For those who use CDs for music, which writable CD type do you use, and why?
Main differences:
- CD-R can only be written once
- CD-RW is more expensive
Did I hit my head and wake up in 2002?
im sorry i just like cds 🥺
I’m sincerely curious: why?
Hipsters claim vinyl sounds better than digital, despite a complete lack of evidence, but at least there’s a measurable difference between analog and digital, if only in the additional dirty noise produced by the hardware. With CDs, though… digital is digital. There’s literally no difference between a wav and a CD; in fact, you can get more bits in a flac recording if it’s recorded right, which would only be degraded by recording to a CD.
So, is it the form factor? Some tactile benefit? Or you like the mandatory ritual of switching out CDs every 60 minutes? Why do you like CDs… because it isn’t for the sound.
driving. my car has a sort-old cd player, no smart-stuff. i dont like to connect my phone everytime i get in the car. cds are just convenient for my case :-)
I drive a 20 year old Toyota, and swapped out the double din for a carplay compatible unit for $299, plus the cost of a custom wiring harness. You get the best of technology, without the worst of car manufacturers poaching your data. I still have my book of CDs that I compiled over 25 years or so, but without the headache of having to load disks while I’m driving. The phone connects automatically when I turn the car on. I’ve only had to connect to it once, when I first installed the new head unit.
FWIW, the factory stereo I replaced had a cassette / 6 disk cd deck in it. I just don’t like swapping disks when I’m driving 75 mph on the freeway.
if i am driving for long enough, i will just pull over to change discs when im sick of the album repeating.
That reminds me of a work van I used to drive where the cd player would overheat and stop after a while so I had to stop at an electronics store to get one of those Bluetooth to radio cigarette lighter things
Good reason.
I think they’re a great format to buy, but nowadays not that great to use. They offer the best audio quality of all physical media (fight me, vinyl enthusiasts), are really easy to handle (on par with cassettes), offers track selection (later cassette decks could detect silence but this doesn’t work for gapless tracks), the equipment is rather cheap nowadays, it’s a digital format without DRM… red book CD might be the best consumer media industry has ever created, my only gripe in the modern world is that its sampling rate is a bit off today’s 48kHz.
However, I only rip the CDs to lossless and then rarely take them out of my cupboard anymore, don’t even have a CD player. Using CDs in a mobile setting is a whole different beast, it requires a buffer and can also damage the discs in the worst case. But at home, pressed CDs live very long without any degradation in sounds quality, regardless of use. And ironically, buying them is often cheaper than buying non-physical only, though it often means that you end up with tracks you don’t want. But that’s an issue all physical media has.
Shh just go with it, we deserve this.
How old is this post?
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I hate being GenZ I don’t even know yet there’s more than one type of CD
Don’t hate it! You were just born in a different time. Your time will come where you have to explain to the young ones about how “smart phones” worked since they’ll just have their implants as interfaces. And also jetpacks.
Jet pack is simple. You just strap it on and fly away
“Yeah, you always had to pick it out of your pocket first and you actually had to put it down to wipe. I don’t know how we coped either.”
I’m a mid-to-older millennial. My elders would say shit like “What? You don’t know how to use a gramophone? You young whippersnappers are completely worthless.” And I find that behavior absolutely abhorrent.
If you were here in person, I’d offer to spend some time burning some CDs. I’ve still got a computer with some pretty decent optical drives laying around. I can probably even scare up some blank discs. We’d find some music, burn it to a disc and then try it out on my old boom box.
As long as you gave them the full experience with tossing a disc in the trash because of a buffer overrun. Damn Nero software!
And weird bugs like Windows audio somehow creeping into audio CD burns. Or the times in Linux where the tray would refuse to open or close. I used to keep a paper clip next to my next to force it open sometimes…
I don’t miss that hardware.
I had pretty good luck burning discs, they would occasionally fail.
I had a CD-RW I used for my mp3 player, and the software I used (Roxio) had this mode where you could treat the disc like any other mass storage device, you could add a single file.
For our young friend SagXD, burning a CD usually had to be done as a whole. You’d arrange all the files (if a data disc) or audio tracks (if an audio disc) in a buffer, and then burn the entire disc in one shot. If done at “1x” speed, it could take an hour, but “8x” speeds were pretty common, if more error prone. With my rewritable CD, I could add a single file if I wanted to and not have to rewrite the entire disc. Adding a single song to the iPod I got in college wasn’t much less rigamarole.
I suspect they were trying to rib you, and you were too young to grok that yet.
If you’re an asshole to a kid ironically, and the kid thinks you’re an asshole, you’re just an asshole. An entire generation wasn’t taught that, and look at the world they built.
Baby boomers got burned more than Nero ever did!
Same, there’s like 3 or 4 💀
CD: the kind you buy from a store with content already on it. Mass-produced with methods and equipment not available in the consumer electronics market, because it was never really necessary. Also includes CD-ROM (Read Only Memory) for data/files read by a computer instead of music alone
CD-R (Recordable): can be written (“burned”) once and only once. As mentioned in another comment, it may deteriorate over time because of how the disc gets written, but by the time that happens you’ll probably forget you had that disc
CD-RW (ReWriteable): Can be written like a CD-R, but you can also erase it and write on it again. More expensive, and I believe some readers had trouble with it, but in a world where data storage was expensive and small this was still a useful thing to have
DVDs had a similar thing, except there were variants where the - was a +, eg DVD+R and DVD+RW. I can’t remember the difference there, but it was pretty trivial. There was also a relatively obscure DVD-RAM that had random access memory. That was pretty cool as well, kind of an alternative to DVR that wasn’t a VHS tape. No need to lose everything you had if you wanted to add more to it
Sure, let’s downvote him for being honest, well done redd… Lemmy.
Whats up with the 2000s tech being so hot on Lemmy right now?
just curious why anyone would bother using a CD—its a digital medium so playing a CD vs just playing a .wav file off your computer or phone is literally the exact same audio quality (unless the cd is damaged and you get skipping which is not optimal…). You can connect speakers to a computer. it is literally the exact same thing. I understand people liking ANALOG media (vinyl or [for some unknown reason] tape cassette) but what is the point of using an out dated, flimsy and easily destructible DIGITAL storage?
car stereo, without connecting a phone
Yea, but why?
Resist the tentacles of the authoritarian surveillance state creeping into one’s life
CD-R, rewriting has a higher chance to corrupt. And if you like your music you won’t need to overwrite it
But what about when the cultural editors publish patches to existing music?
I had to do a double take to see how old is this post.
Burning CDs back in the day was a sort of art. You had to choose a write speed slow enough that your single-CPU computer could keep the buffer fed, but fast enough that you could get through the whole thing without dying of boredom or needing to use the bathroom, because walking across the room was enough to make the head skip and corrupt the data.
A failed burn with a CD-R turned a disc into a coaster. A CD-RW gave you several chances to get a good burn.
I had one of the first CD writers with buffer underrun protection (TDK 32x / 12x / 10x if I recall) and suddenly felt invincible because it was pretty near guaranteed that the burn would work.
Kinda like we all take antilock brakes for granted now. Back in the day just slamming on the brakes in a bad situation would mean losing control of the car.
yooo i remember those TDK drives—they were highly coveted. my first CD burner was a 2x external USB drive. it would frequently take about 45 mins to burn a disc
checks calendar
In the of mobile streaming, mobile storage or cars having usb / etc why would you still be using cds at this point? If you are doing this for a home stereo, use high quality stored audio on a pc and stream from there locally.
my car only has: cd player, radio, and aux cord. i can also get the cigarette lighter bluetooth thing, but i dont like connecting my phone to the car just to play music.
Aux cord is your best friend. Get a 3.5mm adapter and use that + everything I mentioned. Best way to go
If I could get an iphone to work with an aux cable I’d die happy
You can, there’s tons of options for splitters or direct lightning to 3.5 mm
Ex - (Apple MFi Certified) iPhone AUX Cord for iPhone,Lightning to 1/8 Inch Audio Cable,3.3ft, Headphone Jack Adapter Male Aux Stereo Audio Cable Compatible for iPhone 14/13/12/11/XR/X/8/7 (White) https://a.co/d/8CK0yPl
You can buy a new head unit for pretty cheap these days.
I haven’t used a cd in 15 years lol
I like CD-R, not for regular use but it occured to me that it’s one of the only consumer accessable media formats that are actually write once. It’s kind of neat to make a custom disk that is forever unchanged, pop it on years later and go through what was your sound X years back without having to worry about whatever service having pulled licences or modified lists.
Polaroid is another one
miniDisc FTW
Worked in radio for a number of years, and we used mini disks to record phone calls for a while. Still have a number of them knocking around a storage box somewhere.
Okay, so I somehow missed the whole minidisc era. I imagine probably because it was shortlived, or just impractical for me at the time. However I find them incredibly fascinating, especially portable minidisc players. I’ve low key been on the lookout for one while thrifting, so I have an excuse to dive in.
they were super-cool, and, yeah, it was very short-lived. i had a net-MD player, a small, portable MD player that ran on a single AA battery and lasted ages. it could also record on-device and also played mp3s. i loved that fucking thing!
MDs were better than CD-RWs because they were 1/2 the size and came in a case while being almost skip-proof.
If you still have any minidiscs around, glue a couple magnets on the back and they make a great retro fridge magnet.
For sure.
My mini disc cost as much as the first iPod when it came out. It was either 3 or 5 of the discs equaled it’s storage and I think it even took rechargeable AA batteries. Or at least had an attachment that would work with them.
And it has the remote in the cord that gave song title and playlist info.
It was better in everyway. But the promise of “new” and the marketing made everyone go iPod. I never met a single other person at the time that had a mini disc.
But being able to just swap a disc with someone at school and then upload it back to your computer at home would have been huge at the time.
Literal peer to peer file sharing without the internet. And it might have been normalized for an entire generation if Steve Jobs wasn’t so good at marketing.
I’ll be honest. When I upgraded my PC I finally moved to one without any bays. So my rewriter that I’ve not used for probably 10+ years came out of my setup.
Funny story, I did some work on my old setup some 5 years or so ago. I must have unplugged the rewriter to get at some cabling and never re-connected it. I never noticed in those 5 years, until I was taking the parts out I was moving to my new system and saw it was just not connected.
Now, when I DID make CDs around 10+ years ago or more, I used CD-Rs.
