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.
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.
“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.”
Jet pack is simple. You just strap it on and fly away
miniDisc FTW
If you still have any minidiscs around, glue a couple magnets on the back and they make a great retro fridge magnet.
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.
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.
I did not have any miniDiscs but I did have a SuperDisk in a PC I built which was a complete waste of time and money.
The SuperDisk was a waste. Not my whole PC.
oh, i remember those. they were like a super-Zip disk right in the era when usb flash drives and early sd cards and CD-Rs and -RWs were just becoming a thing.
i remember they never took off because nobody could quite figure out what to use them for since there were several other overlapping storage media that were emergent at the time which were better suited to their needs (and cheaper).
Seemed like a good idea when I built my PC.
Was not a good idea. Big waste of time and money.
I had an IOMega ZIP (the original 100MB one) back in the 90s, connected to my Amiga 1200. Those were definitely not a waste when they first came out. I used to run a BBS back then, and had a drive crash and yeah backup wasn’t quite so easy or affordable back then. So I had to rebuild my file library.
I went to a local fellow Sysop with a few zip disks and had a file library back up and running in no time.
Won’t lie, for a short period I had a Sony mini disk set up and I don’t think I can ever appreciate other modern physical mediums of music as much.
And I can’t explain why other than personal biast reasons, either.
I can. Subjectively, MD wasn’t as delicate as CD-R was. None of my old CD-Rs are readable anymore.
How old is this post?
In the thick of the cd era I tried to use RW and there wasn’t much rewritable about them. Any attempt to change the data, even to just add a new track, turned the disk into a coaster. Better to stick to CD-R and just burn a whole new disk each update.
I haven’t used a cd in 15 years lol
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
I have gotten whole cases of CD-R’s at yard sales and thrift stores. I do not own a single CD-RW. Even when I purchase them, the CD-R’s are so cheap that if I mess up I can just toss the error and still come out ahead. If I needed to overwrite it frequently I would probably just use a different media if available (like a USB drive).
CD-R GANG
CD-R since it’s better for compatibility and I actually had issues with RW in the past where I could only burn a CD once and not be able to rewrite on it. I was burning them as audio CDs for car use at the time.
Nowadays? Rip ‘em and slap them onto an external drive (maybe even onto the cloud if you wanna go that far), then toss out or donate the CD so you don’t have to lug that shit around. I’d rather buy the vinyl if it’s an album I really like.
Yeah I remember having the same compatibility and rewrite-ability issues with RW back in the ‘00s, ended up being easier and cheaper to stick with R.
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
Whats up with the 2000s tech being so hot on Lemmy right now?
I used CD-RW and re-wrote them a bit 25 years ago when the price of a CD-R was high, and a CD-RW cost like 2-3x of a CD-R, when the prices dropped it stopped making sense.
Last time I burned a CD/DVD was 10-15 years ago.
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.
I had to do a double take to see how old is this post.