The article certainly resonated with me, but less for the tactile nostalgic fondness of vinyl or CDs than for the joys of collecting. It is absolutely true that I defined myself partly by the albums that I chose to collect. I agonized over whether to get a new album by a lesser known but alluring new artist, or to get one step closer to completing the discography of an old favourite. I grew my collection as quickly as I could, but it was a slow, incremental process steeped in anticipation. So I played the music that I had relentlessly, and I knew my first 50 albums intimately. And as the collection grew, I spent countless hours sorting, cataloguing and dreaming about albums still to be added.

Wanting to stretch my music investments as far as I possibly could, I bought a lot of cassette tapes and taped a lot of my friend's vinyl. I used every inch of space on those tapes, packing loose songs in whenever there was room left after side 2. And I became quite expert at tape maintenance - after the number of cassettes in my collection grew to the hundreds, I was constantly having to take them apart to deal with various mechanical failures. I do have to say that despite the fond memories of those early days of music obsession, I don't miss the flakiness of cassettes, the scratching and skipping of vinyl or the hiss of taped music.

These days it is perfectly true that my collection is too large to enjoy in the same way. Unlike my kids, I don't simply download anything and everything that I want (they have never learned about the appeal of delayed gratification, at least where music is concerned), but through emusic, Paste and MetaBeats recommendations, I've added a lot of music that I don't know very well and I probably never will know very well. It takes a lot of effort to manually browse through and build a playlist or load my ipod. And if I just shuffle, I enjoy the surprise of stumbling across old favourites or realizing that I've discovered a new favourite, but I seem to hear some things all too often and other things never make it to the speakers. And the overall mix doesn't really feel like my music anymore - too much of it is unfamiliar. I can see that the rdio service (which I have yet to try) would further dilute the concept of a collection.

As to your questions, I don't buy physical discs anymore. On my wife's last birthday, I gave her a couple of albums, but I downloaded them from iTunes, so I had nothing to wrap. I ended up printing off pictures of the album art and inserting them into some old CD jewel cases so that I had something to wrap. I was never really one to spend a lot of time browsing in record stores, so I don't feel a sense of loss around that aspect of the transition.