End of an era...

Today I sold about 3/4 of my CD collection. A few hundred I think. I didn't sell them because I needed the money. I sold them because I needed the space. Our house is big, I think, but it still gets filled up and I literally haven't played any of those CDs in years. There were enough CDs there to take up the room of a fair size book case. So off to the store I went.

It's not that I don't still listen to music. I still do, quite a bit, but every CD I own has been ripped to MP3 on my PC(s) and it just never seems necessary to put in a CD. My CD changer is ancient and only still works because I never use it. So it seemed time to acknowledge the change in technology and life-style (and age) and get rid of CDs. The guy at Half-Price books was pretty impressed - he told me a few times that "you've got some nice stuff in here" "stuff I don't see every day" and so on. It made me happy and sad all at once. Happy that my taste was seen as leading to "nice stuff" and sad to be parting with that nice stuff. It's weird, because I still have access to every single song if I want it, but not having the physical media, the discs themselves, feels like a loss. Probably because for years of my life collecting those CDs was one of my main focuses outside of school and friends, and indeed a big part of some parts of school and friends. Music was a big part of my identity. And, back in the day, I would NEVER consider letting go of CDs in favor of MP3s because MP3s are not 100.000% true to the sound of the CD. Who cares that only a dog could hear the difference! If it's not perfect, it's not good enough for my music. Or it wasn't. But now I'm more practical, and need the space, and, well, a lot older. How depressing.

I couldn't go through with it all the way, though. I kept back about 50-70 discs that I just couldn't part with - favorite bands, rare stuff that was hard to find, imports. I won't be using those discs either, but I'm just not ready to let them go. As Monty Python noted, "I'm not dead."