I’ve not touched my CD collection in months, now that I’ve ripped them all to mp3. Is there any reason to hang onto them, or can I start offloading them?

As our fondness for music in MP3 format prompts declining CD sales, the redundancy of the CDs we already own is a question that’s rarely addressed. After slotting them into a computer and ripping them to a hard disk, the ease with which we can hook that computer or an MP3 player up to speakers – making a highly organised, searchable database of music – leaves trawling through a pile of discs a comparatively unattractive prospect.

There’s no shortage of suggestions as to what you could do with your CDs, beyond using them as shiny drinks coasters. “I took a lot of mine to charity shops,” writes John Burgoyne, “sold some on eBay, a few at car boot sales, and kept a few for emotional reasons.” But before you follow John’s example and start slinging them into the back of your car, it’s worth considering – at least for a moment – the advice of audiophiles who, in their crusade to preserve high-fidelilty at all costs, will remind you that your ripped MP3s are merely substandard audio copies, and that the CD you’re about to flog is the best quality version that you can get. Any MP3 conversion involves a certain amount of compromise; if you made perfect audio copies of your CDs, you could only fit around 50 hour-long albums into 30Gb of space (a typical amount of free space on a laptop, and the capacity of one of Apple’s iPod range.) However, rip them as MP3s at 128kbps, and you’ll get over 500 albums into the same space, albeit sacrificing some quality. Simon Lansom faced this precise dilemma. “I’ve got an old iPod full of 128kbps music which I ripped years ago,” he says. “I got rid of the CDs, and now I’m kicking myself, as disk capacity is way bigger and I could had everything at much higher quality.”

It’s heavily debated as to whether anyone can tell the difference between compressed audio formats and the real thing; recent tests showed that it’s virtually impossible for normal people to discern between a CD and a 320kbps MP3. Purists, however, bristle at the idea of losing precious audio data, and they prefer formats such as FLAC, which are known as “lossless” and perfectly preserve the originals. FLAC still only squeezes around 75 albums into 30Gb of space, but it does allow you to quietly dispose of your CDs without worrying about check-ups from the hi-fi police. Then, of course, there’s the question of scanning in all the artwork – but maybe that issue is best left for another day.