Going Back to CDs

Going back to CDs

After more than a decade of getting my music almost exclusively via digital distribution channels (yes, legal ones), I’ve decided to go back to CDs. I started a project of ripping all of my CDs into several formats, mp3s for the car, Apple Lossless for listening on my Macs, and FLAC for my phone. I have a DAC, and decent headphones, and I’ve started to be able to hear the difference in quality between streaming music, and lossless stuff that I have locally.

It has been a very interesting experience so far, going back and listening to albums that I haven’t listened to in years, and hearing new bits and pieces that I hadn’t noticed before. Re-listening to some of my all-time favorite albums, like “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness”, has been really fantastic. I heard a vocal track on Cake’s “The Distance” that I had never really heard before, and that was one of my favorite songs at one point.

Unfortunately, I’ve also lost a lot of my favorite albums over the years, to and from college, moving across the country a couple of times, and generally not using them. I’m going through slowly and ripping what I have, and collecting things that I’ve never owned, new stuff, and back-filling things that I lost. Doing it this way also encourages me to really listen to what I’ve got playing, and I’m finding that just doing that, I’m enjoying music more than I have in a long time.