Storage

When I first started work as a "thick sandwich student", at the grand salary of £13.50 a week, I decided that I would expand my almost non-existent music collection; every week I would buy a record.   And so it was, that every week I would go to Smith's and buy a record, and most weeks I would take last week's back to change it because it had turned out to be scratched, crackly or bowl-shaped.

I gave up on classical records because the quiet bits often sounded like someone was frying chips in the background, and when, some years later, I got wind of the fact that a new digital medium, the Compact Disk, was going to be launched, I stopped buying records altogether and waited.

I bought the first commercially available player, the Sony CDP 101.  It sounded pretty bad, (it only had one DAC so the central instruments appeared in the right-hand channel momentarily before centering), but my hifi wasn't up to spelling this out, and hey, I could listen to classical music without getting an unexpected yen for chips.  To celebrate, I bought a CD of Stravinski.

Once you have a CD (or record for that matter), the question arises of what to do with it once you have digested its contents.  The obvious answer is to store it since it will always be available to listen to again, if and when the urge arises.  And so, over the years I have slowly built a collection.  

The arrival of MP3, FLAC and other music encoding trechniques means that music can now be stored on computer-compatible media, and so I recorded my CDs into FLAC format.   About 6 a day unless I really couldn't face it.   I started by doing them as MP3s but when I was about half-way through my collection, FLAC arrived, and that was better, being lossless, so I did them all again.  Took me a couple of years, but now all my CDs are in digital format, backed up every which way to Sunday.

My portable FLAC player takes two micro-SD cards, one terrabyte each (maybe it supports cards of up to two terrabytes, I'm not sure).   One such chip is holding all of my CDs.

I still have a CD player and I like to browse the CD rack from time to time.  It's a different experience from looking them up on the Media Monkey software, although that comes a very close second.   I use a streaming service too so I don't buy as many CDs as I used to; mostly second-hand ones cheap at car boot sales, but at least I own them and if one day the streaming services shut down, I will still have what I think are the best tunes.  And if I really like them on the streaming service, I buy either the CD or a hi-resolution download.