Soooo…. I am old. Recently my wife and I have come to the conclusion that we have too much stuff. Looking around our home and in our basement it is hard to deny. As discussed over the last several years I like music. I listen to a lot of music. I like to go to shows and historically I have liked to “buy” and “own” music. I have come to realization that this is dark ages stuff. Streaming has won and my 1500 (or so) CD’s will one day be of all the value of 1500 8-Tracks and it is going to happen sooner rather than later. My albums… they are different at least for now. They have art and liner notes my 53 year old eyes can read. But CD’s? They never had any magic. They were beautiful and functional but… they seemed like a logical place for me to start the decluttering process.
I have over the years ripped many of these onto various computer hard drives and subsequently lost some of the libraries when i got new computers. iTunes solved that storage dilemma but only up to 25,000 songs so there was a picking and choosing process while also adding new audio files and downloads instead of actually buying new CD’s. When I decided that this would be first test of my resolve I asked my son for my birthday to put together ripping machine and hard drive to rip all CD’s to hard drive and up into the cloud. He built me a pretty little two disk drive Hacintosh and wrote out detailed instructions for how to rip and I have now started the process in earnest.
I type this after ripping (with Jon giving me a head start of doing 50 or so about 100 CD’s. It is interesting and it is painful. Interesting to see how many jewel boxes had concert tickets stuffed into them, a quaint habit I picked up somewhere along the line. Interesting because he also hooked me up with something called “Delicious Library” which allows me to scan the barcodes of the ripped CD’s and it creates visual library of art together with information on the Cd as well as current value of CD on Amazon. This “value” proposition remains to be tested. But it was interesting too to see how the market has “valued” my collection (more on that later). Painful is just because I love the music and I am a hoarder. Seeing that I have 11 Yo La Tengo CDs is a thing of awe and beauty to me and the fact that 80% of you reading this have no idea who Yo La Tengo is magnifies my sense of the “importance” of my “collection”.
So I sit in front of my machine I load, I open as audio file in something called XLD, I get the track names downloaded and then I rip something called a FLAC file which my son tells me can then convert into an MP3 file.Each one takes about 10 minutes and I can do 2 at a time. I tried to find a high school kid to do this but couldn't and now realize that it would take all the profit out of it. I have opened up an EBay account and I think I need to open Amazon account as well to sell.
I took 96 CD’s to Euclid records and they were very professional with me. I advised that I was coming in to sell my children. The young lady did not seem sympathetic or interested but she was polite. I left them my name and number and about ½ hour later she told me they wanted 26 of them and would pay me 72 dollars. I had priced them Amazon as being worth about 300 total.but was looking at this first batch as an experiment. She explained that the ones I saw as “valuable were worth 5 bucks to them, the rest were either two dollars or one dollar, That just happened. I feel somewhat violated but I think when you sell your children you feel that way. There is a site called Decluttr which will pay me .40 each for them and handle shipping but I think I try my hand at Amazon and/or Ebay and maybe make a trip to Vintage Vinyl. I will report. The process should take me well into the Spring and as of this point for CD’s that probably cost me 1000 bucks I am 72 dollars to the good but I still have 70 of them to get rid of. I have opened a special account for the liquidation of my “treasures” starting with the CD’s, followed by the books I am embarrassed of (Dick Francis, John Grisham and what not) and then...the comic books...scrap metal...who knows. This might be an interesting obsession…. maybe a sad little book…”The Baby Boomers Guide To Selling Your Children, (Decluttering)”. What could go wrong?
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