You ever have a car cd player that plays files? You could put every song you downloaded from LimeWire onto a single disc.
That was an amazing time to be alive. I miss it sometimes. No need for a music streaming service when you have 4 gigs of music on one CD. Then If you get bored you can pull out the other CDs that also have stupid amounts of music. Or maybe you burned all of a language learning program onto one disc. ALL of the language discs onto one.
I was a Napster guy, then a Kazaa guy. I had moved on to torrents by the time Limewire was the big thing.
Though I haven’t actually pirated anything in over 10 years. Was thinking of getting back into it and setting up a Jellyfin to keep some family members from giving money to streaming services that support fascists, but don’t even know where to get files anymore. I’ve already got a VPN for privacy reasons, so I think I’m good there, but I can’t imagine Pirate Bay is still a safe source
We had to use these dammit.
“Ripping CDs” was a concerning term for non-technical friends even back then. I had to assure them it wouldn’t ruin their discs. It does sound more violent than it really is.
When I was 15 I bought a CD burner for my PC. This was circa 1999 and Napster. It cost about $250 (which is a little over $500 in 2026) and it had to be installed and in a more complex fashion beyond plug USB and let’s drivers auto install. I was selling custom CDs for $5 with case inserts and paid off the burner in about a month. Then someone snitched on me in school and eventually burners started becoming standard on all new machines
My favourite name for any application ever is Nero.
What does Nero do?
Burns (CD) ROM!
I burnt a cd like 3 weeks ago, this technology isn’t as archaic as you think
We’re on lemmy. Our opinions on how widely used tech is don’t count.
Personally my last 3 PCs haven’t had a disk drive and I can’t remember the last time I’ve SEEN a disc. It was almost certainly before college.
I think burning CDs is a hate crime. They should be loved, and maybe given better wigs
Wigs?
Jeez… I’d record on a cassette the top 20 from the radio on friday nights!!
Me and my sisters got a cassette recorder we had to share between us for such things. There were a lot of hours spent listening to the local AM station doing homework and hoping you could catch your favorite song to record.
It took determination and time to fill a cassette doing that. Buying 45’s was faster but more expensive.
Difficulty 1000x https://youtu.be/KkZ-8gcgyCE
Hoping that the deejay wouldn’t talk some vapid shit over the end of the song while they fade it out
My son who’s 15 now had a word problem when he was about 9. It was something like “Billy burned 9 CDs and April burned 4 CDs, how many CDs did they have in total”. He asked me for help because he didn’t understand how the answer wasn’t 0 CDs. FML.
My car is a 2001 and has a CD player. Normally, this would preclude playing phone music (without that FM transmitter bullshit, at least), but this CD player was built to accommodate a 6-CD changer in the trunk, and you can buy a little gadget that plugs into the port for this and allows an aux jack to feed audio into the player. This worked great for me until my latest phone which has no audio port. My USB-C to 1/8" jack technically works, but the volume is way too low. So I’m back to burning CDs for my car.
enlaserfication
“Buffer underrun.”
There was a day when you inserted a CD into your computer for the last time and you didn’t even realise. Sad when you think about it.
I didn’t find it sad. The writing was on the wall for physical media and I ripped it with the highest accuracy I could. I still have those albums in CD quality today.
That track at the end of Further Down the Spiral that relies on CD skipping is sort of lost to us, I guess. You can replicate it but kids won’t accidentally stumble upon it. Just like kids won’t accidentally stumble upon the “3rd spiral” of vinyl records. The Easter egg era is over.
I still have an optical drive, and i just put a disk in it about an hour ago.
The only sad thing is people foolishly abandoning physical media.
I was still using 3 1/2" floppies regularly until 2014.
I’m actually considering going back to doing this… just with blurays.
My data hoarding illness is getting out of hand and m-disks are starting to look attractive to me.
