I was in Publix the other day when this really eccentric wizard looking lady approached me and had a story about how she needed a few bucks. She said she had music for sale that she made herself. I said well how do I purchase it? She reached into her bag and said “ I’ve got cds “ I gave her a few bucks and was on my way feeling good. Got into my fucking car and realized oh shit I’m not a teenager anymore in my old car with a cd player like I thought I was for a solid 10 minutes after buying the damn thing. Got home and had to dig out a cd player for my laptop. Music was weird as fuck which I enjoyed. She bought a jug of cough syrup with the money lmfao
You can make a million other hand-made things. But sure bring back obsolete tech.
And, their temporary nature fits the fleeting nature of infatuation.
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.
It can be a zip file.
Or just a playlist you made on one of those streaming services. Ain’t no difference.
I generally agree, but it was special to have a physical tape or CD that you got to keep around. Felt more like an actual gift.
Memory sucks. Having a physical token as a reminder is very helpful.
What no love for the mixtape? We have to go straight to CD?
No, we need transferable digital licenses. I want to both own my software and download it on the go
lets not bring back the worse tech in history, k thanks.
i have to ask, has any downvoter ever used a cd?
Why do you consider it the worst? I’ve burned a fair share of coasters in my time but once the data is on there, CDs/DVDs are pretty reliable
lets see, they take forever to burn, they burn error rate is huge, they are physically large and have tiny capacity, they scratch, you have to handle them carefully, they often stop working due to scratches or just the top of the cd getting a chip or bubble.
increase the capacity of minidiscs and bring them back, a format everyone loved
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.
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?
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.
Lol, oh I know. I just really never liked burning CDs anyway. I had a mini disc player, lol.
Nice, I found the one other MiniDisc user on Lemmy. It’s an honour to meet you.
I really thought they were the future. I should have known better.
I still think they’re the future. People are going to come around, you’ll see!
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?
Maybe I’m remembering it wrong, but by the time they were introduced, even Zip drives were on the way out?
Because it made that noise.
They still sell them
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Posted in r/teachers yesterday:
I took my own children to a park, there were about 8-10 kids running around between the ages of 1 and 6. The children were feral. The parents were on their phones the entire time. None of the bad behavior was noticed, let alone corrected. A three year old boy sat in a tunnel and screamed and pushed anyone who came near. Mom was oblivious. She wasn’t watching her kid, she was on her phone. Another girl (about 5) was being extremely rough around some of the toddlers (kicking towards them, jumping over a one year old at one point). Her dad didn’t correct the behavior. He didn’t see it. He was on his phone. I could go on. Besides the occasional glance, parents were completely disengaged from their children.
Yeah, growing up as a teen it was the opposite. I was burning CDs and had this phone stuck up my ass
CDs and had this phone stuck up my ass
Kids will think you’re joking, but the vibration on those things was a proper… well, vibrator.
Nothing like getting a text from your crush with your phone in your crotch for her/him having indirectly caused you sexual pleasure.
(Also we did actually have contests on who’d throw their phone the highest without failing to catch it. And the throw were easily 5-15 meters high. And lots of misses. But not a single disabled phone. Small scratches on the covers maybe, but you could also buy new covers so it was no problem.)
This is stupid. Just make your own streaming service.
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
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.
Cassettes would like to have a word.
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.
Jumping across the bed to hit record when a song came on is a core memory.
That word
By: Lorie Ransom, The Daily Drawing
It’s weird though. Pencils were never a good way to transport tape. It was also investigated that only certain Japanese pencils fit as these are bigger. In my memory we always used a BIC ballpoint pen which fits perfectly.
I call this “road tinsel”, there used to be a lot of it strewn along highways.
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.
Can’t walk the streets listening to vinyl.
