I’ve still got some CDs and a burner. I’m gonna go burn one just to spite this.
I still burn CDs. This whole streaming thing won’t last. Also, my back hurts…
The real meta is to have a hard drive full of flac files and use tailscale to stream them wherever you are from your computer at home
I need to learn how to do this.
I plan to do so myself. Basically find a Linux package that streams audio on your LAN and get tailscale
Start with Plex and learn from there.
Jellyfin
That’s step two.
That’s the dream. Currently debating what to do with a spare laptop and “make it a server” sounds ideal.
I suggest Navidrome
The main thing you need to worry about in that case is the battery. It’s useful to have a built in UPS, but definitely keep an eye on it, especially after keeping it plugged in for long periods of time.
Yeah well… Can you set the time on a VCR?
Plexamp is also good for this
i burned a cd 2 weeks ago.
Ok, boomer
unneccessarily rude!
They might be just genX.
millennial. turned 40 this year.
I’m a millennial and I burned a CD last month
Okay Xoomer
That’s just zoomer again
It’s pronounced Ex-oomer
Exhume her? I barely knew her!
Ok dad
Ok zygote
holy cow, how are you still not in bed, kid! Off you go!
everyone forgets about gen x
…who?
No we fuckin don’t, you lot wont let us forget you.
I don’t think burning CDs was much of a boomer activity.
The phrase just means, “alright old person” now.
And I declare that calling someone a cunt now means that you like and respect that person. Please go ahead and use it on your boss next time you see them.
CD players were first sold in 1982, when Boomers (if the baby boom started 1945) were hitting their 40s and established in every industry. I think they were actually the perfect demographic to be able to afford a CD player when it first came out.
First affordable CD burner was from 1995. 50 year olds tend to not adopt new technology, it’s a millennial thing.
https://www.computerhistory.org/storageengine/consumer-cd-r-drive-priced-below-1000/
As someone who worked sales in that time period, yes, it was the younger crowd (Gen X) that adapted much better to burning CDs. A lot of the baby boomers had difficulty with understanding certain key concepts and details. … And instructions to be honest…
As for the “Boomer” commenter above: the military and government in the USA still burns to CD for a variety of reasons (no, I won’t go into them). So if someone is military, a government employee, or even just a contractor, there is a chance that at some point they will need to burn a CD, regardless of age.
Shut up. They’re supposed to forget about us.
In Germany MRI and CT images are regularly handed to patients on CDs.
Germany is also technologically 30 years behind the rest of the world…
Same in the US.
Really? Cause in my time in the army I never once saw any kind of military information being saved to cd. Not once. Never. Even in the early 2000s that was just never a thing. Ever.
Sounds like you might not have been part of a team that needed to do so. In the environments I had been part of, they had requirements for it.
Navy.
I requested my medical records from my time in the military in 2014 and received them on CD. Which was funny because I didn’t have a computer that could read them at the time, and I still haven’t read them. Turns out the information i needed was already available to the people giving my c&p exam
It’s a gen-x thing, you know, the forgotten generation.
Lived through the “DOUBLE SPEED!!!” reader up to the 52 some read-write-rewrite.
52x baby. Much speed. Such fast.
I had several generations, and it was always a huge speed increase. 52x was like lightning
I’m in my 40s now and I definitely did not burn near as many CDs as my dad did (he was born in '49)
Yet again, GenX is overlooked.
Yeah but burning CDs yourself wasn’t a thing until much later.
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No boomers are the ones reading the CDs not writing them. Their kids are writting them.
… and you didn’t know it was the last time
Every time is the last one, at least for a while
naw, we have a cd juke box at my work. pretty sure ill be burning them for the foreseeable future.
Still in denial, I see /hj
/hj? Did you just give him a handjob?
the floaties got in the way
No, it means “half joking” /s
he did tho
Wait, so they’re only half joking about the handjob?
Did I get here too late?
Cd…or DVD?
cd, thats why i said cd.
Burning one today just because of this post.
lightscribe for old time’s sake?
— still use one of these from 2011.Me too! I recently put Linux on it and it runs like a brand new computer.
I run Linux on my daily driver, but I’m addicted to the click wheel iPod and I use this machine because of iTunes.
I have two absolutely gorgeous Nanos with zero battery bulge and not a single device that can run iTunes. I even have the 30 pin cable. Once upon a time I would’ve used the family PC but that thing has more viruses than the hospital thanks to my little sister.
I like using my own library of MP3s and knowing that for at least a small amount of time, I’m not being tracked in terms of what I’m listening. My clickwheel has a solid state terabyte so I just threw everything onto it.
If you long to use those nano-s, there are some cheap old Mac’s showing up on eBay or Craig’s list sometimes.
I wish I still had my click wheel iPod…
You can pick up refurbs with 1T solid state drives.
There where points in time where I had a lightscribe disk, and points in time where I had a lightscribe drive. But never both at the same time. I feel like this says something, but I dunno what.
I went out of my way to buy a LightScribe drive for my 2008 build [C2D E8400, 4GB DDR2 800, AMD HD 4870, Vista Ultimate + Linspire], and I never even used the feature. Burned less than a dozen discs total as well.
I feel like optical media died around that same time. Netflix introduced its streaming service, torrents entered the mainstream, Blu Ray flopped, and MP3 players replaced CD players (and then streaming replaced MP3 players shortly after). Didn’t even bother with an optical drive in my 2014 build [i5-4670K, 16GB DDR3 1866, GTX 780, Win8.1 + Ubuntu]. Current build doesn’t have one, either [7700X, 32GB DDR5 6000, 4090, Win11 + Arch]. Just been hanging onto the same drive since 2008, for the rare occasion that I actually need to burn a disc. At this point it’s been over 5 years.
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.
We should go back to doing it, physical media is where it’s at.
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!
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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Oh I knew. It was the last CD in the spindle and I had no plans of buying any more.
I still have a big stack of blank CDs and DVDs. I burned a DVD late last year. I don’t think I’ve hit my last time yet. But maybe.
No way crazyyyy this generalization didn’t apply to SOMEONE on the internet. no wayyyyyy
You know 4chan is back online, right?
LMAO that just sent me
Yeah you should head back.
Naw, not yet. I still burn a few a year. Amazing how entertaining it can be in a older car.
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.
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’m gonna burn a bunch of music to cd this week just because I can. Might even archive some movies.
I just burned one today, it was the easiest way to transfer a game to a Windows 95 notebook. 🫠
Wait is that in the background supposed to be the tardis?
Friggin Keener
Why didn’t you just zip drive it?
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
I loved my zip drive so much.
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
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.
