this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
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A decent music library would require thousands of CDs, it would be a huge hassle. Why deal with that when you can just copy all of that to one hard drive?
Because that's not cool.
Because its information overload (name even 50 albums and the songs on them. Humans dont need thousands of albums. Our brains are not meant for this much information. You can't appreciate 1000 albums)
It has no resale value. And if that HDD dies or you die and your family doesn't know how to use it or how to decrypt it, its useless.
I don't consider HDDs physical media per se. No one is handing down hard drives or selling them at yard sales. I can play my great grandpas 1890 shellac records. Think a hard drive will be able to do that? Hell no.
Ok. But I can touch mine ... they seem very physical.
Because it's easier to just copy the data to someone else's drive, no need to physically hand it over. Also you can still keep the CDs after copying them to another medium.
That seems more like a personal problem than a technical one.
Have you looked at HDD prices recently? You can definitely resell them. The ones I got 3 years ago now cost double! And all data should be backup anyway so you don't lose anything on a disc failure. And the last point can be addressed by either just not encrypting your drive or leave the proper instructions behind.
All in all those are minor inconveniences compared to dealing with thousand of CDs.
HDDs are not designed to last very long. Neither are SSDs. That's one reason to prefer dedicated physical media.
Ssds die randomly without warning. Ask me how I know. Then worrying about all your backups, are they going to work? Are those drives failing? Its a huge headache for a real world person that doesn't spend 24/7 talking about Linux on Lemmy.
You can still keep the CDs around for archive purposes, but to me CDs are no longer a viable option for actual media playback.
If you spend a lot of time sitting next to a CD player they're still OK for now. For music on the move, not so much. And when the player breaks it will be hard to replace. So they're definitely not perfect.
Even if you're at home and do have a CD player it's just not practical. Sure, if you only listen to a handful of CDs that's workable.
But my current music collection would require 1400+ CDs .. and good luck finding a specific song in that pile, even if you do know the exact album it's on. It's so much better to just have a searchable library.
Everything you just said is a HUGE amount more work than my shelf of CDs and just taking one out and popping it in my stereo. Plus then I have the art and lyrics there. No screens.
Nothing beats physical media for simple enjoyment.
All your points about HDDs being physical assume you have computer knowledge to know what to do with a HDD.
There's USB ones, but that's what your limited to when it comes to casual users who just want it to work.
Everyone old enough knows how to handle a CD.
Even if you don't use a USB one, you basically just put the thing in the slot and start up the machine, maybe it needs some formatting. It's not brain surgery. Again, it still easily beats dealing with unmanageable number of CDs.
Actually, more and more people are too young to know how to handle CDs these days.
"Put the thing in the slot".
Which slot? Where?
"Formatting it"
Format a drive? What's that?
"Its nor brain surgery".
Your assuming a tech literacy that simply doesnt exisit in the general populace.
This is lemmy. They think every person on earth has a homelab, solely run Linux, only use social media in the fediverse, and host their own matrix server.
They have no idea what real life is like!
CDs and record beat hard drives hands down. Not every damn thing needs a computer attached to it. My home listening setup sure doesn't.
The one shaped like the thing ...
Depending on your setup it will even promt you do do this, all you have to do is click a couple of dialogs. Or lookup like a 5 step guide on the internet.
I think I'm making a very reasonable assumption about tech literacy here ... yours might just be below the general populace.
your thinking the average as the mean.
I'm meaning average to be 20th percentile.
meaning "most" people where your average would only include half of all people.
my favourite park ranger quote was talking about why bear proof bear garbage containers weren't better. The answer was along the lines of there's a siginificat overlap between cleaver bears, and not so cleaver people.
you have to account for more than average, you have yo account for below it, so that its accesaible to more than 50% of people.