Illuminati-R-Us

Cleaning house after moving, and I seem to have a fair amount of duplication between vinyl records and CDs. So the question is, what to do?

Now, I suspect some of the board members will say to keep the vinyl, and get rid of the CDs. But, perhaps there are some dissenting viewpoints?

This would mostly be 60s and 70s music, I doubt anything I have duplicated would really be considered a collector's item. I think the care with which the vinyl records were handled back when they were still being used maybe wasn't the highest possible level.

Throw them out? Donate them? Sell them? If the latter two, where?

Wherever you’re at will have at least one nearby “record shop” that will let you know what both the CDs and records are worth. As far as which to keep, that’s really up to you, as both have their advantages and disadvantages.

The biggest question is how much time do you want to spend going thru your collection, making decisions and then following thru to get rid of them?

Maybe you'll remember how I digitized all may c. 150 vinyl records back when I had a bout of glandular fever in '08.

You recommended instead of putting in all the work I should just get them, for moderate money, on Amazon (you even sent a link ).

Turns out, twelve years later I have most of my records, haveing listened to the one work I do not have on CD once. The digitization files are still in their raw form, no MP3s were produced. My record player has since broken down, and there the collection sits, on its shelf, doing nothing but gathering dust, while there is at least some activity over on the CD shelf.

For me, keeping the records and trying to put the digitazitions to use hasn't worked out. I should have followed the link.

Morals: If you are not a techno- and audiophile, who gets something off watching a beautiful turntable play beautiful records, the records can probably go, because they are, just another storage device - of inferior quality. The best storage device for your music is the one you play most often. Digitizing them makes sense only for those records you really want to have but can't find on CD/download/streaming these days.

And what bm65 said.

Blue Monster 65 wrote:Wherever you’re at will have at least one nearby “record shop” that will let you know what both the CDs and records are worth. As far as which to keep, that’s really up to you, as both have their advantages and disadvantages.

The biggest question is how much time do you want to spend going thru your collection, making decisions and then following thru to get rid of them?

I'll have a look. The thing is, my vinyl collection is not a bunch of rare pieces that have been taken care of like they are museum items. They were purchased in my teens and very early twenties, and cared for the way most teens probably took care of their vinyl collections at the time Some of them are awfully crackly.

Arneb wrote:Maybe you'll remember how I digitized all may c. 150 vinyl records back when I had a bout of glandular fever in '08.

You recommended instead of putting in all the work I should just get them, for moderate money, on Amazon (you even sent a link ).

Sounds like I followed my own advice then

Fifteen albums, each consisting of one or more LPs, duplicated by CDs. In some cases, the duplication appears to be exact. In others, the CDs include bonus tracks as well. Fair enough. In one case (specifically, "Tommy" by "The Who"), I have what appears to be the US vinyl version and the UK CD version. The division of the more or less continuous musical flow into tracks is different in the two editions, but as nearly as I can tell, it's the same content.

I also have one compilation album consisting of two LPS; I also have the originally released albums by the same artist, containing all of the tracks on the LPs except one.

At the moment, I do not have a usable turntable. I think the ground wire I need is packed away in the back somewhere, in the room I'm still unpacking.

Arneb wrote:Turns out, twelve years later I have most of my records, haveing listened to the one work I do not have on CD once. The digitization files are still in their raw form, no MP3s were produced. My record player has since broken down, and there the collection sits, on its shelf, doing nothing but gathering dust, while there is at least some activity over on the CD shelf.

For me, keeping the records and trying to put the digitazitions to use hasn't worked out. I should have followed the link.

Morals: If you are not a techno- and audiophile, who gets something off watching a beautiful turntable play beautiful records, the records can probably go, because they are, just another storage device - of inferior quality. The best storage device for your music is the one you play most often. Digitizing them makes sense only for those records you really want to have but can't find on CD/download/streaming these days.

Almost none of my usage these days consists of what I would call traditional stereo listening, i.e., sitting in a room with a system cranking out the music onto a left/right speaker system. Even when I do, I'll tend to plug an iDevice into the SurroundSound system through a USB port, rather than finding the original CD and putting it in the Blu-ray player (no longer have a device called a "CD player"). Most of my music listening comes through headphones, or while driving a car (which these days, is primarily driving a rental in New York or in Europe, since I don't have a car here).

Streaming - I guess I just don't feel like I own it until I have a nice shiny metal compact disc, the sort we used back in the 1850s.

But on a slightly related topic - all of my CDs (and I have quite a few more CDs than I do vinyl LPs) have been digitised in two different ways. I converted them all to MP3, and to whatever Apple uses (MP4?).

If I delete all the MP3 files from my computers, am I ever going to regret that if at some point I end up leaving the Apple universe?

Stick’em on discogs. That’ll help identify any that are unknowingly valuable and the site has a very active marketplace