6 ms·

I’ve been doing the same over the last few months. The best part for me is going to record stores again. CDs are SO cheap now, especially used ones. I’ll usual

by WD-42 9mo ago

I’ve been doing the same over the last few months. The best part for me is going to record stores again. CDs are SO cheap now, especially used ones. I’ll usually pick a few out of the dollar bin just based on vibes and the cover and rip them when I get home. I’ve found some cool stuff. It’s like a treasure hunt. Don’t miss Spotify one bit.

te_chris 9mo ago
Yes. But shhhhh about cds, don’t want people to realise… Also the price of decent (Sony hifi grade, not ES) CD players used is great too.
- WD-42 9mo ago
  I did just realize after posting maybe touting how affordable CDs have become is maybe not the best idea.
  - conartist6 9mo ago
    :'D
  - eterm 9mo ago
    I can't remember the artist but there's a fun song about how they used to pick up second hand LPs really cheap and then they got popular and too expensive, then discovered second hand CDs are really cheap now. Frank turner-ish vibes but I don't think it was actually him. It's completely un-googlable though, and even the LLMs aren't much help on this one.
    - nluken 9mo ago
      Oh! I know this one! You're thinking of Jeffrey Lewis & The Voltage's LPs from 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3urXygZXb74 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3urXygZXb74'
      - eterm 9mo ago
        Nice one, thanks!
      - richrichardsson 9mo ago
        Humans prove to have some value in the LLM age after all! /s
      - te_chris 9mo ago
        Love it. Not often you get music threads like this on HN!
  - RIMR 9mo ago
    The people who really want to stop paying for streaming are going to turn to piracy, don't worry. Physical media will still be accessible for people who are willing to pay with space instead of money.
    - KK7NIL 9mo ago
      "We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem" - Gabe Newell
- patates 9mo ago
  Aren't CD players just reading digits? I'm not anywhere close to a hifi expert but it must be all about the DAC, no? Or do you mean the ones with a built-in DAC?
  - JohnFen 9mo ago
    > all about the DAC, no? Yes, it is (unless the CD player is so bad that it can't do adequate error correction). What I do is rip the CD to my music server, which is where I listen to the music from. Then the quality of the CD player isn't important, as long as it works correctly.
    - blibble 9mo ago
      it's surprising difficult to rip from audio CDs in a error free manner most tools do it badly and just accept what the drive gives them in default mode, often with glitches
      - TheDong 9mo ago
        Just use a tool that supports the AccurateRip database or similar, and check your checksums, right? Like, ripping seems easy to me, you rip with something that supports a checksum database, and if it comes out with a correct checksum then it's right.
        hcs 9mo ago
        If you don't have a good drive and a clean disc you may get skipping/jitter and thus possibly never get a AR or CueTools DB match. (CTDB has parity records that can be used to repair some small errors.) This is the point of the elaborate re-read stuff Exact Audio Copy or cdparanoia does. Though even with a good drive you ought to be using a tool that checks for C2 errors, and that won't necessarily catch everything; error correction and detection is always probabilistic. Also not everything is in AR/CTDB. Maybe 3% of the 1000+ CDs I've ripped had no records yet, though I do tend towards the obscure. I rip these again with EAC, which is set up to automatically do CTDB submission. (Usually I'm using the redumper tool which has some specialized features.) Without external verification it's best to dump it twice and ensure they're bit equal, preferably with a different drive to minimize error correlation.
- mlrtime 9mo ago
  >(Sony hifi grade, not ES) I don't understand this, are you saying higher than ES or lower than ES? I thought ES was their top "Elevated" Standard?
6stringmerc 9mo ago
I second this strategy. My suggestion is keep an eye out for soundtracks and “sampler” type promo discs - some quirky gems! Record labels and their relationships with Hollywood did demonstrate money and drugs and music to great together…see: Spawn the movie soundtrack (1990s). Also my library card is much better for legacy music exploration. It scales too.
rurp 9mo ago
Slightly off topic but this describes a lot of what I love about used book stores. I enjoy browsing around and often buy things that just seem interesting since the prices are low. I've found all kinds of great books that would never turn up in a regular curated store.
gibsonsmog 9mo ago
If you can, find an old tape deck at a thrift store and look into cassettes as well. They're super fun to find and you can buy new ones from groups on Bandcamp usually way cheaper than any other merch offerings and still get the high quality FLAC files. I spent some time last year going through a variety of tapes that were up to 40+ years old and was shocked at how good some of them still sounded.
interludead 9mo ago
There's something magical about picking music based purely on a cover or a vague vibe and taking a chance on it
maples37 9mo ago
To anyone going down this route, there's a surprisingly deep rabbit hole when you look into "how copy the bits off the drive and into a .wav file". There are a lot of places where errors can be introduced: the quality of the CD drive, the condition of the disc itself, how fast the drive is spinning for the rip, etc. I didn't think this was a big issue until I got a load of cheap used discs, started ripping them with my laptop, and later discovered issues with some of the rips, even on discs which looked perfectly fine. There's a tool called cdparanoia[1] whose goal is to babysit the CD drive and ensure that it gets a complete, perfect, uninterrupted stream of bits off the drive, and will use a lot of tricks to go back and re-read any data that didn't come back cleanly. I always used it with abcde[2], which was a wrapper around it with album lookup, tagging, and ffmpeg support. I highly recommend anyone amassing a CD rip collection take a look at it, both are still packaged in present-day Ubuntu. [1] https://www.xiph.org/paranoia/faq.html https://www.xiph.org/paranoia/faq.html [2] https://abcde.einval.com/wiki/ https://abcde.einval.com/wiki/
- dmm 9mo ago
  whipper is built on cdparanoia but uses the AccurateRip database to verify the accuracy of your rip: https://github.com/whipper-team/whipper https://github.com/whipper-team/whipper Or you can run EAC in wine.
- herewulf 9mo ago
  +1 for ripping with abcde Make sure you enable its MusicBrainz support. I used to painstakingly input all the band / album / track title metadata but then discovered that people were already doing it for me. However, then you go down the MB rabbit hole with obscure music that no one has ever inputted. Still, it's a quick and easy way to contribute and then it's available for everyone.

by WD-42 9mo ago

te_chris 9mo ago

Yes. But shhhhh about cds, don’t want people to realise… Also the price of decent (Sony hifi grade, not ES) CD players used is great too.

WD-42 9mo ago
I did just realize after posting maybe touting how affordable CDs have become is maybe not the best idea.
- conartist6 9mo ago
  :'D
- eterm 9mo ago
  I can't remember the artist but there's a fun song about how they used to pick up second hand LPs really cheap and then they got popular and too expensive, then discovered second hand CDs are really cheap now. Frank turner-ish vibes but I don't think it was actually him. It's completely un-googlable though, and even the LLMs aren't much help on this one.
  - nluken 9mo ago
    Oh! I know this one! You're thinking of Jeffrey Lewis & The Voltage's LPs from 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3urXygZXb74 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3urXygZXb74'
    - eterm 9mo ago
      Nice one, thanks!
    - richrichardsson 9mo ago
      Humans prove to have some value in the LLM age after all! /s
    - te_chris 9mo ago
      Love it. Not often you get music threads like this on HN!
- RIMR 9mo ago
  The people who really want to stop paying for streaming are going to turn to piracy, don't worry. Physical media will still be accessible for people who are willing to pay with space instead of money.
  - KK7NIL 9mo ago
    "We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem" - Gabe Newell
patates 9mo ago
Aren't CD players just reading digits? I'm not anywhere close to a hifi expert but it must be all about the DAC, no? Or do you mean the ones with a built-in DAC?
- JohnFen 9mo ago
  > all about the DAC, no? Yes, it is (unless the CD player is so bad that it can't do adequate error correction). What I do is rip the CD to my music server, which is where I listen to the music from. Then the quality of the CD player isn't important, as long as it works correctly.
  - blibble 9mo ago
    it's surprising difficult to rip from audio CDs in a error free manner most tools do it badly and just accept what the drive gives them in default mode, often with glitches
    - TheDong 9mo ago
      Just use a tool that supports the AccurateRip database or similar, and check your checksums, right? Like, ripping seems easy to me, you rip with something that supports a checksum database, and if it comes out with a correct checksum then it's right.
      - hcs 9mo ago
        If you don't have a good drive and a clean disc you may get skipping/jitter and thus possibly never get a AR or CueTools DB match. (CTDB has parity records that can be used to repair some small errors.) This is the point of the elaborate re-read stuff Exact Audio Copy or cdparanoia does. Though even with a good drive you ought to be using a tool that checks for C2 errors, and that won't necessarily catch everything; error correction and detection is always probabilistic. Also not everything is in AR/CTDB. Maybe 3% of the 1000+ CDs I've ripped had no records yet, though I do tend towards the obscure. I rip these again with EAC, which is set up to automatically do CTDB submission. (Usually I'm using the redumper tool which has some specialized features.) Without external verification it's best to dump it twice and ensure they're bit equal, preferably with a different drive to minimize error correlation.
mlrtime 9mo ago
>(Sony hifi grade, not ES) I don't understand this, are you saying higher than ES or lower than ES? I thought ES was their top "Elevated" Standard?

6stringmerc 9mo ago

I second this strategy. My suggestion is keep an eye out for soundtracks and “sampler” type promo discs - some quirky gems! Record labels and their relationships with Hollywood did demonstrate money and drugs and music to great together…see: Spawn the movie soundtrack (1990s). Also my library card is much better for legacy music exploration. It scales too.

rurp 9mo ago

Slightly off topic but this describes a lot of what I love about used book stores. I enjoy browsing around and often buy things that just seem interesting since the prices are low. I've found all kinds of great books that would never turn up in a regular curated store.

gibsonsmog 9mo ago

If you can, find an old tape deck at a thrift store and look into cassettes as well. They're super fun to find and you can buy new ones from groups on Bandcamp usually way cheaper than any other merch offerings and still get the high quality FLAC files. I spent some time last year going through a variety of tapes that were up to 40+ years old and was shocked at how good some of them still sounded.

interludead 9mo ago

There's something magical about picking music based purely on a cover or a vague vibe and taking a chance on it

maples37 9mo ago

To anyone going down this route, there's a surprisingly deep rabbit hole when you look into "how copy the bits off the drive and into a .wav file". There are a lot of places where errors can be introduced: the quality of the CD drive, the condition of the disc itself, how fast the drive is spinning for the rip, etc. I didn't think this was a big issue until I got a load of cheap used discs, started ripping them with my laptop, and later discovered issues with some of the rips, even on discs which looked perfectly fine. There's a tool called cdparanoia[1] whose goal is to babysit the CD drive and ensure that it gets a complete, perfect, uninterrupted stream of bits off the drive, and will use a lot of tricks to go back and re-read any data that didn't come back cleanly. I always used it with abcde[2], which was a wrapper around it with album lookup, tagging, and ffmpeg support. I highly recommend anyone amassing a CD rip collection take a look at it, both are still packaged in present-day Ubuntu. [1] https://www.xiph.org/paranoia/faq.html https://www.xiph.org/paranoia/faq.html [2] https://abcde.einval.com/wiki/ https://abcde.einval.com/wiki/

dmm 9mo ago
whipper is built on cdparanoia but uses the AccurateRip database to verify the accuracy of your rip: https://github.com/whipper-team/whipper https://github.com/whipper-team/whipper Or you can run EAC in wine.
herewulf 9mo ago
+1 for ripping with abcde Make sure you enable its MusicBrainz support. I used to painstakingly input all the band / album / track title metadata but then discovered that people were already doing it for me. However, then you go down the MB rabbit hole with obscure music that no one has ever inputted. Still, it's a quick and easy way to contribute and then it's available for everyone.