Why not ditch the discs? Keep the liners and liner notes, if you want; for some obscure bands, that information (gasp) may not be available online.
A couple of questions I'd consider when thinking about switching from optical media to magnetic drive:
1. What format should the data be transferred as, assuming you want the transfer to be lossless? (You can always make smaller mp3s as needed.) FLAC? Something else?
2. If you're going to keep all your music on one hard drive, you really can't risk losing it all to a head crash. You have to have at least one, and preferably more backups, which means you'll need to buy two or three big hard drives, and you'll have to remember to backup your library on a regular basis. Durability is obviously a huge advantage of CDs.
It's too bad that digital music sold online doesn't yet match CD quality; it forces us all to keep buying CDs, even if we'd rather go discless.
(BTW, @2: The damage caused by jewel cases is more in the making of them than in the disposing of them. Don't worry, they probably won't damage the environment, or decay at all, for centuries.)
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randy said on November 20, 2007:
Why not ditch the discs? Keep the liners and liner notes, if you want; for some obscure bands, that information (gasp) may not be available online.
A couple of questions I'd consider when thinking about switching from optical media to magnetic drive:
1. What format should the data be transferred as, assuming you want the transfer to be lossless? (You can always make smaller mp3s as needed.) FLAC? Something else?
2. If you're going to keep all your music on one hard drive, you really can't risk losing it all to a head crash. You have to have at least one, and preferably more backups, which means you'll need to buy two or three big hard drives, and you'll have to remember to backup your library on a regular basis. Durability is obviously a huge advantage of CDs.
It's too bad that digital music sold online doesn't yet match CD quality; it forces us all to keep buying CDs, even if we'd rather go discless.
(BTW, @2: The damage caused by jewel cases is more in the making of them than in the disposing of them. Don't worry, they probably won't damage the environment, or decay at all, for centuries.)