There are a couple of advantages of CDs stored centrally on a PC.
1. Eliminate the physical storage problem of owning 100s of CDs. Off the top of my head I'd guess I own about 200 music CDs, all my close friends own at LEAST as many. The sheer problem of where you PUT all those damn discs necessitates investment in furniture, storage racks, etc. (Funny story: One friend has so many CDs he can't remember what he's got. Sometimes he goes out and buys a new CD, only to discover later that he had it already.)
2. Instant central access. NO MORE HUNTING for that one CD which you KNOW you have, but JUST CAN'T FIND, DAMMIT. <g> Hmm, did you lend it out? Did it get misfiled? Is it in the car? Did it fall behind the desk???? With HDD storage, I can get to any song inside four clicks! GROOVY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
3. Central protection. CD's that you don't use often can't get scratched up or acquire coffee stains or get bent or exposed to sunlight etc.
4. Central organization. You can group dozens, or hundreds of tracks together. You have access to the total programmability of a PC solution. No longer are you at the mercy of each CD player manufacturer's idiosyncratic feature implementations. (Why is it that some CD-changer makers don't grok the fact that sometimes I want to shuffle through the whole magazine, and at other times I only want to shuffle ONE CD???? Etc etc.)
5. Eliminate skipping. Mp3s playing off your HDD are not susceptible to skipping if you bump the machine. Well, as long as you don't take a sledgehammer to it, okay? <g>
6. Portability. You can slap at least a 100 tracks in mp3 compressed form on a CD-R. Stick twenty of those in a 10-CD wallet and you're walking around with 2000 tracks in your bag. BABY! (And here comes DVD-R ... woohoo!)
7. Instant seek. I've never seen a slider bar on a CD player that lets you go to any part of the currently playing song with a zip of the mouse. Helps for learning lyrics <gg>
8. CDDB connectivity. This was one of the coolest features of the Musicmatch product. It totally blew my socks off! The program connects to CD information databases on the web, and using the serial number of the music CD you put in, pulls the album name, artist name, and names of all the tracks from the goddam web!!!!!!! STYLIN!!!!!!!!!!!! In the .. how many years? ten years? that CDs have been around, they've never had the goddam track, album, and artist info encoded on them. I view that as an egregious oversight by the original developers of the redbook standard ... but we certainly don't have to deal with that in MP3 land.
Thanks Stitch! You ARE the Messiah. And I preach the gospel. <g> |
