I’m an old-fashioned guy, and prefer physical CD’s over streaming.

Main reason for that is quite simple: I have a decent collection of CD’s and I just love using them. They never fail me. Playing a CD with a CD-player doesn’t require Internet connection. It won’t spy on me, and it doesn’t send me spam.

But recently I have been thinking about the future of CD-players. My player is 30-years old Pioneer (yes, it’s just amazing!) and it started to act weirdly. It was jumpy, and there were few tracks it just couldn’t play. So I went on looking for a replacement. Turned out that the problem was in the CD’s, and all the players I tried were having troubles with the particular tracks. So I didn’t buy a new player, but instead I just carefully cleaned up the optical head of my Pioneer, and now the jumpiness if gone. I expect it to serve me yet another 30 years. Honestly: can you buy anymore such devices?

In any case, all this made me to think about backing up my collection. And so I started to transfer my collection to computer. Right now I’m in the middle of this process, and have a good half of my CD’s on the hard drive, in loss-less format (FLAC). It’s actually very nice, now I can listen to my favorite records using Emacs (I’m using mpd/mpc, and a simple interface called simple-mpc).

But still quite often I play the physical CD’s with my battle-tested Pioneer player. I don’t have my main computer always on, and sometimes I just want to sit down and listen to some record without the distraction of computer.