1. I never throw anything away. Not literally true but close enough.

2. Legal proof that I already own the real CD and so having the mp3s is OK. Of course, by now, the number of MP3 albums I have without corresponding CDs far exceeds the number of actual CDs I own which makes the whole saving thing kinda moot.

3. Sometimes I like to look at the album cover art. Some of those CDs have really cool album cover art.

4. Someday I might re-rip those CD’s. I ripped most of them at 192kbps which is fine for me. But maybe someday I want a 320kbps version of the CD or, in an effort to jam as many mp3s on a single CD (for my car) I want a 128 or even 64kbps version of the CDs. With all the air-noise in my car, I don’t really need a hi-fidelity version of the music and if I could jam more than 20 albums on a CD, that would be awesome.

Another reason to re-rip is a few of the CDs were not ripped properly. By that I mean I can hear noise in the background which does not appear when I play the CD on a different PC or CD player. My theory is the noise is from the CD drive I used to rip the CD. That might be a totally bogus theory but it’s the only explanation I have for the noise on the rip but not when I play the CDS on a different CD drive.

5. I have a boom box in my bedroom that does not play mp3s: just CDs. I’m not going to replace that boom box any time soon. So there.

Like you, we almost never listen to CDs any more, but I’m still a strong advocate of purchasing music on actual, physical discs. You retain the control over the resulting files that way and you’ve always got a recovery path if your PC dies and your backups are less than optimal.

I’ll admit that I have downloaded pirated versions of some old music that I couldn’t pull off of old LPs, cassettes, or damaged CDs. (In more than one case, I had already purchased the music on ancient 8-track format, but of course no longer had a way to play it, so I still felt justified in downloading those mp3s.)

Along the way during the ripping, I took the time to embed the album art into each song with Mp3tag. Sure, it pads up the resulting mp3 file tiny bit, but there’s a worthwhile payoff when using those on my iPod Nano & iPhone. I also used MixMeister BPM Analyzer to update the appropriate ID3 tag field with the beats per minute, which can be handy when assembling a workout mix.

By the way, I have the original discs stored in a few Case Logic binders and donated the jewel cases (via Craigslist) to an eager and grateful recipient. That really reduced the clutter!