I burned an audio CD just a few weeks ago. My car doesn’t have Bluetooth audio, so I’ve kept going old school all along. I bought a few stacks of empty CD-R’s and DVD-R’s when the stores wanted to get rid of them.
I have zero streaming subscriptions and no intention of getting any. The number of films, games and music albums I’ve bought from flea markets and second hand stores during the past 10 years has to be in the hundreds. And not one has cost more than 3$.
Even my kids haven’t complained about the lack of streaming, they seem perfectly happy using my physical media library.
Yep, don’t give in to ease of streaming, that’s how they win, and take it all from you. Everyone needs to own what they pay for.
Yep. My brother has at least 4 streaming subscriptions that add up to closer to 100$ per month. I once asked him how much he actually uses them and his response was: “I don’t know, many times a week! But it’s nice to have them if I want to watch something!”
To me the idea of basically throwing away more than 1000$ per year is simply horrifying.
And not even owning it…and they’ll keep upping the price little by little, slowly sucking us dry
Whoa, you sound exactly like an improved version of me!
Where do you get .wav files these days??
I get them by ripping CD:s or digitizing vinyl albums.
EDIT: Typo.
I just burned one today, it was the easiest way to transfer a game to a Windows 95 notebook. 🫠
Friggin Keener
Why didn’t you just zip drive it?
I loved my zip drive so much.
Don’t have a ZIP drive, only a 1.44meg floppy drive.
isn’t commander keen a floppy disk game already?
“Foray in the Forest” is a community mod and it’s bigger than 1.44MB. I could’ve split that up into multiple floppies, but I don’t have a modern PC with a floppy drive, so the easiest way was to burn a CD.
oh i didn’t realize it was a mod
Wait is that in the background supposed to be the tardis?
I thought that I burned my last cd a long time ago until my uni required me to hand in my thesis on a cd.
Buying a 4-pack of CDs (with cases) was more expensive than buying a 128gb sd card.
Jokes on you, I still burn my acquired digital media to BluRay discs
Disk rot is like 25 years while an SSD still doesn’t have that kind of shelf life
Who are these mad men who are dumping stuff to SSDs and then sitting them on a shelf? Can’t get my mind around it.
You’d be surprised. And then they tell me disk rot makes BD not recommended… meanwhile this happens after several decades and is exceedingly rare
Doesn’t it make more sense use harddisks?
I mean, the ultimate long terms storage medium seems to be tape, but that stuff is very expensive, but outside that harddisks seem to have the best balance of accessibility and shelf life.
Right post there chief
I’ve still got some CDs and a burner. I’m gonna go burn one just to spite this.
Unless I die tomorrow, you’re wrong.
We should go back to doing it, physical media is where it’s at.
Physical media yes, CDs or DVDs no. Most discs I burned are probably unreadable by now. I remember my favorite artist explaining how he probably had to stop making music because it just wasn’t financially viable. So I decided to buy all his albums (I had all the albums in mp3 format for years). Its about 10 years later, all the CDs are lost or destroyed (most in my car). I still have a NAS with the original mp3s I downloaded 20 years ago.
Yeah, I burned 100s of music cds as well about 20 years ago, and stored them in those books with slots. They weren’t stored in a car, but still about a quart of them doesn’t play anymore, and I am sure it won’t be long before none of them will. All my store bought cds of the same age or older still works fine though.
Homeburning is not a good physical media alternative.
Homeburning can be surprisingly robust as a backup method, and as an option of physical media, but I’d still keep backups on an actual NAS as well. There’s also a ton of variables that affect the lifetime of a burnt CD, like dyes used (cyanine - phthalocyanine - azo), lamination quality, storage and the burner used. Especially the quality and intensity of the build has a surprisingly strong effect, despite things being set in a standard – you can get a lot more storage life out of a CD burned using a quality 5.25" burner compared to a budget slim drive.
Also early discs based on cyanine had a notoriously short shelf life compared to the later archival quality discs, around 30 years or so in optimal conditions (and typically a lot less), so much of the stuff burnt in 90’s and 00’s has already began deteriorating. More recent quality discs can last over a century if stored properly, but the older ones can’t.
DVDs can also often have issues with delamination, meaning that especially the outer rim of the disc can start exhibiting bit rot quite early if you’re using low quality media. I’ve noticed even new discs having signs of early delamination between the two disc halves (DVDs have the data layer in between two acrylic discs, unlike CDs which have it on the backside directly under the reflective coating). I’ve also experienced a lot of issues when burning multilayer DVDs that might affect how long they last in storage, so for actual backups I’d prefer using a single layer disc instead.
But as per reasons for still using discs – they’re an unparalleled cold storage solution. With proper care you can actually leave them be for decades and be sure the data is still readable, unlike with SSDs which will lose their data when unpowered for a long period of time. Tape is a good option, but not really viable for consumers – also tape needs more active upkeep, since you typically have to copy over the old data to new media every 20-30 years or so (promised life in archival is 30 years, after which it might not be possible to get new drives for reading the tapes). Optical is also king when you need to transfer data into air-gapped environments, since with optical media it’s relatively easy to audit that what’s burned to the disc is unalterable. There’s a reason why I still keep a full install set of Debian handy.
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minidiscs are a good sweet spot if youre looking for something physical. theyre not too big so you can fit a few discs in your pockets. the player itself can easily fit in your pants pocket as well. any minidisc player that has
webMDnetMD support will let you add or remove tracks using a web browser. theres the LP mode that lets you fit more music on a discI would legitimately switch back to one of my old MD players in an heartbeat if I had access to a decent software to load music on. Those little wired remotes with LCD screens were when technology peaked, IMO.
Any recommendations for an alternative to SonicStage (or whatever Sony’s proprietary crapola from back in the day was called)?
yea! those remotes were definitely handy back in the day when you would be out and about with it, but i mostly just use it at home these days so i dont have the remote attached.
webmd.pro is what i use. it runs in any chrome browser. its a bit on the slow side but i cant remember at this point whether it was always slow to burn to these disks.
but as long as the minidisc player has “netMD” on the front it should work with that. the only other thing you have to do if youre on windows is install this driver
theres also ElectronWMD which is basically just webmd.pro packaged into a desktop app. that may or may not have the driver included, i havnt tried it yet
I haven’t been able to find something quite like it available already - so I do wonder if there would be enough demand to kickstart a Bluetooth/wireless DAC/receiver remote to bring back that tactical functionality…
But anyway - thanks for the heads up! I’ll check it out in the morning and see if I can connect my N910 and NH1.
Come to think of it, I hope I can find the correct cables, and that they still work… wish me luck!
this guy is using a transmitter with his minidisc, im sure any transmitter you could find would work
seems like kind of a chore having to charge 3 separate things though. if someone would just do a kickstarter for a new minidisc player that had bluetooth built in and usb-c to power it i would buy one in an instant!
the minidisc i have now uses mini usb to transfer data and then has a weird 3v charging port, and the cable for that doesnt work anymore so im just stuck with using AA batteries to power it now. its a bit of a mess. these days it would be just a single usb-c port that would handle all that
good luck with your minidisk journey anyway if you head down that road haha
See - that’s the problem with me writing comments at midnight right before bed, I don’t communicate as clearly as I think! 😅
What I was wishing for, was a product that looked like an MD remote (similar to the RM-MC35ELK ideally), which could wirelessly connect to a smartphone, allowing for tactile media control, and the use of higher impedance wired headphones/in-ear monitors.
Because currently having to use wireless earbuds means I have to randomly squeeze the earpiece stems an arbitrary amount of times to change tracks, and good flipping luck trying to change the volume or switch albums otherwise without having to remove your phone from my pocket.
ah ok! i have a fiio btr3 bluetooth receiver that is something along those lines. it doesnt show any track info but its got buttons at least and you can plug in whatever headphones you want. there could be others around that are more like the MD remotes but i havnt done much research
if youre on android theres also “key mapper” by sds100 that will let you change to the next/prev track by long pressing the volume keys so you dont need to take it out of your pocket!
CDs are geat, still burn them all the time. I have a Jellyfin server that hosts my digital music collection, but sometimes I may be going on a long drive without internet and CDs are unmatched for that. No battery, no internet requirement, and hold hundreds of hours of music in a a small book in my backseat.
We’re the same, you and I!
I have an old android phone running lineage and I host a hotspot if I want it to have data, it’s amazing how well Android Auto works without Internet access compared to having data though.
Remember me Nero Express, good memories, awesome name for a CD burner.
My brother recently found 15 year old CDs with family photos and they still work.
It’s funny how video game media often degrades quickly due to use, but well-packaged and lightly used discs can last for many years. Maybe still a great solution for data that doesn’t need to be accessed constantly.
Except disc rot is a thing.
It’s why I’ve gone through all of my old media and transferred them to my media PC. But I have to admit it’s more satisfying when it’s in the form of physical media, when it’s all computer files I hardly ever look at them.
That’s me. ADD and 678 folders of digital media is not fun. I need physical. Plus, it’s actually real then.
As a kid I always thought that Nero is a stupid name for a program because in Finnish nero means genius. To be honest I still think that it’s a stupid name.
I do the opposite now. I buy discs cheap from bin stores, rip them onto my desktop and then upload to my home library for more affordable ‘streaming’.
Burning cds of my punk band to sell
Encountering the first bunch of “I don’t own a cd player” people.
Cracking the music biz during the collapse of it was a bad idea.
All a part of corpos plan to make it so you can never own anything ever again. Subscriptions only. Drink a verification can to skip song.
I have a CD player in my 2004 car and I burn CDs regularly.
I have a 2005 car, but I don’t burn CDs. I plug my phone into a cassette adapter.
I remember the day I burned my last CD. The fire department paid me a visit.
Haha thanks dad
I laugh when people think cds are old. They’re still the best form of digital physical media. Now I prefer analog media of course, but convenience and portability of digital is nice.
Compact Disc Digital Audio is difficult to improve upon in terms of quality. For day to day listening I’ll either use mp3 or FLAC but especially as the streaming services enshittify I’ll take my media on CD, thanks.
Both of my cars have CD players, I probably ought to burn some discs to listen to. I often drive in silence these days.
It depends, I believe actual tape keeps data usable way longer than CDs.
I mean, most likely any pirated ZX Spectrum software on old audio cassettes will work.
That’s so cool. I do a lot with audio tape (mostly 1/4" 7.5ips and 15ips), but never data tape.
Bullshit. Just two weeks ago I burned an audio CD as a gift for someone who enjoys listening in their car or on their player in the bathroom. Not everything needs to be always online streaming or has the ability to read SD cards or USB sticks.
Burning a FLAC and hearing on a HiFi system with nice cable headphones sounds so much better than a garbled compressed audio stream that gets recompressed to be send over Bluetooth.
