Let me tell you about a disturbing thing I encountered the other day. Usually, when I’m working, I like to put a little music at a low volume, just enough to cover the surrounding noises. Since I was editing some old photos, I thought playing something from when those photos were taken, 1994-1995, would be a good idea. About halfway through the session, I got the idea to listen to an album that brings back many memories. And here comes the unpleasant surprise: I couldn’t find that album.
At first, I said something sweet to Tidal, thinking they deleted a whole album. I moved to Apple Music. Nothing, erased from there. I couldn’t find it on Spotify either. On YouTube I only found a few tracks from that album here and there.
That album has disappeared, while the rest of the discography is intact. It’s like that album never existed. Weird, especially since it didn’t contain anything that would attract the attention of woke censorship, cancel culture enforcer, or any of that shit. After that, I went through the playlists I’d saved a while back and discovered that many other tracks had also disappeared.
I’m no fan of conspiracy theories, but this situation seems like a rewriting of history. It is alarming to see albums no more than 20 years old disappear for no apparent reason. I do not know why this is happening, but precisely this phenomenon drives me to write today’s article. On the one hand, I want to draw your attention to the problem, and on the other hand, I want to give you some solutions to keep your favorite music in case they become impossible to find in a few years.
I have the advantage of living in a house with a roomy, dry attic that I use to store all sorts of junk. Among them was my CD collection, which was put in a crate and stored “just in case.” Today, I got all these CDs down. I will begin an extensive process of digitizing and digitally archiving everything I have on physical media. Of course, I also recovered the album this article started from, but it remains an unpleasant and frustrating situation. Strangely, I have to do this instead of being able to rely on the convenience offered by streaming services, especially since I’m paying a subscription and not getting anything for free.
Although it seems complicated, I’ve chosen the following approach, which gives me the best compromise between storage space and preserving the quality of the music in my collection.
Since newer PCs don’t have optical drives, I used a portable USB BluRay drive. I had an older one, I searched for it, dusted it off and I will put it to hard use. If your PC doesn’t have an optical drive, you’ll have to follow my example and get an external one.
Then I installed Audiograbber, a software that rips audio from CDs. I use this program exclusively to convert CDs to WAV format. I don’t apply any volume normalization, nor have I set the program to remove pauses at the beginning and end of songs.
This program has the advantage of linking to discography databases and can automatically name tracks according to user-defined rules. I usually use the track number – track name format, so that when I listen to an album, the order on the original CD is preserved.
If you want to keep the highest quality audio recordings and don’t mind taking up a bit more storage space, you can stop here. WAV extracted files offer the highest possible quality, being basically the digital equivalent of CD, but they are large in size. I have copied all these WAV format tracks to a backup hard disk and put them in tight.
In addition, we converted the music to FLAC format, which roughly halves the file size without loss of quality. For this conversion I used Fre:AC, a free utility. I put the FLAC files on a NAS that I use as a media server, so I can listen to them on all the devices in the house.
It’s a complicated and time-consuming solution but for now I see no other way.
Buy your favorite music
Beyond all the hassle, the lesson learned is that while streaming offers quick and convenient access to lots of songs, it’s not always a safe solution for keeping music.
So I recommend you invest in buying the music that matters to you in physical format and make sure you have a digital backup. Don’t rely solely on online platforms; they may change or delete content without warning. Keep your favorite music, whether it’s CDs, WAV or FLAC files, to make sure you can access it whenever you want.
Photo by Maor Attias
