[Nicolai P. Zwar]

Cute article, from a relative “normie” (in terms of how he treated and interacted with his collection…rather haphazardly; I’m definitely in his “archive” category,

I like how the author groups CD collections of the 1990s into basically four types: the Pile, the Rack, the Cabinet and the Archive.
And, yeah, I think we’re mostly all in the “archive” group. And I’ve never had the problem the author describes of misplaced CDs or scuffed booklets etc… the first CDs I ever bought still play just fine and are generally free of scuffs and scratches.

I’ve always been someone open to new technology, and have always been “future oriented”. When I first heard of CDs I just knew that that would be the future format of music, even though at that time it would still take a while for me to even get my first LP and turntable, let a alone my first CDs. I knew CDs are the format that you only need to buy “once” (not considering all the re-issues and remasterings of course).
Likewise with movies… I never liked VHS (except of course, that it was cool to have any format to watch any movies on at home at all), and DVD (which had serious shortcomings), but with Bluray, buying some movies became really interesting.

So it is with streaming and digital files. When, as the author described, MP3 and Napster etc. came along, I was pretty much imune to it. I would never trade sound quality for convenience large scale, and MP3 was anything but good sound quality. Nowadays, of course, sound quality is no longer the issue, with streaming services like Deezer, Tidal, Qobuz, etc. delivering CD quality and high-res all the way up to 24bit/192kHz (completely irrelevant whether anyone can “hear” differences, it’s just nice that it’s now common technology).

So when the world turned to Napster and MP3, I continued to listen CDs on my (then Technics) HiFi system. It was in 2013 though that I started to convert some of my CDs to digital, originally to AAC for my phone and car, but after I ripped a few dozen CDs or so (on almost all of which I had to manually adjust tagging for consistency), I re-did the whole thing in lossless (ALAC), so I’d never have to do this again. So eventually (took me a while, I did it at my leisure) I had a bit-perfect ALAC copy of my entire CD collection, a few thousand CDs, perfectly tagged, easy to back up. And I could easily buy digital downloads and add them to the collection.

Perfect. I still have my CDs and did not get rid of (most of) them (I did give certain CDs away, usually doubled up items etc.), but I could do without my CDs more than without my files, because all I basically “need” is the digital part of the collection, that’s the core.

Nowadays, all my music listening is done from files. Every new CD I get is added as a lossless rip to my collection. My music is on a NAS, all of it, and I usually listen to it on my home stereo via loudspeakers, though I can now listen to my entire music collection from anywhere in the world. Plus I also use Qobuz for streaming (and occasionally buying, if I want to add something to my collection). I use headphones only “on the go”, in the gym or when I am (business-) travelling.

Btw, do you have a folder system for your files? The Apple Music app formerly iTunes by default handles that but I disabled it to have my own structure. Of course Apple Music handles it but I am somehow a file system guy that often accesses directly for quick listening via finder or VLC…

Yes, and ironically I still use iTunes as my primary (though not exclusive) tool for music curation because it gives me out of the box the exact file structure I want and need anyway:
Album Artist/Album/Tracks.

That’s how the CDs on my shelf are sorted, that’s how I want my files sorted… so on my CD shelf, when you browse “M” you’ll find Madonna, Mahler, Mancini. So that’s basically how I would sort my digital files even if I had to do it manually, Album Artist/Album, but I’m happy software does that job for me.