You know, might not be the worst thing if Amazon and Google's databases got utterly fried. Just sayin'.
That said, I do need to print out a ton of photographs of my son.
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CDs
- Thread starter 48thStreetCustom
- Start date
You know, might not be the worst thing if Amazon and Google's databases got utterly fried. Just sayin'.
That said, I do need to print out a ton of photographs of my son.
When I had the photo lab, we made copy negs (usually 4x5, sometimes with the Hasselblad) of old photographs, magazine articles, books, etc. for our clients. The oldest book we ever got in was from the mid 1500s. It was in amazingly good condition (it came from our local library's Special Collections department; we usually went there to make copies, but they brought that one in to the lab for some reason). The oldest photograph we got in to make a copy neg of was a Mathew Brady of the Cincinnati Reds in 1869.
Jeff, this is indeed a small world: I grew up with my dad turning the kitchen into a darkroom with his Omega cold-light head enlarger and smelling D76 and that orange stop-bath, printing 120 negs from his Rolleis, and for about five years I was a 'One-Hour Guy' at a Fuji-lab equipped Wolf Camera branch.
In a way I miss film, but I don't miss the chemistry, especially color chemistry.
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Jewel-Box Heroes: Why the CD Revival Is Finally Here
Jewel-Box Heroes: Why the CD Revival Is Finally Here
Compact discs never had the romance of vinyl or the convenience of MP3s. But they’re still the ideal format for getting lost inside your music collection
Rob Sheffield January 19, 2022 11:19AM ET
In 2021, CD sales increased for the first time in 17 years. That’s mostly because of Adele, whose new album sold 898,000 of those shiny little discs. The last time CDs were this hot, Usher, Ashlee Simpson, and Hoobastank were the ones selling them. Now it’s Adele, BTS, and Taylor Swift. It’s part of an overall revival for physical media — vinyl is booming even bigger. But for those of us who love the humble compact disc, it’s a question worth pondering: Are we finally seeing the CD revival? Why are music fans falling back in love with the gadget that once promised “perfect sound forever”?
[And so on...]
Jewel-Box Heroes: Why the CD Revival Is Finally Here
Compact discs never had the romance of vinyl or the convenience of MP3s. But they’re still the ideal format for getting lost inside your music collection
Rob Sheffield January 19, 2022 11:19AM ET
In 2021, CD sales increased for the first time in 17 years. That’s mostly because of Adele, whose new album sold 898,000 of those shiny little discs. The last time CDs were this hot, Usher, Ashlee Simpson, and Hoobastank were the ones selling them. Now it’s Adele, BTS, and Taylor Swift. It’s part of an overall revival for physical media — vinyl is booming even bigger. But for those of us who love the humble compact disc, it’s a question worth pondering: Are we finally seeing the CD revival? Why are music fans falling back in love with the gadget that once promised “perfect sound forever”?
[And so on...]
That reminds me of a radio interview I heard, in which a scholar compared various formats for data storage and observed that paper is actually very good considering how long it can last, how much lighter it is than other physical media, etc. It was a very interesting show. My mother just gave me a stack of old family records, and some are quite old indeed (or are copies of very old records).
I still have about 1,000 CDs. I've ditched most of the boxes, and store the discs in binders with sleeves. I've ripped hundreds into iTunes and then loaded them onto old 160GB iPod Classics that live in the cars. So I rarely listen to the CDs themselves, and now that we all have Spotify I've almost stopped buying them.
I still buy CDs in a few situations: (1) I want to learn tracks for a project, for which I like to use my TASCAM CD Bass Trainer; (2) I've just seen the band's gig, and I buy at the merch table; (3) it's either rare or from one of my very favorite artists. For example, I bought the most recent Beck album.
Indicator stop bath? How quaint!
Real darkroom rats us Glacial Acetic Acid... 
And, we taste it to test the working strength as we set up our trays for fiberbase printing...
As promised, here are my CDs. Most of them, anyway.
My SO's father used that, and a smaller one which we have on display, too, daily, in his restaurant he had in the 1950s up until the place closed in 1970.
The second-most stupid thing I ever did, was buy a Tascam MP3 Bass trainer.
The stupidest thing I ever did, was then proceed to give away my Tascam CD bass trainer.
Now I need to use an old, slow laptop to rip CD's to MP3 to put them on the trainer
[edit] Kidding about the MP3 player, I quite like it!
I buy CD's. I consider them like gold and silver and on line music like bitcoin. If I don't hold it I don't own it.
So, you guys only buy the CDs? No organizing, data collection, nothing? Amateurs.
I use CLZ, for my Jazz collection only. It's a great hobby.
I use CLZ, for my Jazz collection only. It's a great hobby.
Your phone gets stolen or your computer crashes you don't have that music now. Same only happens to your CD's if your home burns down.
+1
This is why I enjoy listening to LPs. They’re a more intimate experience, and you don’t get the ease of skipping or repeating songs so you have to go in the journey the artist wanted you to go on. Doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate streaming services, but I do think they hurt music consumption in a way.
This sums up my feelings. The thing about LPs vs CDs/streaming, is that there is a limited amount of music you can fit on a side of vinyl. I'm sure it's because it's what I grew up with, but 20 to 25 minutes is just the right amount of time to sit and listen and then get up for a stretch and to flip the record. I'm also a book hound and I love the look of record and bookshelves. That's an aesthetic that's not available with streaming.
Decades ago, in college, I was struck by an observation that I made browsing around library bookshelves, that the books from the late 19th/20th century were completely disintegrating while older books - yes, back to the early-printing stuff, or even medieval manuscripts - were perfectly solid. There was a transition over to cheaper acidic wood-pulp paper that doomed them to decay.
In a history class yesterday I was explaining the idea of primary sources in history to my students (documents that arise directly as a result of human actions and experience). We talked about how an event like a car accident resulted in generating all kinds of records - police reports, news stories, hospital bills, insurance correspondence, etc. - that could give a later historian evidence for it. A student observed that the vast amount of information on a social media site like Facebook would be a huge bonanza for historians of the future. And the subsequent discussion was yes, it would be - if the historian of the future were able to access it. If some upheaval, or just obsolescence, makes all that digital media go away (or the software that accesses it), our era could wind up being a big blank that future historians have to guess about from surviving scraps of physical media.
When I buy a CD, I rip a digital copy of the songs, both so that I can listen to them via digital players and as a backup in case the CD gets scratched or broken. But the CD is also a backup in case the song files are deleted or corrupted etc.
It's been pointed out how the new paradigm is subscription to streaming, which has its advantages and disadvantages compared to owning a copy in digital or physical form. I use it, but don't entirely rely on it. The reason is Akira Kurosawa. I went on a kick a couple years ago of wanting to watch as many Kurosawa movies as possible. I discovered that they are not available to stream on Netflix. Now if you hunt around, you'll find them on various other subscription services. But if your main paradigm for home movie watching is where you pull up the service you've got and browse for stuff, you'd never find it. I still really like the idea of being able to own a copy of a movie, or an album, so I'm not dependent on what some commercial service happens to decide they want to be offering me at the moment.
I’m actually beginning to get back into DVDs and Blu-ray of all things. This past holiday season was rough findings classics to watch on TV, and I don’t want to be beholden to numerous subscription services just to see things that used to play repeatedly on terrestrial tv. I already have Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, and Hulu but was severely lacking in options.
I won't do subscription services. One of the fundamental rules of frugal living and financial health is to reduce fixed costs. The companies who sell subscriptions know that most people won't ever take a hard look at how much gets sucked out of their checking accounts by auto-pay, year after year. Buy a CD, you pay once, it'll still deliver the information 50 years from now. If you're tight on money, don't buy the CD. It's real easy to choose not to make an explicit purchase.
"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery."
-- Wilkins Micawber
"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery."
-- Wilkins Micawber
