Should I collect Big Finish physically again?

Collectables
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I am a big physical media advocate. Television, movies, games, books; if the option is there to own it rather than stream it, then I go for the former. I’m proud of having stacks of things on a shelf if it means I own them and have no risk of losing them. If the internet ever goes out, or my phone gets lost, or my laptop explodes; I can experience the media I bought. My DVD’s, my Blu-Rays, my books, heck I still own several music CDs from when I was younger.

Big Finish is the major exception. While I kept hold of the fancy limited edition stuff, everything else is strictly digital only. I used to collect Big Finish both physically and digitally up until 2022. And not to brag, but it was rather large. Before deciding to commit to a digital only collection and selling the physical CDs and boxsets. And I was OK with it. I rarely re-listened to any CDs and ergo rarely used my CD player. They mostly took up shelf space that could be used for other mediums. And paying for a physical CD and waiting for it to arrive in the post, or paying cheaper for immediate download and access, I shouldn’t need to tell you, is more expensive and less convenient.

But ever since the Big Finish app/website wobble of July 2024, I’ve been thinking.

If the website were to ever go down again. If the app stopped working. If my internet ever went out. If Big Finish randomly and suddenly went out of business tomorrow; I’d lose access to everything.

Why am I such a big physical media advocate, when I blatantly make an exception for one media form that shouldn’t be any different? So, for the past few days, I’ve been grappling a question.

Should I start again?

Now I should clarify; it wouldn’t be a full collection, nor would it be exactly the same as the original collection I used to have. Nor would I want it to be. There are numerous releases from Big Finish that are either A) Out of print, B) Not very good, C) Out of print and not very good. The benefit of buying Big Finish digitally is now knowing which stories I would flat out not want on a shelf. I wouldn’t lose sleep if The Sandman wasn’t on the shelf, for example. Rather, a new physical collection would be far smaller and more of a “personal favourites” or “best of” Big Finish collection. Mainly boxsets with a couple of individual CDs.

The major drawback being 1) the loss of shelf space and 2) the cost. I’m sure I needn’t remind any of you that Big Finish is a tad expensive. And physical Big Finish is a tad more expensive.

I’m curious what other people think though. With Big Finish’s recent (numerous) sales and recommitment to the old website, I feel pulled in both directions. Should I be content with a digital collection, or bite the bullet and buy select releases on CD again?

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I’d say the big thing is to make sure you have downloaded copies of all the Big Finish audios you buy, and it’d be a good idea to have them backed up somewhere.

Of course, this holds true for anything digital you buy, and I’m not saying I’m always that good about that myself…

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I would love to collect CDs but unfortunately I find myself moving so often that a big collection would be totally impractical and now I live in the US, the shipping is extortionate. But I do see the appeal of it. It’s a shame you’ve sold some of your old ones, it’s probably going to be hard to find some of the older releases physically if you choose to go back down that route.

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I’m pretty sure you can contact BF and ask for a discount on CDs of audios you already own digitally. It won’t cut the cost completely but it will lower it.

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Well, if you just don’t want to lose your access to stories when there’s a problem with streaming services, back them up into a hard drive. That’s what I do with all the audios and songs I bought digitally. A small collection of CD for your favourites of favourites would be a nice addition to that.

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I really don’t enjoy clutter, so I’ve never been a collector of physical things.

I used to have a bookshelf containing the entire works of Terry Pratchett, which I started collecting at a young age, but then when I moved house I sold them all rather than move them.

From then on, I went digital-only for all my books (barring any that I can’t get digitally), and I’ve always been digital-only for audios.

I bought Once and Future on CD, thinking it might be something special as it’s an anniversary thing. Kinda regret that.

As other people have said, as long as you download the files and save them on an external hard drive, or a cloud service (I have everything on my iCloud Drive) then you’re not that likely to lose them.

Remember, a house fire or other disaster could destroy physical CDs. They may feel safe but owning the files in the cloud and on a hard drive is actually more backups than just discs, and so is more secure.

But if you enjoy having the CDs to look at, and you can afford to get them again, go for it!

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I use a Seedbox server that has Audiobookshelf on it. This makes it both a backup and a way to play everything in a great way.

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That’s a good idea. But I have an app that works with iCloud Drive and does the same thing, no extra cost because I already pay for iCloud for my whole family (we have 2TB!).

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What app is that? I was on android when I set this up. I might have gone with a different solution if I was doing it now.

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It’s called Bound.

It’s not perfect because it doesn’t stream from iCloud but you download new copies (although I prefer that as it means it works on airplanes etc) and the app hasn’t been updated in a little while so there are sometimes a few bugs where I have to quit it and relaunch if it stops working. Hoping they get fixed soon.

But it’s still way better than either Big Finish app :sweat_smile:

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Sounds like a perfectly fine solution. ABS biggest problem is that the iOS app is in beta and you have to be a bit lucky to get into the test flight but when you do it is awesome. You can stream and download and it works great. I mostly stream. You can use it in the browser on your phone but that is not as good.

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I’ve been considering building a NAS for a long time. You get all things in hard drives and can access that through internet using a NAS.

I like all my audios and books downloaded but walking around with a hard drive so I can listen to any bf on the go is ridiculous. Now I walk around with a 512G micro SD card in my little MP3, and accessing all those layers of files via a 1.54 inch screen is… difficult. And it can’t read M4B files or have bookmarks.

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I bought a ReadyNAS a long time ago, and not that long ago, replaced it with a Synology DS223 NAS about a month ago. I’ve got two hard drives in it set up in a RAID so if one of them dies, I can swap it out and not lose my data.

I basically use it because it lets me access any of my data on any computer in my apartment, and I’ve got several. There are a lot of apps you can install on it, and I’m not nearly done exploring what I can do with the new one. (The old one, I bought from a company that no longer exists, was made by a company that no longer makes NAS’s, and can’t install new apps any more, IIRC…)

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