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 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’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 :-)
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I hate being GenZ I don’t even know yet there’s more than one type of CD
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.
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.
Same, there’s like 3 or 4 💀
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.”
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.
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 didn’t think i ever used CDRW for music, only CD-R. not sure why
i find it much more reliable. its also cheaper
I haven’t used a cd in 15 years lol
How old is this post?
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.
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.
CD-R.
I think I bought some CD-RW a looong time ago and never, ever re-wrote with them. Hard to think of a scenario where I would do that.
Also, I just bought some Taiyo Yuden again recently. They’re still available (scamazon).
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.
The mini-disk could/should have been king!
Whats up with the 2000s tech being so hot on Lemmy right now?
In 2008? CD-R, they’re cheap and you aren’t going to change the songs on the disc rather than just burn a new disc entirely.
In 2024? micro SDXC card in my phone.
Do any phones even have that anymore?
Mid range Samsungs and pretty much everything that’s not made by either Apple, Google, or Samsung still has it. We are just in the ridiculous situation that the more expensive the phone the less functionality it has.
Pretty sure it’s easier to find a phone with a mini SD slot than a phone with a CD player.
But it’s easier to find a phone with a CD player than a phone with cassette player.
Can’t argue with that!
CD-R is written in an organic-dye, which deteriorates ( I’ve read the AZO chemistry is more enduring )
CD-RW is written in the crystallization of a metal layer.
CD-RW is permanent record, unless you heat them, or blank them, or overwrite/rewrite them: chemical-deterioration isn’t a problem.
I learned this with backups, many many years ago.
I’ve no idea if DVD-RW discs also are recorded in a eutectic metal layer, but they’ve multiple record-layers ( 2? ), and I’m don’t know how you can make a eutectic-metal layer that is transparent-enough to get through/past it to write the next layer,
so I’ve no idea how permanent DVD-RW’s are.
I’ve lost data on the -R technology.
I’ve never lost data on the CD-RW technology.
