Discussion Forums - Search

I just went and tried to actually make an effort to populate my wish list. I gave up searching the site to add as nothing was hitting. I resorted to hitting up Discogs and searching for the disc there first, than pasting the UPC into search for it and add it. Much of what I added was coming up with no artwork or tracks. I found a number that just plain had nothing found (using the UPC) Not sure where the data on here is coming from, but it's a wee bit spotty. 

I worked for a large company in the early 2000's. At one point they were tossing boxes and boxes of promo DVDs in normal CD cases. I grabbed a bunch of boxes. (100's of cases. Full thickness, clear slims and slims with black backs.) The funny bit was at the time, I asked a bunch of folks if they needed cases (to swag how many boxes I should snag... we are talking pallets here) everyone was like "no, I'm good". I grabbed like 7 cases. Sure enough though, folks started calling me up a bit later sheepishly asking "you don't still happen to have any of those cases... do you?"

I've always bought most of my discs used and so it was a nice upgrade to go through the collection and swap out the cloudy/scratched/cracked cases. The only issue I found was there was some variance with the 'full clear' and the 'clear with black' cases and the back art shapes. 

It would be nice to see the notion of USPS tracking to get built into the 'Swapa' family of sites. In theory if they updated the wrapper generation to use the new barcode specs I think it is possible to track even non media mail First Class now off the Intelligent Barcode. 

When you say 'Import', did it fail to recognize the disc? Old skool iTunes would rip the disc for you, the newer versions may just try and ID the disc and grant you access to the tracks in the system. The disc ID systems seem to be quite spotty these days (I used to listen to a lot of esoteric stuff and the 'auto fill' never worked for me) I would pull down something like Picard and see if the app recognizes the discs.

I've been playing with scanning discs and cd hashes. I might pick up some BMG titles just for yucks. I've seen lots of talk of BMG discs being 'different' than UPCed versions, but I find it hard to believe that they went through the effort of remastering a disc from scratch vs just copying an existing disc. I've not seen an honest effort to map the BMG discs out there to other skus. My guess is the CD hash 'reads' like an existing sku (I.e. the tracks align exactly (meaning that is the UPC I would use) 

The BMG 'stigma' seems to have bled into the CD databases as well. It's all ones and zeros and quite easy to tell if discs are actually copies or not. 

Does anyone here do surface scans of their discs before they list? If so, what do you use. I was doing visual inspection, but I'm now scanning all the discs with cdparanoia and checking the surface ratigns before listing. Thoughts? 

Also, I'm noting that the state of metadata online in discs is rather hit or miss. It seems that most of the date was collected to simply annotate tracks for online players. I've been spot checking and the number of entries in some of these common databases is awful. I'm part wanting to go back and rescan all of my personal (for keeps) collection to see how far off this really is and fill in the gaps. 

Paper boxes work surprisingly well. I've not been able to unpack a bunch of boxes, but they seem to fit nice and stack well. If we are really talking volume, I would look at like the Heavy boxes from Home Depot or the like. I've not seen a lot of plastic bins that hold that sort of weight over time. You want to stack as many as possible on end. Not only is this easier to find things later, but they take weight on them better. 

I just did this last year. The USPS sells "Additional Ounce" stamps and they work like Forever stamps in that they have no price listed. i.e. if the cost goes up, they still work. I have some butterfly "Non-Machinable Surcharge" ones as well.  This 'fixes' the issue with the USPS jacking rates on you and the math is easy. i.e. slap a forever on, then a non-machineable, then throw it on the scale and add ounces as needed. No extra math. 

<cough>

Sell the disc online instead? You may want to check this link.

https://www.discogs.com/Sarah-Brightman-Fly-La-Luna-Tour-Special-Edition/release/1923239

It's one strategy. I would also factor in how bad you want the disc. Moving a disc down too low means that you could easily get sniped by someone that comes in later but has the disc at #1. Something to think about. I have a few discs that are in low print or just not that available that I keep near the top 'just in case'. There is a new trend of not putting out a CD at all, or only doing it as part of a KickStarter, or only selling discs at concerts, etc that makes the disc 'rare' (or worse unlistable) which his a bit annoying. Usually I just want the bits and would be more than fine if it was a record club disc. Not everythng is on Spotify and I have some esoteric tastes.