brent Been there, done that. CDs got ripped down to high quality MP3s. Not the best way to go in terms of quality but my days of being able to hear the silence between tracks have been over for a long time now.
This approach also gave me the opportunity to equalise the playback level across my whole collection and only play the tracks I wanted to hear without spamming the "skip Track" button repeatedly on the occasional "One Hit Wonder" album.
Yet still here I am still living in the past. Personal storage is not the thing anymore as we store everything in the cloud, letting us access our data from multiple devices. Netflix, Amazon, Disney, Sky, Discovery, Now, Spotify, Steam and the list goes on ad nauseam serving our quest for entertainment. Well to quote the late great Sir Terry Pratchett "B****r this for a game of soldiers". While I confess to subscribing to one streaming service I am exasperated by the popular belief that it is a good idea to pay a monthly subscription to enjoy all the music that you used to have in your personal music collection. Equally, relying on a video streaming service to serve up all those classic favourites from a few decades ago is decidedly less predictable than a box full of VHS videos. As a consumer you must consume what is served up to you but not necessarily what you want, you are at the mercy of your streaming providers. So I stay in my time capsule with my music and movies neatly stored on a disc drive with a USB plug on it. My kids say I am behind the times but I'm staying on this sweet spot until something fundamentally better comes along.
Apologies this kind of developed as i went along. Suffice to say a computer with good media players onboard is an important part of my life.
