What to do with your Golden Oldies?
p2pnet news view | P2P | Music:- Like many 50+ year olds, I have an entertainment collection.
LP’s 35
45’s 29
Cassettes 65
CD’s Music 112
CD’s Videos 9
VHS Movie 146
DVD’s Music 17
DVD’s Movie 85
BTW, there are quite a few duplicates, casettes of LP’s and CD’s of cassettes and LP’s.
My collection including the DVD Racks, VHS drawer cabinets, CD Rack and their contents, can be squeezed into two large boxes and four small (book boxes) or in shipping parlance 1.2 cubic metres.
In 2002 – I packaged up my entire collection and placed it in storage where it stayed for the next five years. Along with household furniture (and other paraphernalia) the annual cost was $880 per month. The total storage volume was 26 cubic metres.
So the value of storage of music and video collection came out to approximately $2,436.92 for the period.
In 2006, I purchased a hard-disk and a digital capture card. I then spent a few weeks queuing up content to be ripped and digitally catalogued. Last week I purchased a 32 GB USB stick.
I now have a wonderful collection of my entire life’s musical and video interests (in 3GP format) on a 32 GB stick.
My phone can read it, my netbook can read it, it fits in my pocket and it weighs just 55 grams.
Anyone who wanted to know me would just have to look at the content on the stick and understand instantly my interests, desires and dreams.
Of course, now that it’s digital, complete with my computers digital footprint all over it (hash file identifier) – anyone could profile me rather easily.
Likes Santana, Led Zeppelin, Bruce Willis and Stargate. Hmmmmm – obviously this is someone we could sell ‘Red Bull’ too.
So whilst I enjoy the fruits of labour in digitizing my collection and being able to play all of the content I purchased, DRM free, I am concerned about its security.
Now my only question is: what shall I do with my aging, dust covered originals?
I guess I’ll keep them. Besides, I only ripped the music at 192 kbps and the movies at 1024 kbps.
Maybe one day I will want a higher quality digital rendition.
I look with envy at the current generation. They will never have the storage problem.
P2P is here to stay, and illegal file sharing will one day be made legal. (Although no-one from the Music industry has called me yet to find out how…….)
So today’s generation will just download the higher quality version over the top of the lo-fi version and they wont have to dust their CD racks once a month, or run their VHS tapes on fast forward through the VCR once a year to make sure they arn’t gummed up.
And they’ll be able to live in smaller houses without the need for all those ugly CD racks.
Gee, this digital stuff is pretty neat huh?
Tom Koltai - p2pnet
[Koltai is an economist in Sydney Australia. He's says he's been online for 26 years, has run several ISPs and, "lobbied governments in four countries to prevent Internet restrictive usage legislation from being enacted". He says he's a strong believer in P2P, "as being a technological requirement to fully exploit the convergence of telephony with computers and remove the last barriers to human communication and interaction".]
June, 2009
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June 16th, 2009 at 10:04 am
.. just wait until every single song that exists can be stored on a thumbdrive.
kinda makes 1$/song seem incredibly outrageous..
stw
June 16th, 2009 at 10:41 am
@surfer…….I read the article about a HDD that will fit all recorded music in the near future, but what makes you think a thumbdrive will ever be big enough, or compression tight enough to do it??
stw
June 16th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
“…but what makes you think a thumbdrive will ever be big enough, or compression tight enough to do it??”
At a time when we’re all using lots of things that wouldn’t have seemed possible years ago, why would you question the logic of a large-capacity flash drive??
Not long ago, lots of concepts were thought to be “too ambitious”, yet we’ve got them now…
- Harddrives of all types have crossed the TeraByte threshold;
- Processors that can handle HD media without “flaking out” are available;
- Koltai’s flash drive in the article has 32GB (that’s way more than some said we’d even reach);
- Most MP3 players aren’t much bigger and can hold quite a bit already;
- Digital cameras handle bigger pictures all the time (I’ve lost track of the latest pixel count).
When I first started with computers, they didn’t have harddrives, and RAM was barely a consideration. You had punch cards… then you had 7″ floppy disks (180KB – 360KB) that would load a *temporary* operating system into a limited memory so you could replace that floppy with a “data” floppy for saving your work.
Some years later, when I worked for Unisys, we were a little excited when they started replacing the existing PCs with ones armed with 20MB harddrives. We thought that was a lot, only to have them replaced again very soon after with 350MB drives and 2MB of RAM (upgradable to 8MB!). At that time, floppies were reduced in size to 3.5″, given the harder case, and held over 1.4MB.
I could go on, but in short…
After that, we watched a long list of consistently evolving technologies come and go so fast, it’s almost a blur to try and remember them all!
I have no doubt we’ll see much bigger thumb drives in the very near future… Along with MAFIAA-launched court cases charging that such a thing “facilitates nothing more than massive piracy” of their entire libraries. (You know, the same way the Cassette Recorder, the VCR and the MP3 Player did.)
; )
June 16th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
“And they’ll be able to live in smaller houses without the need for all those ugly CD racks.”
I dunno. I rather like showing off my cd collection. Sure people who know me already, know that I like music, but do they know which artists I like? Simply by glancing at one of the four cd towers in my living room they can see that I have all but 2 of Led Zeppelin’s albums and a lot of cd’s by “that new band Modest Mouse.” “Hey what’s with all these Modest Mouse albums? I thought they only had that one song from a couple years ago?” If all that is tucked away on my hard drive (which it is, in FLAC) nobody knows my musical passions and a conversation which I might actually enjoy participating in might never be started.
I’ve got a friend who collects vinyl albums and has a couple wall mounts for albums. He switches out which 3 or 4 albums get displayed every month or so. I went over one day and it was a couple Ozzy albums. Went over a couple months later and it was Johnny Cash. Fun stuff if you ask me.
June 16th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
@NO1UNO
with the recent invention of SSD (Solid State HardDrive), im absolutely certain there will be 100Tb thumbdrive in my lifetime.
should be enough to hold every song ever created..
June 16th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
@surfer…
“should be enough to hold every song ever created”
That’s assuming every song ever created were worthy of that kind of archiving!
Some of us will probably choose to save *some* of that 100TB for something else, only storing the ones that turn us on.
: )
June 16th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
it certainly wouldn’t hold all the pr0n ever created..
stw
June 16th, 2009 at 7:40 pm
“LP’s 35 (about 1000 – actually …)
)
45’s 29 (don’t know)
Cassettes 65 (bloody hell – none!)
CD’s Music 112 (a few)
CD’s Videos 9 (none)
VHS Movie 146 (some 100s down in the cellar, TV-recordings)
DVD’s Music 17 (less than 5)
DVD’s Movie 85″ (about 1000??? not quite sure – how to count them – 1 season = 7 or 1 dvds???
Sorry – no bragging intended! I’d just like to point out, that both, old and new media, fit. Although, for instance, I’ve got lot of my fav music converted to mp3, I NEVER would give away my ORIGINALs!! No way!!! I like my iTunes, but i love holding vinyl and covers in my hands – much more than bits and bites. Similar to movies. Always hated videotapes due to lack of quality. DVD made it for me. Now also I do have all of it on one little device. But I would miss a lot, if there was nothing physical.
June 16th, 2009 at 8:01 pm
Well, having started this “can of worms” and reading everything all of you had to share……………
I have no argument with any of it, the future is wide open and I for one, look forward
to the further leaps in tech I’m sure we will see soon, (maybe even before I’m gone, 50
is coming up fast!) So, surfer, DA and all, lets see if we cant give them a reason to build it all!
stw
June 16th, 2009 at 9:46 pm
“it certainly wouldn’t hold all the pr0n ever created..”
Good job!
Ya’d never get any SLEEP!
: )
June 16th, 2009 at 11:36 pm
What’s this “over fifty” stuff, by the way?
LP’s: 7500-10,000 (At LEAST 7500).
Cassettes: 500-1000 (too many boxes with tapes mixed in with other stuff to really know)
Reel-To-Reel: 20 (but that’s mostly family stuff from my Wife’s family that I’m gonna convert over to digital at some point, so it probably doesn’t count for the purpose of this list.)
45 RPM records: 200 or so (used to be more, but, regrattably, the largest portion of my collection of 45s went “crunch” (unlabeled box in a storage unit during a move several years back).
As for the “aging, dust-covered” aspect, I’m going to be investing in one of those “vaccuum” machines that a lot of the “archival” places use — sucks the dust and such right off the albums, and gets you a significant improvement in fidelity.
As for why I have such a big collection:
A lot of it was bought up really cheaply from people who were stupid enough to actually believe that they “needed” to buy their entire collection again every time the Corporate MediaPigz came out with a new format. (Same with wall of VHS tapes which I’m probably going to end up digitizing, rather than paying the MPAA scumbags — it’s worth a slight reduction in resolution just to know that I’ve fucked them over by “hiding behind” things like the first-sale doctrine
Plus — and this is the really critical aspect of my collection — almost none of it was “major label” bullshit.
At some point I might start doing one of those “music blogs”, but I dunno — things have been pretty chaotic of late.