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Death of the Compact Disc


indy4

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I'm like Neil, the only time I really use my iPod is in my car. In fact, I didn't even want an iPod until I bought my car back in 06 (I have a 06 Buick Lucrene). I saw no real use for an iPod until I realized I could down load all my Star Wars special edition double CD's to it and listen to them back to back without having to change a disc. Seemed safer...

At anyrate, I remember the first day I plugged the iPod into the car. It struck me that 10 years earlier, I was putting a device in the tape deck of my mom's car and plugging it into my Discman so I could hear my CD's while I drive. Now, I was plugging a iPod into my car so I could hear my CD's while I drive.

Proving conclusively that the more things change, the more things stay the same.

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10 years earlier, I was putting a device in the tape deck of my mom's car and plugging it into my Discman so I could hear my CD's while I drive.

That device also works for the ipod, as its the only thing i can do in my father's car.

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I just don't use CDs for anything, except occasionally playing in the car. If I buy one, it gets ripped and then placed on my shelf, and I might never use it again.

And all this business about compression is audiophile talk IMO. I have done blind sound tests between a flac and 192kb mp3, and there wasn't a single bit of difference, as long as the mp3 is well encoded. I do still very occasionally buy a CD if the music is important to me or it's not otherwise available.

Thing is with scores, that since virtually no releases are complete, I often feel more satisfied with a computer folder of high quality mp3s that contain an entire score with alternates and concert pieces, than a CD contains 40 minutes of edited music. It's like there's always some additional/alternate/concert cue to add, and a physical CD album rarely feels complete to me.

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The tape deck thing always brings out the worst sound quality though. A device that goes uses the cigarette lighter or one that connects directly to the radio are the best, especially the latter.

The tape deck thing is in effect a line in. It sounds fine. I've never had any luck with the FM transmitters. Those always annoy me.

How does using a cigarette lighter get sound in your car?

Neil

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My wife's car has an auxiliary plug on the stereo. All we had to buy was a cheap RCA cable and plug it in to stereo. To keep it charged you just need to buy a charger that plugs into the cigarette lighter with a USB end that fits your iPod.

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My wife's car has an auxiliary plug on the stereo. All we had to buy was a cheap RCA cable and plug it in to stereo. To keep it charged you just need to buy a charger that plugs into the cigarette lighter with a USB end that fits your iPod.

Yup. That's what I have for/in my car as well.

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The tape deck thing always brings out the worst sound quality though. A device that goes uses the cigarette lighter or one that connects directly to the radio are the best, especially the latter.

The tape deck thing is in effect a line in. It sounds fine. I've never had any luck with the FM transmitters. Those always annoy me.

How does using a cigarette lighter get sound in your car?

Neil

My sister has one of those FM transmiters and they have a wavy sound in the backbround if they are not well placed with respect of the antenna. And it sucks a great deal of battery power.

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Our Circuit City recently moved into a new building so I went to see the new store today. If I were to double my collection I might have more CDs than the store did. Then I went to Best Buy and they had their CDs stock basically cut in half.

They weren't kidding in that article.

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My wife's car has an auxiliary plug on the stereo. All we had to buy was a cheap RCA cable and plug it in to stereo. To keep it charged you just need to buy a charger that plugs into the cigarette lighter with a USB end that fits your iPod.

Yeah that's the best way to set it up.

How does using a cigarette lighter get sound in your car?

Neil

I meant FM Transmitter, which connect using the cigarette lighter.

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I know engineers, they LOVE to change things!

I just don't use CDs for anything, except occasionally playing in the car. If I buy one, it gets ripped and then placed on my shelf, and I might never use it again.

And all this business about compression is audiophile talk IMO. I have done blind sound tests between a flac and 192kb mp3, and there wasn't a single bit of difference, as long as the mp3 is well encoded. I do still very occasionally buy a CD if the music is important to me or it's not otherwise available.

Thing is with scores, that since virtually no releases are complete, I often feel more satisfied with a computer folder of high quality mp3s that contain an entire score with alternates and concert pieces, than a CD contains 40 minutes of edited music. It's like there's always some additional/alternate/concert cue to add, and a physical CD album rarely feels complete to me.

Can't fool me with your anti-CD rhetoric!

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... and a physical CD album rarely feels complete to me.

Do you paint clouds on a Van Gogh or change the weenie of Michelangelo's David too?

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I love buying CDs, I like owning something physical, with artwork and lyrics and whatnot. I'm not really going to bich and moan as if it's going to make a difference, whatever happens happens. Such is life. It's like not like this is taking place tomorrow. I did get the mp3 version of In Rainbows by Radiohead in lui of buying the more expensive boxed version, but would like to continue to buy a physical product.

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  • 3 years later...

Just found out the local record store near me is going out of business. It was far from perfect as far as film music selection goes, but it was still much better than the average record store. Now, the best physical CD store I have easy access to is Barnes and Nobles. Blegh. :(

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But it's fun to just browse through the store. You learn about new albums, sometimes you find great deals, and it's just a fun way to pass time. Like a kid in a candy shop.

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But it's fun to just browse through the store. You learn about new albums, sometimes you find great deals, and it's just a fun way to pass time. Like a kid in a candy shop.

That's true. I miss that, though it wasn't that often that I made worthwhile discoveries that way.

explain what is the difference between 5.1 music, and 2.0 music in 3 sentences.

I'm not sure what prompted that question in this thread, but the difference is much like the difference between stereo and mono - just somewhat more subtle. The more channels you have, the more convincingly you can recreate the ambiance in the environment where the recording was made, assuming you have speakers that are set up appropriately. When music is played live, some of the sound comes from the left, some comes from the right, some comes from the center, and some comes from behind (both left and right); having five channels is a pretty decent way to simulate that instead of relying purely on the acoustics of the room to fill in the blanks.

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I like to browse through rows of CDs in used music and book shops to see what obscure albums I can find and what gems people discard. I have found only one recent specialty label album, an LLR album, this way, though a lot of vintage Varese albums that nobody seems to love because they're everywhere used.

I have had to accept the fact that any "soundtrack" one can find in a Walmart, FYE, or BestBuy is either ridiculously mainstream -- Harry Potter, Star Wars, Star Trek OST -- or it's not what most of us here want to buy -- Glee, Disney compilations, song albums, and other craptastic albums.

Fortunately, I buy music in genres other than purely film scores, so I can find plenty of rock and classical in the shops.

I do realize that they also physically sell used music albums on eBay and Amazon. I try to avoid windows shopping this way; I think I'd end up spending a lot more money.

And anything can be bought digitally. And when the computer crashes and the hard drive swims and the iPod gets dropped for the 37th time, it's all gone.

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That's a major drawback that people seem all to willing too dismiss.

Hard drives are far more vulnerable then CD's. If you just put a CD back in it's box, and don't scratch it it will basically be fine for probably decades. Unless a cataclysmic event like an earthquake, flooding or housefire happens.

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The Wal-Mart here in Cedar City and the Wal-Mart store my dad worked in Salt Lake City had virtually no soundtrack section that I could see. Borders has long since closed but I quit going to them because they're prices were a bit ridiculous for CDs. These days I mostly do my shopping online, either from Amazon or mostly from Movie Music. There's only a couple of times I've bought CDs directly from the labels IE: LLL, Varèse, Intrada, FSM.

When Borders was open, like some of you I had noticed over the years how their soundtrack section got smaller and smaller each year. Back in the early 90's there were literally two whole sections devoted for score soundtracks. I had to sometimes walk to the other side to see if they had what I was looking for. After time that really went down to just one single side, then a small section. It was quite sad to be honest to see it get smaller and smaller.

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The Wal-Mart here in Cedar City and the Wal-Mart store my dad worked in Salt Lake City had virtually no soundtrack section that I could see. Borders has long since closed but I quit going to them because they're prices were a bit ridiculous for CDs. These days I mostly do my shopping online, either from Amazon or mostly from Movie Music. There's only a couple of times I've bought CDs directly from the labels IE: LLL, Varèse, Intrada, FSM.

When Borders was open, like some of you I had noticed over the years how their soundtrack section got smaller and smaller each year. Back in the early 90's there were literally two whole sections devoted for score soundtracks. I had to sometimes walk to the other side to see if they had what I was looking for. After time that really went down to just one single side, then a small section. It was quite sad to be honest to see it get smaller and smaller.

Yeah that seems to be the fate of all brick-and-mortar CD stores, especially the soundtrack sections. About 10 years ago the collections were quite excellent here in Helsinki but then slowly but surely the soundtrack section was filled with Inspired by song compilations and scores began to fade away from the shelves. Now they order a few copies of the sure fire seller of the latest block buster film but more often than not even that has stopped. E.g. Tintin soundtrack could be found in just one store here on its day of release.

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The Wal-Mart here in Cedar City and the Wal-Mart store my dad worked in Salt Lake City had virtually no soundtrack section that I could see. Borders has long since closed but I quit going to them because they're prices were a bit ridiculous for CDs. These days I mostly do my shopping online, either from Amazon or mostly from Movie Music. There's only a couple of times I've bought CDs directly from the labels IE: LLL, Varèse, Intrada, FSM.

When Borders was open, like some of you I had noticed over the years how their soundtrack section got smaller and smaller each year. Back in the early 90's there were literally two whole sections devoted for score soundtracks. I had to sometimes walk to the other side to see if they had what I was looking for. After time that really went down to just one single side, then a small section. It was quite sad to be honest to see it get smaller and smaller.

Nice to see another fellow JW Utah fan on here! I know what you mean, the Media Plays in the day always had 2 sections and for some reason, the people at the store I frequented, always had a pretty good knowledge of the section too. It was strange.

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I don't even know any more where my nearest CD shop is - so many are closing.

Even my browsing over the last 5 years has really only been out of curiosity to see what they stock, not with any expectation that I'll actually find anything.

Outside of LEs, the only reason I buy CDs is to get the music in lossless so I can do edits or join cues. If I could buy flacs with high res artwork and a nice pdf booklet, I could give CDs a miss almost entirely. (I say that because I do like having grails and important stuff physically).

Haven't yet decided which format to buy War Horse in.

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I love having physical stuff, but I'm willing to forgo it due to the difference in price. A download of your average soundtrack is £8, the CD in HMV or wherever is usually £10 at the least, that's assuming you can even find it there, which is a major problem I have - very few stores stock any kind of soundtracks now outside of Glee or whatever. I still buy CDs where I can because I like to have my music in lossless and I regularly use my stereo.

But if they do ever do FLAC or ALAC downloads soon for the similar price as now, I'll happily switch and then make a CD-R.

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The two most local stores to me that have CDs have seriously downsized their CD departments and will not be stocking War Horse OST at all. Wow.

As a long-time collector, the physical copy of the album * WITH THE ALBUM ART & TRACK TITLES * is key to me and this trend somewhat disturbs me on some level. Granted, I can still buy it online or drive 45-55 miles to a CD store that probably has it, but gone are the days of just driving to your local Walmart or what not and picking up the new John Williams CD. Amazing how in the few years that Williams took off from scoring anything new, the landscape of music CD sales has changed dramatically with the takeover of mp3 players and iPods and such. It is due largely to the newer generation of “have-it-now/download-everything” kids and the fact that it is easier and people are living in a more mobile/on-the-go/don’t-live-at-a-home age and may have nowhere to actually store their owned items (I could never live like that being a pack rat completest-collector that I am). Nothing wrong with these players to have a digital copy on, I have mp3 players myself, but still, to own the physical album of the music and then rip it to your favorite portable player seems to be a no-brainer to me. Heck, those things break all the time, and recently my older PC's hard-drive blew, losing everything on it, which shows how fleeting a digital copy actually is. But I guess this shows how much most people like their music (not enough to actually own it; just listen to it). On a related note, some albums never get a physical copy even made! For example, the Transformers 3 score has still not been released in a physical CD and only exists in digital download, and that score is more popular mainstream-wise than Warhorse and possibly Tintin as well, so this bodes poorly for the future of owing an actual physical version of scores. Hopefully, they won’t stop them entirely, and online stores will still have them in stock, otherwise I'll be revising my CD shelves to include printed CDR copies from digital downloads (like I used to do with just bootlegs as place markers until the commercial release was in my possession). Not to mention that I'll either have to go to a friend or family member's house for a download or tether a smartphone which I do not own yet. Ugh.

I just cleaned-up and re-organized my John Williams (+ film score) CD shelf that needed an extra two shelves to re-organize (with the recent archival releases, my shelf was overflowing and titles were piled on top of each other out of order), and part of the fun is collecting every single one and putting it in its proper place on my shelf (I arrange everything chronologically in order of composition & release; and I even keep all the CDRs containing "unreleased" on the shelf too, unless it was made 100% completely obsolete by a legit release, does it get taken down - and most have now). This may sound like a crotchety old man saying this, but this mentality that you can own a digital copy of something that can be accidentally deleted, erased, or corrupted as easy as it is copied is foolishness, IMO. Taking the most lossless source available (which would be a CD in most cases) to encode for your favorite portable player is one thing, but buying a download seems like buying air to me. Seems like a disconnect with many of the younger kids, and considering I'm still in my 30s, it shows how quickly ideals change.

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Yeah I'm not keen on the idea of only being able to buy scores as mp3s, particularly because not everything is in 320k mp3 (Amazon is 256k and some other places go as low as 192k for some labels).

And that's not just for listening quality - if I edit or combine tracks, I always want a lossless source if available. I've bought 3 or 4 CDs for the sole reason that I hate album producers splitting up a long track.

I'm not against CDs at all; I just don't think they're necessary for everything. Just scores that are personally significant or those that aren't available digitally.

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Even if in the main stream CDs die our labels IE: Intrada, La-La La Land and Varèse will at least continue to make them since they're still a demand for film scores on a physical media.

Honestly I'm surprised that CDs haven't died out yet because of the "download age" today and how people are downloading the music illegally.

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Honestly I'm surprised that CDs haven't died out yet because of the "download age" today and how people are downloading the music illegally.

Because most people who download something weren't going to buy it anyway.

Also there are people who start downloading and this introduces them to liking something and possibly drop more money on it in the future, been more keen to buy stuff, and finally buy such stuff. My case, for example. :)

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Even if in the main stream CDs die our labels IE: Intrada, La-La La Land and Varèse will at least continue to make them since they're still a demand for film scores on a physical media.

Don't be so sure. These labels won't be able to distribute CDs if the actual CD manufacturing contractors don't make them anymore.

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Using a DVD to sell music is a bit of overkill, wouldn't you agree? I mean, an 80 minute album in lossless is about 700 megabytes in WAV, which is as lossless as you can get in stereo. That's not even 1/4 the space of a 4.7 DVD. Any bigger, and you're wasting space.

Sure, you can use a DVD for 5.1 surround like the Lord of the Rings Complete Recordings provide, but who has the time to listen to that much music tied to the DVD player in their living room? DVD players in cars are still the exception, not the norm like simple CD players, and portable DVD-audio devices are practically nonexistent. DVD implies a need for video, not simply high-quality audio by itself.

I don't mind digital per se, but what I hate about it is the lack of a natural backup in case you lose the download. Now I've never tried to re-download a song from Amazon or iTunes so I don't know if you can, but my favorite online vendor for musical purchases is Wolfgang's Vault, and I know they don't offer the ability to recover a lost download. Rip that CD and lose the iPod or the computer gets toast, and you can re-rip the CD. Unless you lose/break the disc, you have that much of a safety net. With digital only, it's like any other computer file: make a ton of backups.

If they get rid of CDs altogether, it's just another case of brash executives looking at a large sample group and using it to draw assumptions about the entire population.

A large number of people download from iTunes and Amazon? A large number have high speed internet? Well golly gee, that must mean everybody uses iTunes on their high speed internet instead of CDs. Let's stop making CDs and just disregard the possibility that anyone doesn't have high speed internet, and totally remove their ability to get music.

And voila. Dis-connected bosses forcibly isolate and eliminate a sizable and still breathing portion of their consumer base. Bravo.

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Well I don't think anybody's talking about getting rid of CDs altogether, at least not yet. That article that was recently posted said that even major labels will still release physical CDs in limited quantities.

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Even labels like Intrada, Varèse and La-La Land will continue to produce CDs, as there's a demand for film scores on a physical media. So I don't think they'll totally die out like the cassette tapes did, unless that is EVERYONE including our beloved labels started offering scores only as downloads but with the lossless option.

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  • 2 weeks later...

CDs to be dead by the end of next year?

http://www.dailyfina.../?ncid=webmail1

Rebuttal to that article, saying CDs will be around for a while yet

http://www.nme.com/blog/index.php?blog=146&title=are_major_labels_about_to_abandon_the_cd_1&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

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In honor of the death of the compact disc, I give you....murder of a compact disc, at 23,000 RPM!

Skip to the last twenty seconds or so, the sound effect gets aggravating.

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  • 3 years later...

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