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No value?


Hardbopjazz

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I don't understand why CDs are no longer popular (outside Japan). Sure, there is a lot of stuff on Youtube, Spotify etc. (but not all),  but what if it gets deleted? They can't delete my CDs. What about music in the car? You can listen with your cellphone's data allowance, but what if there is no signal.

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2 hours ago, JSngry said:

Half Price Books will give you almost nothing if they buy from you, and/but a little more in store credit.

Nothing for something is an absolute measurement, anything else, you gotta weigh the options.

Half Price used to give you a lot more for CDs, but they quietly changed things. Now it's, as you say, hardly worth going there to sell stuff. In fact several longtime employees to whom I've sold things in the past now have the decency to look very sheepish when they offer you a  total of a dollar or so for, say, ten  or  fifteen clean, eminently sale-able CDs. The problem with this policy, it seems to me, is that a customer who comes to the store in part to sell CDs typically buys more, even a lot more, CDs while he/she is in the store (I know that I did), and often buys books too, while a potential customer who stays home buys nothing.

In any case, thanks be for library de-accessioning sales. Sad though it is in one or more senses, a library near me is disposing piecemeal of its entire CD collection (including a large varied stock of classical material) at rates of 2 for $1. Their thinking, I believe, is that  the library needs/wants the space for other purposes, plus patrons can now listen via computers. I visit the place almost every day; it's like stealing candy from a baby.

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You all are giving me the creeps. :blink::lol:

CDs are dwindling in value here too - yes, but seeing what my son (19) still manages to get when he thins out his Heavy Metal CD collection leaves me with hopes. In fact he said he has sound files of those CDs that matter to him and has decided to keep only those CDs that are either unavailable online or by obscure bands, so for him it is vinyl and online but much, much less CDs from now on (signs of the times?). So niche musics that have a focused subculture still do sell as CDs, even secondhand as it seems. I wonder in what way things are that different with jazz CDs?

As for books, ho hum .... :huh: Tomorrow I will be setting up a stall at a local book fleamarket (including not just books but any printed matter in fact, and now expressly including records too, BTW, so my crate of duplicate jazz vinyl goes there too). So I hope you ALL are at least partially wrong. I have had a stall there for about half of the the past 18 years, noticed brisk business during the first few years until things slowed down (when of course my first-time-ever-to fleamarket antique books and magazines had gone) and then paused for a few years, and in recent years have attended again and found business across the field to be relatively good again. A lot of books will go at "impulse buy" clearout prices (trying to make space before I donate to "bring and take away" book exchanges again) but I still feel that there is a market either for truly antique books on specialized subjects of historical or "collectible" (focused hobby) interest. As Rooster said, encyclopedias and "general purpose" books are dead (I cannot bring myself to dump the 1965 Encyclopedia Britannica I inherited a long time ago nor the 20-volume German encyclopedia of 1935 we dug out when my father in law moved to a senior citizens home last fall). And you cannot shift a book of 1920 or 1930 dealing with the history of your country or with "notable works of art" or other generalist "cultured citizens" topics but you CAN INDEED get money for a book of 1920 or 1930 about the then state of the art of architecture or antique automotive books or even antique cookbooks, for example!

So keep your fingers crossed for me, pleeze! ;)

Edited by Big Beat Steve
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this is all very interesting; about 70 percent of my collection is not downloadable in terms of either the actual recording or the sources, which are everything. Otherwise it is like having bad prints of paintings and thinking that that is sufficient. Which many people do believe.

Edited by AllenLowe
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Non-streamable music will be marginalized. For many people, it is a simple question of available technology. A 12 cm disc with a storage capacity of around 80 minutes of music is considered inconvenient, and they might not even have CD playback equipment anywhere any longer.

I listen a lot less to plastic disc's these days, and have rips of some of my own non-streamable music available in a cloud of my own. 

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I ran into this this last week too in fact. After our most recent move, I decided it was time to get rid of my rock CDs so I hauled about 800 or so to a local used book/record store. They accepted about 20 discs, claiming the rest were in too poor of condition to take; while some may have been a little scuffy, most were in perfectly fine shape, some basically brand new. I tried my hand at a record store with a large CD section and they took another 10, also claiming the discs were in poor condition. The irony of course, is that both places, and every place, happily sells LPs in truly deplorable condition for premium prices. So now I suppose the last refuge is a donation to Goodwill; hopefully someone will be made happy by them, though I'm doubting it more and more.

I also set aside a few rare CDs that generally list for a good amount of money secondhand to sell on Discogs. I priced them far below the other copies on there and there again seems to be no interest whatsoever. So yes, unfortunately, no value as far as I can tell. I dread to think what will come of my jazz, blues, experimental, and ethnographic CDs when I die, which could be 50 years from now. It'll all go to the dump.

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28 minutes ago, bresna said:

What's killing me is that every new car I look at doesn't have a CD player. So even if I wanted to play my CDs in the place I most often play them, I can't.

I'm starting to make that a criteria for my next car search.  I know the Toyota Camry still offers a CD player, at least for some option levels on the car. 

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4 minutes ago, Aggie87 said:

I'm starting to make that a criteria for my next car search.  I know the Toyota Camry still offers a CD player, at least for some option levels on the car. 

Time for us to buy a car.  We always buy Honda Accords, and they stopped including CD players in 2018, so we are looking for a low-mileage 2016 or 2017, and know this will be our last car with a CD player.  They started including XM radio with the 2019's, which would be an acceptable substitute for me, but my wife loves having a CD play for trips.  I feel very old these days.

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19 minutes ago, felser said:

Time for us to buy a car.  We always buy Honda Accords, and they stopped including CD players in 2018, so we are looking for a low-mileage 2016 or 2017, and know this will be our last car with a CD player.  They started including XM radio with the 2019's, which would be an acceptable substitute for me, but my wife loves having a CD play for trips.  I feel very old these days.

Same here--I'll be buying a new or new-ish car in the next year, and it has to have a CD player.  I know that limits my options, but so be it.  

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1 hour ago, felser said:

Time for us to buy a car.  We always buy Honda Accords, and they stopped including CD players in 2018, so we are looking for a low-mileage 2016 or 2017, and know this will be our last car with a CD player.  They started including XM radio with the 2019's, which would be an acceptable substitute for me, but my wife loves having a CD play for trips.  I feel very old these days.

Our 2018 Subaru Outback has a CD player!!:tup Factory installed equipment.

Also has Sirius XM radio.

Edited by jlhoots
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Just went to pull some CDs for two afternoon shows that I'm pre-recording next week and was glad all over (apologies to the Dave Clark Five) to be able to let my eyes wander over all of the music that I have, things that I haven't listened to in awhile (just to pick an off-the-beaten track example, Mundell Lowe's Satan In High Heels--that might be a fun one to revisit sometime!) and to leaf through the booklet for the Lou Donaldson Mosaic.  Having grown up with vinyl, I have no love or even nostalgia for it (and feel it turned into a high-end hipster racket long ago), but I do have much respect for those who treasure their LPs.  Maybe, or even most likely, it's the 20th-century (or older) notion of a library, whether it be books, music, or movies, but I love being surrounded by physical artifacts of the art forms that give me such profound pleasure.  That's just my taste, let others stream or Spotify away--my concern there for the future of distributed music is how little compensation artists tend to receive from those formats. 

If nothing else, I'm well-situated for the inevitable CD revival of 2033! 

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For those with no CD players even as an option, is it now standard to include a thumb drive?  I would hope so unless its only presumed that you are going to output from your phone to your no-CD stereo?

 

My KIA (2015 IIRC) had the CD player installed with USB port underneath.  I hardly drive at all since our move (2-3 x per week tops) except for monthly trips to Naples which is less than three hours each way to visit Mom. I've taken to converting LPs or other things to a dedicated thumb. So as long as USB plugs are provided I won't insist on a CD player for the next car.

(and at this rate of driving that could be a long time - by then we might have no choice but to stream from the cloud to our car stereo.)

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5 minutes ago, Dan Gould said:

For those with no CD players even as an option, is it now standard to include a thumb drive?  I would hope so unless its only presumed that you are going to output from your phone to your no-CD stereo?

 

My KIA (2015 IIRC) had the CD player installed with USB port underneath.  I hardly drive at all since our move (2-3 x per week tops) except for monthly trips to Naples which is less than three hours each way to visit Mom. I've taken to converting LPs or other things to a dedicated thumb. So as long as USB plugs are provided I won't insist on a CD player for the next car.

(and at this rate of driving that could be a long time - by then we might have no choice but to stream from the cloud to our car stereo.)

Yes, there is a USB port and I do have a fully loaded stick in the car ready to go but it's not as convenient as you'd think. It's certainly not convenient when you go to a CD shop, buy a disc and being unable to listen to it on the way home. Or thinking to yourself, "Hey, I haven't heard Paul Gonsalves' "Gettin Together" in a while", only to realize that it ain't on the stick that's in the car and then you'll have to go get it, bring it into the house, copy the folder over and bring it back out to the car where you'll have to browse for it (if it loads right this time). :)

It was so much easier to just grab the CD off the shelf.

1 hour ago, JSngry said:

Try installing that here. :) 

Image result for toyota prius prime audio

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Just now, bresna said:

Yes, there is a USB port and I do have a fully loaded stick in the car ready to go but it's not as convenient as you'd think. It's certainly not convenient when you go to a CD shop, buy a disc and being unable to listen to it on the way home. Or thinking to yourself, "Hey, I haven't heard Paul Gonsalves' "Gettin Together" in a while", only to realize that it ain't on the stick that's in the car and then you'll have to go get it, bring it into the house, copy the folder over and bring it back out to the car where you'll have to browse for it (if it loads right this time). :)

It was so much easier to just grab the CD off the shelf.

Oh no doubt all of that's true. It works well for me because I plan ahead with things I want to hear soon and I'm cool with what I put on.

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1 hour ago, JSngry said:

Why can't one just get the lowest end standard audio equipment and then get an after-market CD/etc player installed?

That is getting more difficult in many cars, as the audio is integrated into the GPS and other controls,  with a larger touch screen. 

It's not usually a stand alone radio head unit like decades ago.

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