I hate CDs. Actually, I’ve disliked them for awhile but there really wasn’t anything I could do about it until existing desktop tech made it feasible to replace large sections of my CD library with digital copies. Before going any further, this isn’t a rant about the inferiority of digital music, compressed waveforms, or hoary old arguments about digital versus analog fidelity. At least I’ll try not to rant…
Anyway, my hassle with CDs are with them as physical objects. CDs are great in small numbers or as temporary storage, but once you accumulate a lot of them (say hundreds) the inconveniences exponentiate. I’ve been doing a lot of traveling lately in anticipation of resettling in another city and the idea of moving a couple thousand (I stopped counting years ago at 2000) CDs gave me migraines.
Okay okay, queue up the World’s Smallest Violin to play “Boo hoo, Barrus has too much music,” but that wasn’t my first thought. The geek SysAdmin in me looked at all this music as a data administration problem and quickly concluded “gosh there’s a lot of single-point failures here.”
Look at it this way, how many of you have or know someone who’s had CDs stolen from them? Your car or house might have been broken into, or you’ve had a portable CD player stolen with a disc still in it. Really annoying. Now multiply that by some super-obscuro CD-R release from a Kiwi band that tours the US once every ten years or by some ultra-expensive Japanese-only release that took eons to special order. Really really really annoying.
Not surprisingly I picked up an iPod early on and left all my CDs at home. I use a laptop full time so anytime I picked up a CD I ripped it to disk and listened to it that way. My stereo conked out a couple years ago and I never bothered to replace it. My ears are shot from too much drone rock so I don’t notice data compression artifacts at all. Packaging? Who cares… with a few exceptions (IPR, Factory, and Rhino’s box sets), music packaging has been dead since 1987. Why haul around boxes and boxes of CDs when you can carry just about everything in a shopping bag full of DVD-Rs?
Easy? Sort of… Going digital with a huge record collection creates a data management problem. iTunes is a pretty good music data interface but it gets unwieldy when you have thousands of files. My current listening pile has 8208 tracks and I have roughly 150 DVD-Rs of archived MP3s/AACs. Hard drives are getting large enough that I could conceivably put the whole works on a single drive (though I’m obsessive enough to use two and mirror the whole works). With the release of the Mac Mini, a lot of folks were kicking around the idea of a Mini-based media server, but I want something more server-oriented, perhaps a scaled-down Xserve with only one processor and one drive bay, but with input/outputs for whatever interface (analog audio/video, FireWire, optical, etc.) I want to throw at it.
Before the custom hardware though iTunes could use a couple improvements right now to make it perfect. Multiple library support that could handle offline discs so I could search archived tracks. Additional metatags instead of just the one “genre” tag would be nice. Couple that with Spotlight support for all the ID tags (e.g. show me all “radio show”-tagged tracks from 1962 that are longer than 30 minutes) and I’ll be a happy camper.
