$1.99 CDs (the music kind)

[Hyperborea]

I posted before about planning to replace my record collection (or at least a subset of it) with CDs. Well the event I was waiting for is now at hand. The CD music club I belong to has brought back the "buy one CD at regular price get an unlimited number at $1.99". Of course they jack the price up with S&H but that will still mean about $4 for each CD and if you buy enough then the cost of the single regular price CD at ~$20 will be spread out.

www.bmgmusic.com

 

[kayelem]

Just beware that when you try to cancel your membership that it will take consistent effort and documentation.  Always get return receipt requested for anything you send back to them or they will say they never got it and bill you for it.

I had joined this record club for one of these deals years ago and that was my experience.  Then my husband wanted to do it (around some AA frequent flyer promotion, he got a bunch of extra points).  I warned him and it happened again.

We finally got out of it, but it took a lot of work.

I now prefer to just download the songs I like for 99 cents.  Don't think I will ever buy another CD.

EDIT: It took me a long time to not feel like I had to listen to every song on an album...but now that I have it is very freeing. Only problem is that somehow I miss the thrill of finding having a song "grow on me".

 

[Hyperborea]

Just beware that when you try to cancel your membership that it will take consistent effort and documentation.  Always get return receipt requested for anything you send back to them or they will say they never got it and bill you for it.

Hmmm, not my experience with them.  I "trained" them to stop sending me CDs "on spec" by returning them.  They've sent me replacement CD cases for the two that were broken in shipping (out of a large number over time).  I did the $1.99 / CD before too and it worked just fine but that was "new to me" CDs.  I'm now ready to start replacing the vinyl or at least a subset of it.

I now prefer to just download the songs I like for 99 cents.  Don't think I will ever buy another CD.

Much more expensive, no backups, and you have to deal with whatever rights you are granted by the online service.  You don't have to rip them yourself but then you have to live with whatever format and data rate they were ripped to.

 

[yakers]

I am converting a few pieces of old vinyl and cassetts to digital but mostly buy off of itunes and get some *elsewhere* on the net. The albums I have bought off itunes sound great to my ears, they seem to have the compression well worked out. When I go to burn a CD and can burn the AAC, MP3 or full AIFF. The AIFF works in any CD player. I can burn CDs with my own song mix. I no longer want to even own too many CDs (this after deciding to get rid of vinyl). I put my CDs in book type album, got them out of plastic CD cases. Made more room and easier to browse CDs. But the direction I am heading is to no longer buy CDs. I have some 3,000 songs (OK, 60% of them are my teenage son's) on my laptop. I have an ipod and I can play them all on my car stereo via an AUX plug on the front.
Since you are moving out of vinyl maybe you want to leap frog out of CDs at the same time?

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

I was with both columbia house and bmg. Not that they advertise this well, but you can opt out of the "auto ship if you dont reply" option to an opt-in. If you basically tell you they can change you to opt-in or cancel you, opt-in you'll get. I rode both for 2-3 years that way and every once in a while they'd poke me with a cd that i'd actually want. The longer you wait the better the deals get they offer you.

About 2 1/2 years ago I fed all my cd's into the pc and ripped them all to 128K mp3's. Not exactly audiophile quality but better than FM radio. The pile has sat since then, untouched. Never even put them back in the cases. One of those 943 things on my 'stuff to do' list.

I may re-rip them to 64k WMA format. I've been impressed with the sound quality of WMA...seems to do as well to my ear as mp3 at half the size.

I wont buy ANY music that comes with a bunch of DRM wired into it. My small dissent will make no difference on that front as people will buy buttloads of music thats wired to tell them how they can use it. Makes me go loco when I see all the work and money that goes into hamstringing 95% of the music and movie consumers while not impeding piracy one bit.

 

[kayelem]

As in all things it depends.

99 cents a song is more expensive than 1.99/CD plus shipping if you typically like to listen to complete albums. But over time, I have found that that are usually only half the songs at most that I really like. And buying CD's got more expensive because I didn't actually listen to them except for a small subset becasue of the hassle of filing, jewel box cases, etc.

Backup isn't a problem as I have music on computer hard drive and ipod.

 

[Hyperborea]

And buying CD's got more expensive because I didn't actually listen to them except for a small subset becasue of the hassle of filing, jewel box cases, etc.

Not planning on shuffling jewel cases long term. The CD is just the delivery mechanism to get the music to me legally and to provide long term backup (pressed CDs should be good for the rest of my lifetime).

Backup isn't a problem as I have music on computer hard drive and ipod.

Yeah, I've got an iPod (one of the very first purchased at a steep discount through an Apple employee friend), my music is on my laptop at work, and on the mini-tower at home. However, I'm not very thrilled with the reliability of drives these days - the race to cheapest price has come at the cost of reliability. The size of my ripped music is well over 20GBs and growing so backing that up to more stable media would be time consuming plus burned CDs / DVDs don't have a really long shelf life (maybe less than 10 years).

Also, I plan to be a lightweight perpetual travelling in ~6 years so I won't be able to make and keep backups but stuffing a couple of boxes of CDs in a relative's basement will be easy. The actual ripped music can live on whatever player I have then but if my one and only device fails then I can always reload from the CDs. A hard drive stored for 5 years in somebody's basement could easily develop "sticktion".

Finally, there's the rights management issues that restrict fair use and tie you to software or other mechanisms that my not exist for as long as I want to listen to the music.