It's funny people are still learning this, but I guess some are younger. I have hundreds of CDs I started buying about 1992 or 1993 and did a big project at on

It's funny people are still learning this, but I guess some are younger. I have hundreds of CDs I started buying about 1992 or 1993 and did a big project at one point making MP3s and early on in the iTunes/iPod era they found their way into iTunes. I started playing around with MP3 Layer 2 and then Layer 3 around 1995-1996, but at that time it was still prohibitive to try and store your whole collection as hard drives were still barely the size of one CD. I think my computer in 1995-1996 had a 250MB HDD. In 1997 I think I got a 1GB one in a desktop build. But by 2002-2003 this started to not be an issue. There have been so many shenanigans along the way (this reddit thread is just one of them) that I gave up about 9 years ago. I ended up re-scanning every CD as FLAC and storing them all outside of iTunes and then ended up getting a Fiio DAP that could play them. I don't use the Fiio all that much anymore, but I kept on buying CDs and ripping them to FLAC or buying FLACs directly. I definitely didn't buy as much music the past 10 years though. Lately I have gone back to actually playing the CDs in a dedicated CD player and even got a Turntable and now have a very small # of vinyls. Everything is off on the NAS backed up but yet it's somehow just more fun to pull the disc out and play it. It's like the entire physical media -> files -> streaming thing has been a 20 year bad trip. The loudness war didn't help either. It boggles my mind vinyl is making a comeback now, but it seems obvious it is because of the double whammy of the loudness war and the endless shenanigans by Apple and all other digital music stores/streaming platforms. And the stupid thing is there are still tons of releases that actually sound better on Vinyl despite it being an inferior format because they have never gone back and fixed a lot of the loudness issues. Some of these are crazy. The Beatles Sergeant Pepper's album was re-released a few years ago. The Vinyl copy was an improvement on the older vinyl versions. But the CD version was a degradation of the 1997 version that I've owned since the late 90s! Sometimes the streaming services somehow have worse versions than the CD.