After reading last week’s column, a friend asked me, “Why are you so worked up about the iTunes store? If it’s such a rip-off, you can still just buy the CD.” And he’s right. I still buy CDs. But those days may be numbered because technologically, the compact disc has been eclipsed by other methods of digital storage. Hard drives –whether on computers or portable media device, and the internet, are unquestionably more convenient means of acquisition, listening and storage than CDs. As a result, the compact disc as a media format is dead.

I am not saying this as some digital music evangelist. In fact, until recently, I’ve been pretty close to the opposite. Most of my friends haven’t paid for music in years and don’t understand why I still spend so much time and money at CD stores. Until I started downloading concert recordings, I hadn’t downloaded music since Audiogalaxy was shut down some time in 2002 and my iPod lay unused for a year. Because the sound was typically terrible, I rarely listened to anything on my computer. The only other people I knew who listened exclusively to CDs were my parents.

But today, I rarely listen to CDs. What changed? Really, all it took were two purchases totaling around $300 to render my CD player obsolete. The first was a Digital Audio Converter (DAC). I purchased the USB Thingee. There are cheaper options out there. This allowed me to listen to music directly from my computer to my hi-fi system without any loss in sound quality. It is essential when listening to music on a stereo system. A cheaper option (that doesn’t sound as nice) is to just buy a good pair of speakers for your computer. In fact, music played through the DAC might even sound better than a CD. I purchased it because I eventually realized that in order to listen to concert recordings, it was absolutely necessary to listen from my computer. Burning and storing hundreds of hours of unedited live music simply was not practical. Once the DAC was purchased, I could listen to lossless formats from my computer, and it would sound as good (or better) than any CD I had.

The next purchase was an external hard drive. I had been planning to back up my entire music collection for years, but it was not until more recently that hard drive costs dropped to a point where backing up my 1000+ CD collection in lossless formats wasn’t very expensive. A 1.5 terabyte hard drive cost me just $150. Backing up my music collection was necessary for a variety of reasons. Let me just mention that I am very clumsy. I have destroyed more than a few CDs due to my clumsiness. Many of my favorite albums are out of print; so once a CD is destroyed, it could be gone forever unless I am willing to spend $50 on EBay. But most importantly, CDs don’t last forever. Even if you never scratch a CD, some day it will start to break down and skip. The only way to be sure that you will never lose your music is to maintain an adequate backup on hard drives (yes, drives as in plural. But this is not a column about the advantages of backing up your data).

Lossless compression has also made digital storage easier, and both sound better than MP3s. I know there are a lot of people out there who think MP3s sound just as good as CDs. I’ve never agreed. Thankfully, these days, I can compress the files and preserve all musical data. Both Apple Lossless and FLAC are less than ten years old, and both are much more suited for computer storage than just copying your CD’s WAV files. Both compression formats will save you approximately 40% of your hard drive space, and both allow song tags –something that makes it much easier to sort and organize your digital collection. Now that all of my music is stored on a hard drive connected to my old laptop, all I have to do is type in the artist name in Foobar, drag the album folder over, and hit play. While I never found CDs inconvenient, my new setup is much easier.

I have no reason to listen to CDs anymore. My CD collection is rarely touched unless I need to look at liner notes. I could also phase out CDs in the car if I had one (I live in New York and only drive when I visit family back home in Texas). Many basic car stereos include both a USB and an RCA mini port for music players. These stereos also come with CD players, and digital audio converters are still not as widely sold as home CD players (as far as I can tell from browsing electronics and stereo stores). But the direction technology is taking is clear. CDs are a relic of the past.

I still haven’t figured out what to do with my CD collection. Do I get rid of it? Or do I just keep the albums with sentimental value or really good liner notes? I still buy CDs somewhat frequently, but I do not have the storage space to continue increasing my collection. They are beginning to pile up. I have space on my hard drive, but not on my shelves. For now, I’m letting the question sit. Some point in the not too distant future I’ll have to figure it out, but for now I’m not ready to let go of my CD collection. I’ve spent too much time with CDs to just give them up cold turkey.

My confusion over what to do about the death of the compact disc is nothing compared to the recording industries. As far as I can tell, they seem hell bent on prolonging the lifespan of the CD as long as possible. Lossless files are rarely sold, leaving CDs as the only legal means of obtaining lossless digital music. As I mentioned last week, I think we are being gouged on MP3 prices. They can get away with this as long as people consider MP3s equivalent to CDs. But as hard drives become cheaper and larger, I think people are going to start finding new ways to fill them. After all, you only need so much music. The industry’s current position gives illegal file-sharing sites that distribute FLAC versions of albums a monopoly of the digital audiophiles. But aren’t most MP3s acquired illegally anyway? I don’t have any hard statistics, but I’ve seen estimates that around 70% of all music downloading is still done outside of commercial sites like iTunes and Amazon. Preserving a physical product may be the only way to keep people paying for music.