How to Geek: “…You’ve doubtless seen a lot of articles and videos over the past decade extolling the virtues of listening to music on vinyl. Shopping for physical music media is a great hobby, but my preferred “vintage” medium isn’t quite as august: CDs. Here’s why I love going to the dustier part of record stores to thumb through jewel cases. Try as I might, I just don’t get all that excited about vinyl records. The world seems to, and that’s fine. Vinyl sales have continued to overtake the physical media market (PDF). Best Buy stopped selling CDs years ago and since then has expanded its vinyl selection. I admit, too, there is much to love about collecting vinyl…I do use Spotify regularly, but mainly to find new music. I put the stuff I discover in playlists and use those later as a hitlist for my shopping trips…The cool thing to do these days for streaming services like Spotify, though, is raising prices. At the time of writing, Spotify has just announced yet another poke to my wallet. The ads I get in the free version of Spotify are some of the most insufferable, which I’m convinced is intentional. So, for the moment, I continue to pay for Spotify Premium, but only as one tool in my quest to find the perfect song for every feeling…Compared to vinyl, cassette tapes, and streaming, CDs are the main draw for me at my local music stores because I can do way more with them. After getting home, I can pop them in my computer’s disc drive and easily get lossless (high-fidelity) copies…Once I have my CDs ripped, I put them in the cloud from which I can stream or download copies to whichever of my devices I want to listen on. (I have a private Nextcloud server I roll myself, but you could do this with a OneDrive or Google Drive account.) My phone gets the most use this way, and with it, I can jam out in my car or on a walk without moving the needle on my limited cellular data plan. If I lose or destroy my phone and can’t rescue its storage, I can just redownload from my archive…”