Today I finally felt the death of the CD...

[Breen]

Local remaining big store was moving out of one of their main street stores. Clearance sale. Vinyl, DVDs, compilations, earphones and of course CDs.

I got a John Pizzarelli for $5.05 of my local dollars. It was listed as $5.95 and I absent-mindedly gave $7.05, but the cashier gave my 2 dollar coins back.

They had others I could have taken, an old Joyce Cooling, P-Funk, White Stripes, Johnny Cash, Mike MacDonald, Rivers Cuomo.

All thats left here is HMV and this local store (Gramaphone). The rest are 'indie' stores or standalones manned by passion.

I do like my music on a plastic disc. Can you believe there are people just say 5 years younger then me that has NEVER EVER bought a CD? Sigh.

[Lenderman_k]

I still buy CDs all the time.

[emu!]

I for one am glad to see them go. The "experts" said that CD's wouldn't skip. HA! They can get scratched just as easy as vinyl. They also said they would outlast the purchaser. HA! Leave them in a hot vehicle and see what happens.

It's a conspiracy I tell you.

[Green Lantern]

It's for the better, I think. There's nothing a CD can do that a digital mp3 can't, and mp3's are more convenient. Also, with the downfall of the CD, there is a bit of a resurrection of vinyl. With vinyl, people can enjoy a more impressive presentation where physical packaging is involved, and there actually is a tonal difference. So, people are either going with the incredibly convenient digital mp3, or they're going with a growing niche that enjoys the impressively presented vinyl records. There really is no place for the CD anymore, if you ask me.

[NastyMojo]

I still buy Cds too! I been buyin em since 8th grade. I also collect records tho :)

[Tele-Caster]

Yeah... Times change...

The iPod / iTunes is the Japanese transistor radio of the current age. Those little transistor radios sounded like dog squeeze BUT you could take tunes with you anywhere...

I have to admit that I don't miss compact cassette tape nearly as much as I miss vinyl or as much as I am going to miss Compact Disc as a recorded music format when the Mp3 download finally kills it totally dead.

On the plus side, if I want to sell my music, Mp3 makes doing that a whole lot easier than the process was back in the vinyl disc / 8 track tape / compact cassette tape days.

Count me in as one who'll miss CD's, too.

T-C

[BobbyZ]

I'm still POed about the lack of new 8 tracks.

[jkingma]

I prefer having the CD but digital music is just so convenient and compact that I'm starting to shift...

I can carry almost my entire music collection around with me on a flash drive the size of chapstick. I can plug it in my car... I can plug it in my shop... I can plug it in my computer at work... its awesome, really.

[LarsOS]

The CD format lacks the charm of vinyl, the versatility of networking, the sturdiness and compactness of solid state storage, and the flexibility of being able to choose the bit depth, sampling rate, and compression level that suits the application.

Shorter me: Good riddance.

[AirBagTester]

I have a bunch of cd's on 8 different spindles tucked away in my closet somewhere.

When I was in high school I would listen to a cd all the way through while reading the lyrics and looking at the art. The one I remember the most is the Primus album "Frizzle Fry."

Later I junked all the jewel boxes and art because none of the cd's were in the right cases anyway, and half of the cases were broken. I don't even know why I keep the cd's still.

[bossaholic]

My 16 year old just discovered vinyl. A couple of days ago we went into a consignment furniture store and they had a room set up stocked to the brim with albums and 45's. Nothing was categorized. Just boxes and boxes of stuff.

We had a blast spending a couple of hours sifting through it all.

There are vinyl stores spouting up all over our town. I never thought it would make such a comeback.

[LarsOS]

Originally Posted by AirBagTester

I don't even know why I keep the cd's still.

Where I live, AFAIK, having the physical CDs work as a "proof of purchase" of sorts, which makes it legal for me to have the same album stored on my hard drive. If I didn't have the CDs I could theoretically be charged with piracy. But IANAL, and YMMV.

[stevieboy]

The format I don't miss, though I didn't dislike it either. What I miss is the time I could spend in a record store browsing through the racks. It was a great way to spend a free afternoon. Here and there you can find a decent store still, but they are few and far between. I do like the convenience of downloading, but I'm sure I buy less now, just because of the nature of the experience. All I need, more reasons to sit in front of a computer.

In an odd way this has contributed to my GAS. Now the only stores there are the I like to go to are music stores, and that can be a very bad influence.

[idjster]

I still buy CDs. I still buy vinyl albums. I buy the odd thing electronically from iTunes or somewhere, but not near the quantity I buy on some hard format. Most of the digital music I've listened to has been transfered by some lossy format and doesn't really represent the way the music was recorded or played. While one can argue that any sound is 'lossy' if recorded, the digital recordings are the most compressed due to downloading necessity, and so have been the most lossy. I sometimes think about young people who've never bought a CD, but have never heard recorded music sound the way it was recorded, or close to it, either.

Things change, but not always for the better.

Just my $0.05...

[neocaster]

There's a record store in downtown West Chester, PA that made it through the whole revolution (so far) from vinyl to cassette to CD, and their inventory has been shifting back towards new vinyl pretty steadily for the last few years. With widespread access to high speed internet, why waste a trip to a record store? Bit and sample rates of file-based digital music have surpassed compact discs, anyway. lossless compression codecs have brought digital music a lot closer to analog recording/playback. The only value left in CDs is the possession of the token itself, and any promotional materials included (album art, liner notes) and the record industry has largely failed at making those sufficiently attractive to woo buyers. They should look more closely at the video game industry, whose special-release and collector's packaging draw lots of interest.

I have a deep sense of nostalgia around the record store ritual, but it's in the past and will always be special. My parents and their peers have a similar fondness of their memories of early morning milk deliveries and the DDT truck. Their parents had similar memories of the ice truck, and sitting around the radio in the evening.

The flip side (at least the record industry gave us that awesome phrase) is that young musicians have a surprisingly wide and eclectic source of artistic inspiration. I believe it will lead us into an age of explosively inventive music unlike anything the world has seen since the birth of jazz.

[hemingway]

The one remaining CD shop near me has suddenly started stocking heaps of vinyl. Make of that what you will. I always buy CDs - almost everything I've downloaded has got lost in computer mess-ups over the years. Lesson: if it ain't on disc, I don't own it.

As for CDs scratching easily, most people are still under the impression that the side you need to protect is the silver one. It isn't. You need to protect the print. The digital info is just under the artwork. The underside is just transparent plastic.

CDs are not dying - we just buy them online now.

[telleutelleme]

Problem is the Justin Beibers of the music industry sound just fine to their market using MP3, so why worry about quality sound? The industry isn't catering to audiophiles. Good news is most of the stuff I like is available on both vinyl and CD, so I'm happy.

[Racer5]

My favorite record store in town just closed a couple of months ago.

Then on their Facebook page this weekend, they said they are opening in a new, better location.

[stratofortress]

the biggerst thing I used to miss about albums and Cd's was spending hours looking at the album covers and cd inserts looking at the pictures and reading the lyrics and also looking for hidden signs the band might think to put in..Cant do that with a mp3 player.

[Tred]

What do you mean, they don't sell 8 Tracks anymore??? LO

Love the compactness & quality of the MP3s. I have roughly 68G of albums & singles, on my external hard drive, just for my own listening pleasure! If I need a CD for the truck/car, 10 minutes, and there it is! Not only that, IF my vehicle should get broken into or stolen, all I loose is the cost of a recordable CD. (God bless the IPod!)

I do love the digtal age...