Half a Year Collecting CDs

It’s been over 6 months since I started collecting CDs again, and what started as a curiosity has turned into a nice little collection. I’ve now got over 150 albums ripped to FLAC, totaling over 2500 tracks and 70GB in size. A decent portion of it leans into alternative/punk rock, but the library is ever changing.

The last time I had a local music library this size was probably around 2012, back before I made the jump to Google Play Music (now YouTube Music). Back then my music was acquired from the high seas but streaming offered a cheap and Legal alternative to finding my own music. Streaming still has its perks – instant access to almost anything and the ability to discover new artists quickly – but I’ve realized it also comes at a cost. Over time, I became detached from the music. I’d let the algorithm decide what to play next, often without even noticing the artist or song title. It felt passive. Disposable.

Now, with everything local again, there’s a level of connection that just wasn’t there before. I choose what to listen to. I browse albums. I see the cover art. When I listen to an album, I recall where I bought it from and the excitement I felt when I stumbled on a new (to me) album in the local Op shop. I’ll regularly listen to albums in full rather then just the one or two tracks that made the artist famous. There is a sense of ownership and control in the experience - which cant be said for streaming.

My ripping workflow is pretty straightforward: I rip CDs using Sound Juicer into lossless FLAC, clean up tagging with MusicBrainz Picard, and then everything gets loaded into Jellyfin, which I stream on mobile using Finamp **Symfonium (Recent change. Found Symfonium to be more feature complete). It’s a fast enough process, clean, and works exactly how I want it to. No ads. No recommendations. Just my library.

The biggest issue Ive had when ripping music is when a track fails to copy. Sound Juicer will sit there for hours unable to rip a track. Sometimes I can get away with simply copy/pasting the track manually but thats not a silver bullet. Ive found it has little to do with the age of the disc (although disc rot is of course a thing) but more with the condition of the disc - aka scratches. Ive had to abandon a few tracks, and the occasional CD wholesale, simply because the disc will not rip.

It’s been fun hunting down albums too. Some second-hand stores have absolute gems hiding in them. I’ll often stop by the local Op shops just to see if they have more CD’s to check out. Its a bit of a lottery and it scratches that dopamine addiction we all have without spending hours staring at a screen. A couple times Ive left with a stack of CD’s - many times I leave with nothing. But thats part of the fun.

What I cant find on CD, I turn to Bandcamp. CD sales fell off a cliff in the 2010’s. So finding more recent music second hand is near impossible. Some artists, especially the smaller indie ones, may never release their music on CD. Ive purchased 22 items from Bandcamp at the time of writing. Artists including (but not limited to) OVERWERK, Posy, MASTER BOOT RECORD, Yours Truly and Rise Against. These purchases help fill out the library of something more recent. Im not opposed to purchasing new physical CD’s either, Ive just found it cheaper and easier to purchase digitally.

I’ve been especially loving the Triple J Hottest 100 compilation albums, released by the Australian Triple J radio station – they’ve made up a large part of my listening experience. Triple J often favours indie and especially Australian artists and these albums are a compilation of some of the best music released each year on a two disc set. The problem I have with other Best of compilations is they are often pop heavy, feature big name artists and usaully come on a single disk so not a lot of variety.

Honestly, going back to local music has been a small but meaningful change. It’s more intentional. More tactile. And it brings back some of the joy that got lost somewhere along the way in the streaming era.

If you’ve ever felt like music streaming is just there to fill the silence, maybe it’s time to take your music back too.