Ok clearly it’s not literally about making CDs and people saying “just make your own streaming service” are both missing the point and vastly over estimating the capacity of the average person.
The important part that’s largely missing from today’s music environment is the personal touch and investment. Many people, as the author says, just comfortably coast through an algorithmic smoothie of familiar music. That is inferior to a friend saying “I made you this mix” and then you actually listen to it, attentively, more than once.
It doesn’t have to be a CD. It can be a zip file. But the intention and focus was important.
I’m an outlier in that I never let “the algorithm” choose what plays. Sometimes I still make mixes for friends, though lately they’ve just been a collection of links. That process of choosing is meaningful. My friend still listens to the mix I made for them when their job laid them off, sometimes.
No, we need transferable digital licenses. I want to both own my software and download it on the go
Only if burned from FLAC or similar. But also no. 700MB and super slow. Take an old Android phone with an SD card in it and turn it into a WiFi server. Let people connect to it and take what they want. iPhone, Android, Windows, macOS, doesn’t matter, it’ll connect to it.
What no love for the mixtape? We have to go straight to CD?
This is stupid. Just make your own streaming service.
this is a good reminder to finish that mix CD I’m halfway through putting together
Bring back that whole timeframe. We weren’t all so stuck up our phone’s ass.
Yeah, growing up as a teen it was the opposite. I was burning CDs and had this phone stuck up my ass
Nothing’s stopping you from burning a CD right now. But ultimately, these kinds of nostalgic memories are less about the tech itself and more about remembering the happy times of youth. Bringing back the burned CD won’t bring those back I’m afraid.
I’ve recently gotten into vinyl, and what I’ve learned is that convenience is often antithetical to experience. When just about every song ever made is immediately available to me at a moment’s notice, I stop caring; I’ll listen to a song I like for a little while then move onto the next one without thinking about it, and I won’t form any lasting memories along the way. When music is something that takes time and effort to enjoy, I have a chance to form a memory about my enjoyment, and when I have to physically find a song in order to listen to it, it gives that song much more meaning than if I spent less than 5 seconds typing the name in on Spotify.
Environmentally awful though.
Ingredients are terrible and they are bulky and heavy to transport.
Makes more sense to have your own server and make a sleeve or carboard qr code that “plays” your selection to give you the best of both worlds.
What’s stopping me is that I haven’t had a CD burner in like 12 or 15 years. But you’re right about the rest of it.
A tiny laser and steady hands should work
I don’t have those, either, lol
Very small pickaxe?
Maybe if you’re using an m-disc
External USB ones are free in boxes of Frosted Flakes these days.
I have a genuine honest to goodness 5.25" bay mounted Blu Ray burner in my tower right now. Hey, you never friggin’ know. It comes in handy every once in a while. There’s a machine in my basement with an LS-120, a Zip drive, and a 5.25" floppy drive in it that all still work. Occasionally I still find myself needing to get some monumentally important ancient file off of some kind of floppy disk or other for somebody.
I was soo excited about ls120. Zip drive capacity in a 1.44 MB disc format with backwards compatibility. How could it not become the next big thing?
Because it made that noise.
Lol, oh I know. I just really never liked burning CDs anyway. I had a mini disc player, lol.
They still sell them
Actually…
I got married seven years ago. We could bring our own music to the ceremony, but it had to be on audio CD.
None of our modern computers have any optical drive, but we have an USB DVD burner. We just couldn’t get any modern system to complete a burn, it just kept failing halfway through.
After many hours I installed OS X on my MorphOS PowerBook G4 from 2005 to use the built-in drive and burn through iTunes.
It used to be a cakewalk. Now not so much.
You probably had a faulty DVD burner then. I did it within the last year, using my modern computer and a cheap external drive.
Or just burned too quickly on poor quality media. It seems like as dvd drives got better the media got worse. But 15 years ago they stopped getting better, and the media kept getting worse.
That’s totally on your hardware. All those DVD burners you can buy do work.
I agree with your point. However that’s not what the article is about. It’s about the social and aesthetically engaging aspects that come with physical media compared to the utilitarian services where music is presented like “tap water”, and the sense of indifference that’s created through abundance, hurting the artists financially.
Yeah, I miss the days of making my own mixes, sharing music with friends, etc.
I recently ripped a bunch of CDs and one of the batches was my folio in my car. I do not fucking miss having to handle CDs. The slightest scratch on the foil and it’s done, scratches on the plastic and it’s done. You had a hour and some minutes max that you could pack into one is you didn’t have an mp3 capable player.
I love getting music on CDs, I love listening to an album straight through and the hidden song at the end coming after a bunch of silence, and making a mix that flows like a God. But it’s so much nicer having all of my music ripped on my server.
There was a certain intentionality to burning a CD that a Spotify link just can’t replicate. Spending an hour picking the perfect songs to fit exactly 80 minutes, and then handwriting the tracklist… it was a real labor of love. It’s a shame that convenience has replaced that personal touch.
I never stopped. How else am I going to burn PS1, Dreamcast, and 360 games?
I think all of these have sdcard mods now (and the 360 had long had HDD mods from memory).
Oh yeah, they do. I’m just weird lol
PS2 for DVD-R
360 wasn’t DVD?
It was.
what’s a CD?
CDs nuts!
Goteem
CD is just an acronym for the Compact Disc media format.
A Certificate of Deposit. A kind of simple interest bank account adjacent in form factor to bonds. In simple terms, you give the bank an amount of money for a set amount of time, say a year, during which you can’t withdraw the money without paying a penalty. When the term is finished the bank returns the money plus an amount of simple interest. They often bear higher interest rates than savings or money market accounts and are FDIC insured.
You can get one at a bank. It is short for certificate of deposit. It’s basically a high interest savings account that is difficult to access until it matures. They are at or above 4% now at some banks, so it is a relatively safe investment that is slightly higher than inflation.
Mix tapes were better
They each have their place. Tapes fit in your pocket though, which was great for casual carry. I always had a mix tape in my pocket.
I have lots of playlist cds, same thing. Better skipping function.
Not the same thing
Bring Back the Clay Tablet— They’re a love language. And a reminder of the hope we once had.
Sing me a song about shitty copper.
Fuck … Erm…Shite
There once was a man named Ea-Nasir His business practices were very unclear He got so many complaints Some real, some ain’t But one lasted for thousands of years
Cassettes would like to have a word.
That word
I call this “road tinsel”, there used to be a lot of it strewn along highways.
By: Lorie Ransom, The Daily Drawing
Huh, I think this is the first time I’ve seen this comic without the caption “OnLy FiVe PeOpLe WiLl GeT tHiS 🤪”
The word is “shutterst*ck”?
Bird is the word.
I find that most my old cassettes still play, can’t say the same for the CDs.
It’s the opposite for me. I live in a place that gets fairly humid during different times of the year so cassettes don’t often make it If they were left in a car or a garage or something similar. Whereas most of the CDs that survived my teenage years still work.
imho in a weird way cassettes were better/more fun. Like wanting to record a song you like so you’d sit in front of the tape deck for hours on end listening to the radio waiting for that ONE song to come on so you could record it. It would take you hours, maybe even days, to make that mixtape of songs you didn’t own.
Also when I was a kid I had one of those fisher price tape decks that had the microphone attached to it. I wanted to make a mix tape of all my favourite songs from my NES games or games that I would rent (like the Battletoads theme song, or the music from the Batman videogame) so I would pop the game in then hold the microphone up to the TV speaker and record the songs.
Um no. Having to rewind the tape was annoying. If you had a janky player it would eat it.
Jumping across the bed to hit record when a song came on is a core memory.
Cassettes are making a comeback much like vinyl but to a lesser extent. I’ve got 600 or so cassettes and probably 3/4 of them were made in the past 8 years.
Vinyl made sense because of its high fidelity. Cassettes do not make sense unless you enjoy dogshit audio quality
Incorrect. I have three NAD 6300s and a Nakamichi Dragon, and with metal tapes it’s transparent to digital. Shit even good type II nearly transparent. Tapes do not sound “dogshit”. Unlike vinyl, you can easily experiment with the many varieties of tape out there and master your own cassette recordings. It’s like rolling tubes in an analog amplifier. Yes, it’s not perfectly transparent to digital on a cheap type I tape, but the warmth of a high end type I rounds off some of the harshness of modern tracks. YMMV, it’s not for everyone, but I think it’s pretty fucking cool.
This is a rare setup. Kind of vintage audio unicorn.
You still have a noticeable noise floor and medium limitations as equalizer, though (“warmer”).
99.999% of decks and surviving tapes do sound like dogshit.
I mean reel tape kills vinyl and cassette. It surpasses or equals digital in high $$ situations.
*its mostly about the mastering
Yes, its clunky huge and expensive and has a limited catalog. But once you’ve heard one you’ll want more.
Oh, no doubt. Reel to reel is the ultimate analog media.
I love showing it to people who havent heard great audio.
But yeah, its so expensive. The best part tho is unlike records, tapes are very robust if you keep them in normal temperatures and away from magnets. No surface noise, and most tapes the hiss is hardly noticeable especially on anything 15 IPS.
The good part about the limited catalog is you’re going to always get super high quality from it because its so limited and expensive to do
Can’t walk the streets listening to vinyl.
https://www.amazon.com/Bluetooth-Speakers-Rechargeable-Turntable-Phonograph/dp/B0DJQXZNZY
Well… But you’d have to really steady on the hands. Maybe some jig would work?
It seems to me like the world has had 3 phases:
- Phase 1: People own media on records, tapes, etc. because that’s the only way to listen to what you want whenever you want. The only alternative is radio, where you listen to what the DJ thinks you should hear. If you buy something once, you can listen to it whenever you want forever. (Or at least as long as the medium holds up)
- Phase 2: It was relatively easy to get the media you wanted on demand, but it wasn’t always legal, because the copyright cartels were used to a certain way of doing business and didn’t like disruption. During this phase people still bought read-only media in stores. But, they also sometimes bought blank media and filled it up from their computers at home.
- Phase 3: Everything is now online, and you no longer own media. In this phase you can listen to / watch whatever you want, but you don’t get to own anything, and you have to pay monthly if you don’t want your media viewing / listening to be interrupted by ads. In this phase, media you love can just disappear if someone loses the license to stream it, or the copyright owner decides to pull it or modify it. In this version someone like George Lucas can decide that the version of Star Wars you grew up on should change, and you now have to accept his new version.
Unfortunately, long-term storage hasn’t kept pace with short-term storage and bandwidth. You can make someone a “mix tape” that’s a USB stick, but if someone puts it on a shelf it might not be readable in 5 years. You could save the original version of Star Wars to a NAS. But, if your friend wants to borrow it, it’s not as easy as grabbing a case off the bookshelf and handing it over.
I keep hoping that one of these “crystal storage” mechanisms takes off. Then we can much more easily be data hoarders, keeping everything, and not relying on a continued subscription to a streaming service for our favourite media.
