📣 News Best Buy pulling CDs; Target pushing for consignments

[Rudy]

Head units today use USB and/or SD card slots, so a hard drive really isn't necessary. A hard drive in a car isn't such a great idea since it is exposed to the elements (temperature extremes, humidity and worst of all, shock through road bumps), although a solid state drive would work well in that instance. I used to have this tiny USB hard drive for my JVC in-dash, and while it worked OK in most weather, it would not work at all in very cold weather since the disk could not rotate. Thumb drives and SD cards are much easier to load up in the house--I usually add new files once a month on average, with no proprietary software needed to do so. (Since my Pioneer handles FLAC files, I simply copy them over from the music server.)

Many new cars today do not have CD players. Someone in one of the automotive forums I read, found a USB-based CD player from China that worked perfectly. It was just a matter of finding somewhere to mount it. Manufacturers consider everyone just uses Bluetooth and their phones now for tunes (either stored on the phone, or via streaming), so they don't bother with CD players. Android Auto and Car Play both have a selection of music players and streaming services so even there, they see no need for CDs.

I haven't used CDs in cars for five or six years now. The USB thumb drives and SD cards hold up in all weather, don't get scratched up, don't skip or get dirty, are less to fumble with when driving, and (at least with the Pioneer I'm using now) I can carry lossless and better yet, high-res music files that surpass CD quality.

 

[Bobberman]

Head units today use USB and/or SD card slots, so a hard drive really isn't necessary. A hard drive in a car isn't such a great idea since it is exposed to the elements (temperature extremes, humidity and worst of all, shock through road bumps), although a solid state drive would work well in that instance. I used to have this tiny USB hard drive for my JVC in-dash, and while it worked OK in most weather, it would not work at all in very cold weather since the disk could not rotate. Thumb drives and SD cards are much easier to load up in the house--I usually add new files once a month on average, with no proprietary software needed to do so. (Since my Pioneer handles FLAC files, I simply copy them over from the music server.)

Many new cars today do not have CD players. Someone in one of the automotive forums I read, found a USB-based CD player from China that worked perfectly. It was just a matter of finding somewhere to mount it. Manufacturers consider everyone just uses Bluetooth and their phones now for tunes (either stored on the phone, or via streaming), so they don't bother with CD players. Android Auto and Car Play both have a selection of music players and streaming services so even there, they see no need for CDs.

I haven't used CDs in cars for five or six years now. The USB thumb drives and SD cards hold up in all weather, don't get scratched up, don't skip or get dirty, are less to fumble with when driving, and (at least with the Pioneer I'm using now) I can carry lossless and better yet, high-res music files that surpass CD quality.

Looks like I made a pretty good investment in my SD card recently I was given a Toshiba satellite laptop made in 2013 with a hard drive of 1 TB ( terabyte I hope I pronounced it correctly) with a working ripper/ burner and I had help with copying my SD card with 13,600 plus songs to the hardrive along with several CDS I ripped into the device already and I still have 700 plus GB of space available it looks like I might have almost my whole music library in it with plenty of room to spare and I still have the 13,600 plus songs on my Tablet's SD card and that laptop joins my older laptop ( given to me on a previous birthday a few years ago) as well as my Tablet so I've been triple blessed beyond measure this year. So far the laptop has a total of over 20.700 music tracks so far

 

[toeknee4bz]

I tried the thumb drive thing in the car and I had no luck. Can't access anything. Out of a good 50 or 60 tracks I might be able to play three or four. And I mean literally THE SAME THREE OR FOUR TRACKS. I tried taking the files out of folders and just adding them to the drive as a single list. Nope. Still can't access them in the car. Might be limitations with my Pioneer, but it's just too much trouble and not really worth my time and effort to try to figure it out. With my good old stand-by, the digital audio compact disc, I just stick it in the slot and it plays... every... single... time... without fail. Works for me.

 

[toeknee4bz]

Side note: About five years ago, a friend of mine finally retired his TWENTY-EIGHT YEAR OLD Realistic (Radio Shack) standalone CD player when it bit the dust. He bought that thing in 1985 and played it to death (which would be around 2013 or so). He said that he thought about holding a funeral for it and bury it in the back yard, but that might've been a bit much.

 

[tomswift2002]

I still prefer physical over digital, as I find CDs and Vinyl offer a better sound than compressed files.

Of course, with Vinyl, when I compare discs that were made in the 80’s (I.e “The Beach Boys” 1985 and Tiffany’s “Hold An Old Friend’s Hand” 1988) to modern pressings like “The Beach Boys That’s Why God Made The Radio” (2012) the modern vinyl seems to be mastered at a lower level from the digital masters, whereas the 80’s were mastered at a higher level (and, for example The Beach Boys 1985 self-title was recorded and mixed at 16-bit, 44.1kHz so it’s not that it was mastered from CD masters—-that was what was out for digital recording to U-Matic, Betamax or VHS masters that were used in the 80’s).

Plus in my new truck I have both CD and DVD, so for going to work or on the road, CD's are better. Plus I've picked up a number of CD's for a lot less than what I would pay on iTunes or another streaming/downloading platform (last I checked, iTunes wanted $1.29 for a single track, or $9.99 for a whole album at its cheapest, whereas I've paid anywhere from $5 to $20 for a single or double CD collection at the local Wal-Mart, and those discs have had anywhere from 10 to 20 tracks per disc (or in the case of the double CD's upto 50 tracks). So in a lot of cases I'm paying maybe 40 or 50 cents per track (and that includes tax).

As for physical releases dying out, the major players may try to, however, I would say that at the consumer level or even a level where you are only distributing a small number, there will still be demand for a physical product. For example with my small business, I'm finding that people are preferring to get DV-AVI or DV-MOV files on hard drive of their VHS, Betamax, 8mm or other family memories on videotapes nowadays rather than DVD's, as they can stream the files on their computers, as they are more future proof than DVD's, but on the other hand, when I tape a wedding, people prefer DVD-R's, as they can send can have a physical copy of their wedding video, and even send DVD copies to their family members (and I have even had a few requests for VHS copies for their older family members), and with the insert photo and Amray case its a nice presentation piece. But even businesses can use DVD's or SD cards as marketing tools at trade shows for example, as more people are likely to pop a DVD into a DVD/Blu-Ray player or find a SD card at the bottom of a bag and see the marketing video, than they are to look through a bunch of papers and typing in web addresses for videos on YouTube and Vimeo (although DVD-R's are cheaper, as I'm able to put together for my clients a DVD that costs about $5 for all the materials---DVD-R, Insert paper, ink to print the picture and Amray case---whereas the cheapest SD card is about $7 dollars for just the card, and they don't seem to make anything like a DVD case for SD cards).

 

[Rudy]

I still prefer physical over digital, as I find CDs and Vinyl offer a better sound than compressed files.

If using downloads to buy music, lossless is the way to go; buying high-res is even better. I've never bought a lossy (compressed) file in my life, and never plan to. Given that there is so much Internet bandwidth available, there really is no reason for lossy files anymore. I can download an entire lossless album in just a couple of minutes now.

I do still enjoy handling vinyl, though. And there will always be physical formats available. As you say, it often makes the most sense to distribute something in the easiest way possible. Even though many independent artists sell their music on download sites such as Bandcamp, it is still a great takeaway to offer a CD for sale after a concert.

 

[tomswift2002]

I do still enjoy handling vinyl, though. And there will always be physical formats available. As you say, it often makes the most sense to distribute something in the easiest way possible. Even though many independent artists sell their music on download sites such as Bandcamp, it is still a great takeaway to offer a CD for sale after a concert.

I've heard of independent bands and artists going the audio cassette route, since cassettes can still be sold at concerts for a lot of time less than $10.

Forget Vinyl, Let's Talk About The Cassette Comeback

 

[Rudy]

Cassettes are one of those dead formats that the hipsters are into, since vinyl became too popular.

The big flaw there is that there are not any good new cassette players being made. The only home deck I've seen is Pyle (which can't even approach mediocre in quality) and a lot of those import chinese portables with unpronounceable names which you probably throw in the trash a few months later when they stop working. Vintage cassette decks most often need to be worked on to be usable--new belts due to rubber drying out, electronics that have drifted out of spec, electrolytic capacitors going bad after 20-25 years, etc.

 

[Bobberman]

Cassettes are one of those dead formats that the hipsters are into, since vinyl became too popular.

The big flaw there is that there are not any good new cassette players being made. The only home deck I've seen is Pyle (which can't even approach mediocre in quality) and a lot of those import chinese portables with unpronounceable names which you probably throw in the trash a few months later when they stop working. Vintage cassette decks most often need to be worked on to be usable--new belts due to rubber drying out, electronics that have drifted out of spec, electrolytic capacitors going bad after 20-25 years, etc.

I gave up on cassettes in 2003 as they were out of favor pretty much and made a total switch to digital recording on CDR which inevitably would lead to computer based playback thanks to those CDRs and regular CDs my entire disc library is in the process of going into my 1TB storage laptop and so far so good I'm preserving all of my lifelong audio and putting them in one convienent unit which has a rare but working Ripper/burner

 

[AM Matt]

Target stores still have their exclusive bonus tracks!! Matt Clark Sanford, MI