Reripping the CDs, as you do.

 

Lost a pile of my CD rips to a failing household server disk. Serves me right for trusting a single hard disk, never backed up, for eight years. Never wait until it’s actually making clicking noises. Yes, I’m a sysadmin, and the cobbler’s children have no shoes.

So I’m reripping, as you do. Just bought a USB DVD player, after all. Now we have a working disc player in the house!

25-year-old CDs should be assumed to have decayed into dust. I distrusted the silver buggers from day one. You can see the music on vinyl. Pure digital files are the essence of information as its own construct. The silver buggers were a misbegotten Frankensteinian construct, in denial of the natural flow of digital patterns. (So glad the record companies didn’t think of DRM in time.)

Here’s to cdparanoia and EAC, to turn the music trapped in the silver abominations back into the pure data they were meant to be.

Amazon Glacier is way tempting — a few dollars a month for terabytes. That’s the offering for corporations to store their backups — I use it in the day job a whole lot. Fiddly as hell — not a pleasant backup experience — but I’m surprised Dropbox haven’t offered a user-friendly repackaging of this, the way they did Amazon S3.

I gave up CDs one wonderfully happy day in August 2001 — when my housemate Lionel set up us the CD ripping, and I discovered “holy shit, I have the thousand disc changer I always wanted.” Took a while to build a whole-collection playlist to shuffle in WinAmp.

I literally don’t understand why people buy physical records or CDs any more. I mean, observably they do — I just don’t get it. I don’t read paper books any more either, and didn’t start reading books again until I got into ebooks. (And that worked out quite well, really.)

I am this Daily Mash story: Things men want for Christmas have no physical form. “Wives are increasingly finding that the only things their menfolk actually want are a series of ones and zeros flowing down a fibre optic cable.”

I realise my life is one nuclear electromagnetic pulse from being erased. But there’s too much information these days anyway. Give the scholars of the future something worth tearing their hair out over the absence of, y’know.

 

Top image from Wayne Winton’s video of destroying a Kryptonite Evolution disk lock.