Hey, Happy birthday Sid. It seems like just the other day you turned 21. Yer racing toward the big 30! It will be here before you know it.
I ordered three CDs from Amazon. They were delivered on Friday afternoon after 4:30 and they were left outside the front door here at work. It rained all day Sunday. The package was as wet as possible and sitting in a puddle of water. Fortunately each CD was wrapped individually in the same old almost impossible to get into plastic. They were all fine.
I still prefer to have the full CD, and then RIP it at the higher bit rate into MP3s. I listen to them in my car and neither car is exactly a sound vault. They both have lots of noise but is is "close enough for Rock & Roll" as they say.
Back in the late 1990s I ripped all my CDs to MP3s and started making compilation CDs. With 650 MB of space you can get quite a few "albums" on one CD. Then DVD's came out, and then Dual layer DVDs. Now all of that is old hat and I can fit my entire collection of CDs (about 130 disks) onto one 16 GB thumb drive, and easily carry the entire collection around on my iPhone as well.
I went back and re-ripped all of them a few years ago. Insert geezer voice: Back when I started ripping the MPS the "tags" had to be typed in one song at a time and there was no album artwork. Now many different programs will download the information and put in more info than I even knew about some songs. The ironic this is I listen to Pandora a lot so I can here stuff that I don't own.
For my road trips I like to just play my music and not suck up phone data. This year Mrs. Carrera will ride with me all the way. She wants to listen to some of her music! Imagine that.