Ah, yeah. Times and terms change.

I still will pick up old CD's at thrift stores and flea markets fr a few bucks and rip them to my computer system.

I have a monstrous music library. (don't even get me going on the vinyl LPs I've got)

Had a friend give me a used service drive from a computer repair shop and it had a customer's backup music library on it as large as my own at the time. 80+ GB of stuff.

Incorporated that in a heartbeat.

For years I did repairs and drive replacements for the kids in the neighborhood and often they'd be more than happy to let me duplicate their music libraries. I didn't charge a lot so it was a win/win situation.

That and finding a shocking amount of music on dumpster dive laptops.. esp machines from the 2008 - 2012 era.

Know a family (fairly well off) that sold a summer home a few years back and they moved on a ton of stereo equipment and one was a crazy big Sony CD changer that had a carousel of 100 disks in it.. Guess what was still filled with CD's?

Granted it's "grandma" music, and lots of stuff like Burt Bacharach and Barbara Streisand, but some of that is actually really good, solid songwriting. Not my favorite kind of music, but given the AI slop online now, it makes it easy to hear how shitty that is.

What, if I may ask, does „Ripping“ mean to you?

Am always interested in different takes on words.