One of my local thrift shops had a two-for-one sale on music CDs. A dollar a disk, for any music CD on the shelf.
I decided to gamble a few dollars.
I got more than I bargained for, in a good way.
Ripping thrifted CDs. One part nostalgia. One part entertainment. One part psychotherapy.
Zero parts algorithm.
An illegal smile
These days, anything that makes me smile, involuntarily, has to be a good thing.
And that’s how I react to hearing a long-forgotten song, under the influence of exercise endorphins. I just can’t stop myself from grinning.
The back story is that my son gave me wireless earbuds for Christmas. Something I had stubbornly refused to buy for myself. And, after a little bit of a learning curve (below) I found that I like wireless earbuds. After substantial weight loss, I can now jog on a treadmill with ease. And, thanks to wireless earbuds, I can listen to music as I jog on a treadmill.
I’m sure I look goofy-onto-senile, an old guy plodding along with a smile plastered to my face. But I’m past caring. Plus, senile may not be such a bad analogy, as what I’m doing is not materially different from music therapy for Alzheimer’s patients. The description of which is a pretty good match for what I’m feeling:
Music can activate the limbic system, subcortical circuits, and emotionally related systems, inducing the sensation of well-being. Source: Music Therapy in the Treatment of Dementia: A Review Article
The uncontrollable cheerfulness of my D-I-Y music therapy only happens at the gym. I get no such kick from listening to oldies while sitting in my La-Z-Boy. This pretty strongly suggests a synergy between the music and the exercise endorphins. Restated: It sure feels like I’m doing drugs. They’re just produced internally.
And a brief respite from future shock.
I defer to Wikipedia for the definition of “future shock” (emphasis mine, below).
Future Shock is a 1970 book by American futurist Alvin Toffler,[1] written together with his wife Adelaide Farrell,[2][3] in which the authors define the term "future shock" as a certain psychological state of individuals and entire societies, and a personal perception of "too much change in too short a period of time".
The fly in the ointment is that I own almost no recorded music. I don’t much like just sort of sitting around listening to music. And I need silence if I’m going to (e.g.) get some work done. So I’m not listening to music all the time, I have no CD collection of favorites, and the rag-tag handful of albums that I’d picked up over the years, and somehow copied over to my phone, was getting a little stale with repeated use at the gym.
Compound that with my disdain for the whole streaming-music subscription-service thing. Technologically, the idea of tapping a vast internet music library is surely appealing. But economically, everything on the internet tends to be run toward “natural monopoly”. So, as with just about everything else to do with the internet, this industry is just another oligopoly run for benefit of the overlord class.
Worse, I have yet to figure out even the basic math of (e.g.) Spotify. An annual subscription to Spotify costs about $150. By report, a) Spotify pays 70% of its revenues to musicians, and b) Spotify pays about 0.3 cents per song streamed. If I’ve done the math right, then the average Spotify user listens to … 35,000 songs a year? Just shy of 100 songs a day. If “a song” typically lasts 5 minutes, that means the average Spotify user listens to about eight hours of music a day.(?) That doesn’t seem plausible.
In addition, I don’t need another algorithm feeding me more stuff. I get tired of the constant push. Everything I subscribe to, they immediately shove more stuff in my face that they think I should want. And I think algorithm-determined content has played a big role in the death throes of the U.S.A. that we are now experiencing. So I just don’t care how much fun their game is, I don’t want to play.
So there I was, an old guy in desperate need of some tunes. To put on my phone. For working out at the gym. Just at the time when my local thrift shop was trying to clear out a backlog of CDs.
It was fate. Or luck. Or an unprintable combination of the two.
In any case, as I age, I increasingly feel future shock. Partly, that’s a natural consequence of getting old. Partly that’s because the pace of societal change has picked up, a lot, this century. The infusion of AI into every aspect of culture isn’t helping. And, needless to say, the Trump takeover of the Federal government has done nothing but amp that up.
But this one process — the shopping, the old-school ripping and copying — is all comfortingly familiar. And then, the listening, particularly to corny old ’60s rock and roll — lets me briefly lose my sense of future shock.
I don’t quite get lost in the music, and forget the present. But it’s close enough.
And, absent chronic consumption of psychoactive substances, it’s all I’ve got, for dealing with ever-present future shock.
Some lessons I have learned
The whole process of ripping thrifted CDs has been surprisingly entertaining. After that initial 2-for-1 sale, I started hitting up my local thrift shops, just to check out their CDs. I will admit that, so far, the shopping itself is both fun and interesting. Part treasure hunt, part nostalgia, part practical, and 100% cheap entertainment.
Thrift stores have distinctly different music personalities. Some of them have lousy taste in music. For example, I had nothing in common with the typical CD donor to Unique (our local mega-thrift). They must have 300 CDs on the rack, at any given time, and none of them said “buy me”. But I find other thrift shops to be totally simpatico, in terms of musical tastes. My local hospital-run thrift shop has excellent taste in music. I, of course, attribute that to a better class of donors to that store.
Of course, the health economist in me cannot help but point out that most likely influx of these really great tunes is estates. That’s my demographic, musically speaking. So, ultimately, I guess I like thrift shops located in areas where geezers with my taste in music are kicking the bucket fast enough to keep my local thrifts stocked with good tunes.
I try to buy in bulk, as befits the $1-a-disk clearing price. But not be a pig. My compromise is that on any given trip, I’ll pick up a dozen or so — as many as I can conveniently carry in one hand. Whatever catches my eye. Artists I recognize, stuff I never listened to when it was popular, and whatnot.
Now to the laptop. Facing this stack of CDs, I place an old-but-functioning Windows laptop with a built-in CD reader (drive). It’ll do.
Edit 2/17/2025, for an extended hardware caveat. My old laptop made rips that sound just fine to me. And since I’m the only one listening to them, that’s all that matters. But if you get into the fine points of it, you soon find that both the quality of the drive and the software matter, for the absolute fidelity of the rip. But, after a brief look, it seemed as if that “high quality” path led to far more expensive hardware, and far longer rip times. I opted to KISS.
To rip a music CD is to copy its contents. That word — rip — appears to be the acceptable name for it, though (per Wikipedia) “digital audio extraction” is a more formal name for it. And, if you get into the weeds, you find that “copy” isn’t really technically correct.
To rip the CD is to read and convert the CD’s digital contents into files formatted in a way that other (non-CD) devices can read. CD tracks become (e.g.) .wav .mp3 files. The thing you get, as the output of a CD rip, not only isn’t a CD physically, I’m pretty sure the digital files (formerly the CD tracks) are not in the same format as a CD’s digital files originally were. For sure, you can (e.g.) select your output quality (sampling rate), which means that some sort of transformation of the underlying digital data is going on.
As with all computer-related consumer items, you don’t have to know anything. You get a program (or applications program or app) that does the ripping.
In fact, the built-in rip function of Windows 7 still works to rip a CD, but the internet-based lookup of “metadata” (the album and song names) no longer functions. So the native Windows 7 app (Media Player) will only produce an un-labeled rip of a CD, where the song titles are Track 1, Track 2 …. Consequently, I’m using Express Rip, which a) I chose not-quite-at-random, b) seems legit, and c) functioned flawlessly as true install-and-use software, no fiddlin’ required.
I still don’t know why the authors of this CD ripping program allow me to use it, for free. But that’s not be cause I suspect foul play, but merely because I never understand how that can possibly be an economically viable business model. And just because it’s prevalent, doesn’t mean I understand it. It’s clearly the way things are done, in some cases. I just means I don’t understand it.
Just another example of future shock.
At this scale, you have to babysit the CD-ripping operation. I’m doing this with a (good-quality) Windows 7 laptop, and some freeware. Total elapsed time to rip a dozen CDs is an hour or two, but you have to tend to it every few minutes. And, even if all goes well, disk rip times vary enormously. As a result, you must tend the process. Change to a new disk when the old one is done. Re-start the occasional failed rip (after cleaning the CD). If nothing else, the freeware is set up for non-commercial use only, so you are required to make multiple clicks manually, for each CD that is ripped.
Something I did not know, until it failed, is that the “meta-data” — the name of the album and name of the album tracks — is not typically recorded on the CD itself, but must be appended, by the ripping software, at the time of the rip, via internet look-up. I can only guess there’s some sort of registration number somehow written on the physical CD.
A consequence of this is that if your CD is a bootleg CD, your ripping software either won’t find the names or will give you names from some absolutely unrelated album. (Further, I get the impression that this lookup must be done at the time the CD is ripped, and cannot be recovered from the ripped (e.g., .mp3) .wav files. But I haven’t tested that.)
You can get fancier, I am sure, but the defaults on Express Rip worked just fine for me.
I ripped the CDs to .wav.mp3 audio files on my ancient Toshiba laptop, with built-in DVD reader. Windows 7 media player long ago lost the ability to add album and track names to those ripped files, but Express Rip worked flawlessly, with no adjustments. Tell the software where you’d like to put the output. Each ripped album appears there as a plain-vanilla directory (folder) in Windows Explorer. Each track is a dot-mp3 (.mp3) file in that folder. Moving those albums to my phone means using Windows Explorer to copy those folders to my phone’s SD card, via USB cable. On the phone, I play them with VLC media player, which finds them and recognizes them as albums with no effort on my part.
Everybody plays nice with everybody else. It’s refreshing.
You can get picky about imperfections in the copy, but I see no need to. The rip process starts with reading the optical disk. This means that any garden-variety read errors will get embedded in your ripped copy. To avoid this, there are super-duper ripping programs that will ultra-mega-guarantee that your ripped file is an exact copy of the original. Or something. But unless your bootleg copies are going to be passed down through the ages, I don’t see the necessity for that level of precision. As long as they sound OK.
Every aspect of that is comfortingly old-school computer use. All the obvious stuff …. works. Again, with reference to future shock, the transparency of this process is soothing in its own right. All the obvious things that should work, do work.
Once I’ve copied the music to my phone, things get a little trickier.
Major edit 2/22/2025: Skip all of this, about using an equalizer. Just wait and see what happens.
In my case, after getting the earbuds to sound good by applying a bass-heavy equalizer, something happened, and the last time I used them, the sound was awful. Way too bass-heavy, treble almost inaudibly soft.
As if the adjustment for the tinny earbuds was now being done twice.
And, sure enough, now, the music sounds fine, after turning off the equalizer.
I am guessing that my phone/software updated something, and that, in the modern world, these earbuds have a driver (to use the Windows lingo). Or, perhaps, merely some standard metadata that includes a default equalizer curve for offsetting the mechanically-driven tinniness of the earbuds.
And so, now, my manual equalizer adjustment was on top of the adjustment the phone embedded natively in the output to these earbuds. Hence, double-adjusted.
Either way, I’m pretty sure the story is that a “smart” phone is supposed to adjust to the (audio) response curve of the output device, automatically. Once it pairs with and recognizes the sound-producing hardware. My phone just didn’t do that immediately, in this case. Why, I do not know.
The moral of the story is that if you try out your near wireless earbuds, and they sound tinny, give your phone and music software time to update. Or be prepared to undo what you did, if you follow my advice below, once the phone gets its hand on the response curve for those earbuds.
So skip this, is my advice:
Wireless earbuds require using an audio equalizer in order to sound good. Out of the box, my gift wireless earbuds sounded cheap and tinny. As befits their rock-bottom price. To me, they’d be adequate for phone calls, I guess. But in no way adequate for listening to music.
But all I needed was bass boost on the incoming signal. I needed to run an audio equalizer to boost the low tones and mute the treble. Accessing the equalizer function in VLC took some doing (you can only adjust it when using VLC for video, so you have to open a video with it, then dig through menus, then adjust it. But you only have to do that once.) In any case, a major boost in the bass, a reduction in the treble, and the sound quality is fine.
But if you boost the bass, so the earbuds sound good, the default Bluetooth settings can’t handle it. It took a while to track this down, but if you crank up the bass in your music, the default Bluetooth encryption algorithm introduces annoying distortion into the music. Bluetooth transmits the signal from phone to earbuds in separate frequency bands, as the fastest (least-computationally-intensive) way to do that. That works fine for (e.g.) phone calls. But if you’re using an equalizer to boost the bass, you max out the volume in the lowest (bass) frequency bands. The resulting signal “clipping” (abruptly cutting off the waveform as it hits the maximum allowable level) generates a big, loud “square wave”, which your ear interprets as a god-awful annoying fuzz-pedal-type noise that shows up in time with the music.
With some phones you can ask Bluetooth to use a more robust algorithm, and that solves it. But on my phone, my only solution was to back off the equalizer bass boost, to the point where the distortion is infrequent and tolerable. Near as I can tell, it’s not possible to get rid of it entirely, under the default Bluetooth encryption algorithm. The upshot is that the final sound quality of these earbuds, in this use, is limited by Bluetooth, not by the earbuds.
Bluetooth has an exceptional broadcast range, on my Moto G6 phone. No problem going from one end of my house to the other. The big lesson for me is that if you have any qualms about bluetooth security of your phone, or battery use, you really need to keep Bluetooth turned off when not in use.
I had few, easily-corrected read errors on thrift-shop CDs. Either most people took good care of their CDs, or the thrift shops toss the ones that are obviously scratched. (Or the ones that the estate bothered to keep were the nice ones.) Out of the few dozen CD’s I’ve bought so far, I’ve had zero total failures. To the contrary, almost all had a mirror-perfect finish on the working side, and copied with no drama at all. Maybe one-in-ten had trouble copying until I stopped the failed initial copy, wiped them down, and re-tried.
This seems to be occurring more frequently as I rip more CDs, so at a minimum, I may need to use a CD drive cleaning disk. I had forgotten that such things existed, but they are still in production because Blu-Ray players use them.
I goofed. The software does not produce .wav files as outputs. Each track becomes an mp3. My wife caught this, sight unseen, now corrected above.
This would make sense, as my impression is that .mp3s are compressed versions of the original data. Lite. Here, best I can guess, the compression was maybe six-to-one? No album seems to take up more than 110 Mbytes (as .mp3s), yet I know CDs hold 650 Mbytes of storage. Maybe a touch more. To me, this suggests that the conversion to .mp3 compressed the data almost six-to-one. By reputation, at least, I likely would hear no difference between .mp3 version and original.
Whether this or other software could give me different outputs (that is, not .mp3s but something else), I’ll never need to know. All I need to know is a) this is for my personal use, and b) the music sounds good to me. All else is irrelevant.
Is this legal? Is it ethical?
I’ll probably have to do a separate post on this, just to ferret out the truth as best I can. But here’s what I think I know.
If you have physical ownership of the CD, you have the right to make a separate copy of the contents, for personal use. That’s not crystal clear, and surely that was in doubt some years ago. But that’s my reading of the current state of the law.
But this means that I can’t just donate those CDs back to the thrift store. Not if I care about this legal nicety. In order to play the music on my phone, legally, I need to own the CD.
I’m still undecided about whether or not I care about this. But for the time being, I’ll respect what I think are the legal limits of this process.
And so, for now, the big downside of CD ownership (as opposed to music rental via Spotify and similar) is that I have to own a big stack of physical CDs. Once ripped, those CDs can live in a dusty box somewhere in the basement. But I can’t just copy the CD, and then put it back into thrift-store circulation.
Conclusion
In all seriousness, something like one-third of Medicare beneficiaries take some form of prescription mood-elevating drugs. (Not joking, unfortunately. I did some of that research myself, from Medicare’s Part D drug summary data.)
To my surprise, at age 66, I find that listening to some forgotten old music, while working out, makes me involuntarily cheerful.
Plus, instead of feeding the oligarchy, the money from these CD purchases goes to worthy charities.
I’m still not sure how I feel about not having to pay the original artists, for the use of their music. As an economist, I can brush that aside by assuming the presence of a secondary market was known when those CDs were first priced and sold. As a normal human being, I’m a little less sure.
If I have any moral qualms about it, there’s an obvious solution, which is to listen to these ancient musicians. But spend money to support young ones.
Who knows, I may even find myself buying brand-new music CDs. Assuming they still make them. And assuming I can find something new I’d care to listen to.
