Old CDs and other "stuff"

Rob Keeble

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Location
GTA Ontario Canada
Glenn mentioned in reply to Toni about shelves being adjustable that he provided for the piece of furniture to be re-purposed after his use. In that comment he mentioned CD's

A good few years back i ripped all the CD's i have and have never since used a cd player or gone back to the cds.

In spring i plan on truly clearing out the "stuff" i have been hording. Some i am going to have a once of go at selling and seeing if nuts out there would by my junk.

So i was wondering what are you all keeping your CDs for. Hoping someday they gonna be worth something or are you seriously still using a cd player and playing them.

I can understand the vinyl guys and have sent my last couple of vinyl pieces off to someone that would better appreciate having them.

But the same goes for things like old video tapes either of home movies made with a camcorder and now having digitized them whats the point of keeping these things.

Whats your thoughts on books. I for some unknown reason i cannot explain cannot bring myself to throw out any printed book (i dont mean magazine btw.)

But there are books we have of our kids and i just dont know if in say 10 years from now if there are any grandkids whether or not they going to even look at a book.

Whats your thoughts.

My primary concern is i am committed to leaving no junk or as little as possible when my day is up.

I would like to hear thoughts from all corners of this problem just to kinda have the last chance to rethink a strategy. So would love to hear any approach.
 
Rob, I've been in the process of uploading all my CD's to google music for quite awhile now. I have one box left...most of them are/were my FIL's blues and jazz CDs. Once I've got them uploaded I plan to sell all I can and donate what I can't. As for books, I've donated most that I had except for those that are meaningful or have to do with woodworking/turning. I've mentioned before that the year prior to my parents retiring, they filled a couple small dumpsters of "stuff" they held on to. I do not want to have that chore for myself!! We will probably move to different house in the next few years and I don't want to do it then either. I think it was Brent that digitized a bunch of wworking mags with a scanner ....Good luck!
 
I still have over a thousand CD's and an equal number of books. We listen to the CD's when TV gets boring, which is often. A couple of years ago my son loaded all the CD's on an Ipod for us, but we have never figured out how to make it work and it is in Mac format so I can't use it on my PC. Books? We could do with a clean out, but there are many reference types for woodworking, cooking, gardening, architecture etc. that I refuse to part with. Having done the fill a dumpster thing at my MIL's a few years back we can appreciate the burden placed on out kids if we keel over, but it sure is hard to part with some stuff.
 
I still have over a thousand CD's and an equal number of books.

We boxed up all our CD's about 7 or 8 years ago and haven't brought them out since... I don't think any of our stereo equipment even plays CD's anymore (we did a cleanup of that a while back but that's lomls side of the house so I haven't paid that much attention lately - at least I haven't tried to play one anyway). I should probably dig out the box of CD's and dispose of it.

I still have somewhere north of 2000 and south of 4000 books - I like books. This is after cleaning out something like 25% of the fiction and a fair bit of the non fiction (I took a full pickup truck load to work a couple of years back and started a "take a book, leave a book" library share - a few other folks brought in a couple of boxes - and have taken several truckloads to.. cough.. and from.. the friends of the library). I have a hard time giving up books, although I think its time to take another run at the fiction section. I put "useful" books into sort of a special exempt place, but that may just be because of the way I think :D

More troublesome is the stacks of scrap iron, etc.. although I do use bits and pieces here and there with reasonable frequency. Most of it won't go with when we move - although that stack of planer blades is good steel (they're super heavy duty ones and make fantastic specialty lathe tools and at only $1 for the stack how could I say no?)
 
The correct answer is to stack them all in piles in your house and make little pathways to walk through.

Make sure the piles are stacked securely, because you don't want to get buried in an avalanche.
 
A good few years back i ripped all the CD's i have and have never since used a cd player or gone back to the cds.

In spring i plan on truly clearing out the "stuff" i have been hording. Some i am going to have a once of go at selling and seeing if nuts out there would by my junk.

So i was wondering what are you all keeping your CDs for.

I still buy CDs on occasion. My wife and I prefer physical media, since we feel like we "own" something.

I've also ripped a ton of them and listen to them on the computer, but if I sell or give away the CD then legally I don't have any right to the ripped music anymore. And that's all I'm going to say on the issue of copyright.

I used to buy a lot more books, but these days we do most of our reading from the library, so we're not increasing their at all. As well, the used bookstores in our city are declining in number... I have in the past tried to sell a few boxes of books, and ended up coming home with over 3/4 of them since the store didn't want them. I think maybe Ryan's approach to giving them away might be the only way to prevent many from ending up in a landfill.

It sure does feel good to purge every now and then!!
 
The correct answer is to stack them all in piles in your house and make little pathways to walk through.

Make sure the piles are stacked securely, because you don't want to get buried in an avalanche.

:rofl: And add 10 - 15 cats to patrol the collection{s}

A few years back I burned all my cd's to an external hard drive and sold off the 400 or so hard disks...of course being the dummy I am, the hard drive crashed and burned recently without a back up :bang: never really missed the cd's themselves until this dumb move.
 
Rob, I am 90 and I just keep going through stuff and tossing, donating, giving to someone who would like that item, etc. And I still have way too much stuff for the kids to have to go through.

I have managed to make a couple charities happy with Myrna's clothes, shoes, etc.
I have made a lot of ladies happy with jewelry.
I have made several ladies happy with pots, pans, Dutch ovens, etc.
I have given away a lot of clothes that I have shrunk out of.
I have made space by giving away electronics that are not up-to-date but still quite useful.
etc., etc.,

However, there are still 90 years of photographs, children's keepsakes, gardening tools, motors, paintings, etc. that someone is going to have to decide what to do with---Yes I know that last sentence is borderline English. (English is my second language. My first language was, "I want this. I want that. Gimmie.")

Example: Myrna's mother came west in a covered wagon. She flew back in a jet. She also kept, an almost daily, diary. That is something you just don't throw away---on the other hand all it is doing is taking up space. Bertie was one heck of a wonderful mother-in-law---I still miss her dearly.

I must have had too much coffee. Myrna always said that I got diarrhea of the mouth when I had too much coffee. So

Enjoy,
JimB
 
Rob,
This must be a process we all go through... we long ago copied all the CD's -- well most of them -- to the computers and rarely ever listen to them now.... I closed my eyes and packed a whole wall of books and took them to the local library... was one of the hardest things I ever did, but as I age, my eyesight is fading some and I'm too vain to go around with reading glasses, so I couldn't read them any way... besides I do have a kindle and can read that (I can enlarge the font)... We've made a number of trips to the local habitat stores, goodwill, the county SPCA store and several christian ministry stores that operate around the area.... we still have a 10x20 storage facility behind the carport that has stuff we haven't seen in the last 9 years since we moved up here and stored them... sometimes, I think "Stuff" breeds and multiplies when I'm not looking.
 
Hmmm, I have a CD that I paid $6 for that is now worth $256 as it is out of print and desirable. I'm sure the same could be said for many of the vinyl albums I sold by the box full for next to nothing :eek:. I assume many of you wish you had your old Baseball cards back when those were sky-high. I really can't believe I sold Oingo Boingo's "Only a Lad" EP !!! . . . I'm keeping the CD's.

I do not want to get into an audiophile conversation but, an iPod with ear buds is not a music listening system in my world :)
 
In spite of our best efforts, stuff is increasing here.
The house is jammed with leftovers from three college students (and we only have two of our own!), my in-laws' stuff from three successive down-sizings and now some family treasures from my older siblings who are also down-sizing. We've discovered the furniture bank and a couple of great charities who put used clothing to good use.
We're keeping our cd's too, being in agreement with Glenn's thinking on them.
But, as Vaughan once pointed out, George Carlin has the last word on "Stuff".
 
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I have no room for stuff of my own, half my shop is filled with my kid's stuff. :rolleyes:

I burned all by cd's to a drive a few years back. I keep a copy on every computer, an external drive, and a dozen or so dvd's. Most of the songs I've purchased over the past 5-6 years has been on itunes, so I just download them when I get a new phone, so copies of them are there too.

The cd's themselves I kept a collection of ones I really liked, but sold most of the others in a garage sale. We once had a huge movie collection, but it's dwindled over the years as we've loaned them out and sold them.

Every few years we go through our books, but I do keep a collection of reference and ones I enjoy reading again. I've started buying ebooks, but will still by hard copies if it's something I'll use often.

I have a box of old pictures and stuff from growing up, which my wife refers to as "the old girl friend box". Admittedly, it has some of that stuff in there, but there's a lot more of other stuff. We've had the discussion, it's my box of stuff that defined me at one point or another, and it's not going away. ;)
 
I ripped I think all of my cd's, but kept them, both due to the copyright issue, and codecs change. (relative re ripped all of his to Flac)
In the last few years, I have seen and picked up one, 300 cd changer, to hook up to my stereo, so I could keep fingerprints off them and still use them on my computer, without having to run the stereo off the computer. (edit: garage sale $10 find)
Books, I do go through. Heck, who uses Windows NT any more? I am also going through my movies (got rid of the video tapes a few years ago), as once I tend to watch one, I remember enough of it, I rarely if ever watch it again. There are a few exceptions and some of those are series (Coupling, Doctor Who).
I've been in houses where books were piled up in walking paths, as well as houses filled with other junk. I really want to get back to simpler things, although I am not likely to do so with tools and the shop.
 
Oh man, this thread hits home lately. My wife and I have both gotten rid of quite a bit of stuff in the past year to 18 months (two 30 cy dumpsters to start with, plus whatever else was donated, sold, or tossed in the normal weekly trash). But having spent a good part of this past week moving things from the storage place to the new house, I'm seeing over and over that we still own way too much stuff. Of course the stuff I'm holding onto is useful things we might need some day. But her stuff is just fluffy girly stuff nobody really needs, as far as I can tell. Seriously, do we really NEED 18 plastic bins full of Christmas decorations? And that's just Christmas. She has decorations for Christmas, Easter, Valentines Day, 4th of July, Veteran's Day, Halloween, President's Day, Groundhog Day, and some Estonian holiday I can't even pronounce. Or dog dishes. Honestly, how many dog bowls does one dog need? Then there's the nightlights. Not only are there never any empty electrical outlets in our house, but do you have any idea how many amps of current those 14 or 15 nightlights draw? :rolleyes:

I have all the important stuff. Like drawers and boxes and buckets full of miscellaneous hardware, fasteners, and cables. Do you need a pair of those special brackets for mounting a window air conditioner? I have one of them. Or three perfectly matched casters. And we can't forget the tools. I have multiples of pretty much every wrench, plier, screwdriver, or socket you can think of. And lots of handheld power tools. With cases. I've gotta keep the empty cases because that's where I have to store the extra tools for working on the tools they came with. And I'm sure there'll be a perfectly good use for 300 or so wire clothes hangers one of these days. And who doesn't need extension cords? I conservatively estimate I have 4.7 miles worth of extension cords, ranging in length from 1 to 100 feet. And being the cook in the family, I like a well-equipped kitchen. I'm sure there's a good reason for me to have the equivalent of about 3 or 4 very complete kitchen knife sets. Or 3 sets of BBQ tools. Or full sets of anodized, stainless, and non-stick cookware. And we simply won't even mention guitars, guns, or clamps, because we all know you just can't have too many of any of those. :thumb: :bang:

Seriously, we both have way more stuff than we need (or really want), and we hope to pare down the pile as we unpack from the recent cross-country move. Much of the packing done in LA was rushed, so we both knowingly moved things that we should have gotten rid of. Now is our chance to do a more thorough purge. Lots of stuff to donate or toss. We also have quite a bit of stuff to sell, via either Craigslist or eBay, depending on the item.

But books? I think we MIGHT have two boxes worth. Mostly cookbooks that I'll never open (except for The Joy of Cooking, which I think is a pretty good general reference). Books just don't have the allure to me that they do to many people. I'd just as soon have my written materials be electronic. Music-wise, I do have a box of CDs, but everything's been ripped and copied onto multiple devices. Nearly all of my music purchases over the past 10+ years have been from iTunes. (The remainder have been CDs sold at live concerts and shows.) Still have a meager collection of vinyl, but haven't played any of it in decades. I also have maybe a couple dozen DVDs, and they haven't been watched in over 10 years. When I get them unpacked, I'll likely donate most of them and just keep a couple that I really like (like Hell Freezes Over by Eagles, in 5.1 surround sound). I generally don't watch a movie more than once or twice, so I think my days of buying movies are over. I'll just stream them, rent them, or watch them on satellite.
 
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