as you keep your stuff tagged, it works just great.

If I get a Palm Pre to replace my Zune, I'll have to re-evaluate all that, of course. The real problem is that I can't stream FLAC or AAC lossless to anything I've got under my home theater, so there would be some messy transcoding problems involved. I suppose that if WMP is the sync software of choice for the Pre, I could just leave it in WMA lossless and let WMP worry about the conversion to MP3 or AAC when I do my sync. I'm not really eager to get into the CD mega changer side of things, especially since I would have to store the music somewhere else in digital form anyways.