Clearing out the CD shelf

For a few years, whenever I downloaded an album – initially from iTunes, then from AllOfMP3 and latterly MP3Sparks – I burned a copy on to CD and even went as far as printing up covers. Call it obsessive, if you like, but I loved the look of a shelf full of CDs and I didn’t want the fact that I was now obtaining most of my music digitally stop the collection from growing. And if we had guests it was easy to ask them to choose some music to put on, because they could just look and see what I had.

 But recently I’ve made a discovery: I should have bought better quality blank CDs. I got home from work and my wife was playing some music and it sounded awful. Crackly like an out-of-tune radio. One of my carefully burned CDs. I tried a couple of others out. The same. They’ve simply worn out with age.

And so I decided it was time to have a sort out, and yesterday I went through the whole collection and weeded out every CD that I’d burned at home. Here they are laid out on the sitting room floor: 

The home burned CDs now being cast out.

The question is: will I miss them? Well, no of course not. Every track on these CDs, along with every other track I own, is on our iMac, on my iPod, and backed up on an external drive. And the chances are the vast majority of it is available on Spotify in any case. So getting rid of the CD copies is hardly going to matter. It’s just another sign of times changing, I guess.

Look out for 70 empty CD cases appearing on a Freecycle list nearby soon!