How to Get Rid of Your CDs and DVDs?

We’re slowly but surely moving towards a world where CDs, DVDs and most forms of portable optical media are obsolete.

We’re consuming more media than ever on our iPads and mobile phones, neither of which can read discs, and many of the sub-compact netbooks don’t even ship with a DVD/CD drive. Netflix is ditching DVDs in favor of streaming subscriptions. Apple is launching an app store for Macs, and the MacBook Air, which Apple just refreshed with new models, has no optical drive. Cloud-based storage and giant hard drives that plug into your home network are pennies per gigabyte, and reusable flash memory drives can hold more data than a Blu-ray disc.

Blu-ray players and disc-based game consoles will likely be around for a few more years, but the writing is on the wall: DVDs and CDs are not long for this world. Here’s how to transition to a future free of shiny plastic disks.

In this guide, we will show you the Four Methods about how to Get Rid of Your CDs and DVDs:

Method One: Stream it to your living room

If you listen to your music exclusively on your computer or on portable devices like the iPod, then you’re good to go. But if you’re an audiophile, or if you want to play your music on a stereo or home theater across the room from your computer, there are some excellent solutions.

One example is the Logitech Squeezebox. It’s a two piece system — a hardware device that plugs into your stereo, and an open source music server that you install on your computer. Music is streamed to the hardware box over your wi-fi network, and there are analog and digital outputs (both Toslink and coax) to hook up the box to any stereo, pre-amp or dedicated receiver.

If you purchase a particularly versatile music streaming box, you will find that not only can you eliminate all of your CDs, you can also download and play high resolution files, such as 24Bit/96KHz files, FLACs, mpegs, WAVs, and a variety of other formats without you needing to convert them into the kinds of files most players can handle. You can also tune in to internet radio streams. Thus, you not only eliminate large numbers of discs, you may find this new-found freedom almost dizzying as you can now play practically any format over your living room system wirelessly.

Method Two: Rip your DVDs

Take a hard look at your DVD player and your television. Do you see USB ports? Most home theater components have them now. If so, do an experiment — rip one DVD, convert it to an MP4 or MKV file, dump it onto a USB stick, and try watching it. If it worked, you can start phasing out DVDs.

Pavtube DVDAid is regarded as the best DVD ripping software on the market that provides movie lovers, children and people in any group with the easiest and fastest way to rip and convert DVD movies to MP4/AVI/MKV/WMV and many other video and audio formats with high quality on Windows 10. It lets you enjoy DVD movies on any portable device like iPhone 6S, iPad Mini 4, iPad Pro, Nextboox Flexx 9, Galaxy S7, Galaxy Tab 2s, Sony Xperia Z4, Surface 4, Surface Pro 4 and Surface RT/Pro, Kindle Fire HDX, etc. Surprisingly it adds H.265/HEVC and M3U8 as output video format in order to satisfy users who ask for high video quality. (Lists of Best DVD Copying and DVD Converting Software.

Moreover, Pavtube DVDAid makes 1:1 copy of original DVD Disc without quality loss with all audio streams, subtitle tracks, extras, etc. For the short time it takes to convert the movie with the help of CUDA/AMD GPU acceleration, and you will get hours of enjoyments. It’s simple to use and well worth the investment.

Most important:

It can support latest DVD, features with adding *.srt and *.ass subtitle, also help you direct copy titles from DVDs. Below is two users’ reviews:
1. Your profile works just great and the picture is clear, well as always you guys are fantastic with your products and please work on being able to burn to DVD once the user has made their conversation that is something that your competitors can not do directly and that would be awesome and I would love to be your beta tester.
2. It is easy to use for editing and conversion and makes great quality copies of my DVDs. I really like that I can turn up the volume on my DVDs. It is a great feature! I also like that it gives me a lot of options when choosing how to copy and convert my DVDs. I tried some other DVD software and researched others and this seems to be the best! I am glad that I bought this software!

Trial Download:

1. Pavtube DVDAis for Windows (Requires Windows XP/2003/Vista/Windows 7/Windows 8/Windows 8.1)
2. Pavtube DVDAid for Mac (Requires Mac OS X El Capitan, 10.10 Yosemite, 10.9 Mavericks, 10.8 Mountain Lion, 10.7 Lion, Snow Leopard 10.6)

Hot Search: DVD to H.264 MP4 | DVD to MKV | DVD to QuickTime | DVD to PS4 | DVD to DROBO 5N

Method Three: Rip your CDs

For most everyone, this will not only be the most time-consuming part, but also the part that requires the toughest decision.

How much of an audiophile are you? If you demand the best, you’ll want to rip your music to a lossless format. We’d recommend Apple Lossless or FLAC. Apple Lossless is an option in iTunes (it’s in the drop-down in Import preferences), but FLAC isn’t. FLACs are CD-quality and the codec is free, and there are multiple free software programs that can rip FLACs for you. Songbird is a free, iTunes-like application that can rip straight to FLAC — you just need to install the CD Rip add-on to do it.

Of course, lossless files are much larger than even the highest quality MP3s. You’ll save massive amounts of disk space if you go the MP3 route. If you’re not an absolute stickler, consider ripping MP3s with the highest quality settings available.

And if you’ve gotten this far, you’re probably already familiar with the differences and you’ve found a setting in iTunes (or whatever you use) that you’re comfortable with.

Method Four: Back it up

There are two ways you could go with a fool-proof backup plan — a local data-saving system like a RAID array, or a cloud-based backup service. Ideally, you’d do both.Protected storage

When choosing a storage drive, aim for some sort of protection against drive failure or massive data loss. Most NASes and large-capacity storage devices come with software to manage a RAID array for you. Alternatively, get a pooled storage device like the Drobo, which protects you from drive failure and can be expanded as your collection grows.Cloud-based storage

There are a multitude of cloud-based backup services aimed at consumers, and you should pick one and keep it up to date. Think of it this way: what if your house burns down? What if kitty knocks over that 40-ouncer of High Life and it shorts out your NAS? You can restore all of your data from the cloud if you have to. It will take a few days to restore a large collection, but you won’t lose anything permanently.

Check out disaster recovery options from Backblaze, Mozy or Carbonite, all of which are around $50-60 a year.

To get more utility out of your cloud-based backup, consider something like Dropbox or Box.net. These services work more like a hard drive in the cloud, so you can access your files from any computer, upload files, share files and keep multiple computers in sync. They are more expensive, though — between $5 and $20 per month, depending on how much space you need.

Additional Tips: What to do with the old stuff?

  • Sell your CDs and DVDs on the used market. Be aware that once you no longer own the media, you no longer have a license to use the content on the media, and some places will ask you to delete the copy on your hard drive.
  • If you want to keep your media for backup, pull the discs and artwork out of the jewel cases, then organize them in a binder that you can store in a bookcase. Freecycle the plastic cases.
  • Don’t throw away the CD and DVD plates themselves! CD and DVDs are made of several layers. 90% of it is composed of polycarbonate, a petrol derivative which is very polluant. You can contact the CD Recycling Center of the Americas. If you are in Europe, there is CD recycling factory near London, and one in Switzerland.

Leave a Reply

What You May be Interested

Pavtube Video Converter Ultimate

All-in-one video toolbox – Fastest Convert, edit, organize, capture and enjoy any audio, HD/3D/4K videos and DVD/Blu-ray Movies anytime anywhere.

Pavtube ByteCopy

The Fastest Blu-ray DVD Ripper and Copier tool, backing up Blu-ray/DVD to multi-track MKV without quality loss, to multi-track MP4, MOV and ProRes.