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
Pirate bay is still a great source if you use your brain in terms of the types of files you are downloading etc. I get a lot of TV shows etc from there with no issues at all.
You ever have a car cd player that plays files?
It’s pretty common.
My current car can do that (2019 Toyota) with the factory player.
As could every car I have owned in the previous couple decades.
We had to use these dammit.
The Old Magic Will not be Discussed with Children of New
Anyone else remembers having to cook eggs to replace the ball on the mouse? It was ridiculous.
my brother (at the time 10yo) told me (4yo) that it would explode if i drop it on the floor.
Please don’t do animal cruelty
Eh… What?! Certainly remember pre-optical mice, but replacing the balls with eggs was surely not a thing?
Ask your parents, sure they did it and never told you about.
Doubtful, I’m 49!
Maybe you forgot about it. Ask your parents, for sure they can help you remember
Haha
What happened to the original ball?
Its get used and dirt for the table. You can clean the ball but eventually it lost material and became too small to work functionally and you had to overcook an egg to replace it
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
Remember the audio cable that had to be installed inside from the CD player/burned to the motherboard?
If you didn’t install that you couldn’t actual hear the music from audio CDs (which had a different format than data CDs) because it was the player itself processing on the fly the audio tracks like the in the standalone audio-only CD players, rather than it coming in as data to the processor (this was probably done like that because the processors back then were pretty weak plus PCs didn’t have that much memory and audio CDs had the data in PCM format, which is not compressed, so we’re talking tracks of 90MB in systems with less than that in memory).
“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.
I think burning CDs is a hate crime. They should be loved, and maybe given better wigs
Wigs?
My favourite name for any application ever is Nero.
What does Nero do?
Burns (CD) ROM!
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.
You can get Bluetooth to aux devices so you can send music over Bluetooth. Works great, did that for a long time myself.
They’re burning to see deez nuts! Got 'em!
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.
It’s slang for using Nero burning ROM
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.
Hey, I’m one of today’s ten thousand! I don’t think any of my LPs have a hidden groove but I want one now!
My Easter egg musical experience was with a CD, Guster’s Keep it Together. I was the first person in the family to get an mp3 player, and when I ripped the CD I found a minute long “Silent Track” before a hidden song, Two at a Time. When we saw them live next and I knew the lyrics to that song my parents were baffled lol.
Hidden grooves on records were not terribly common, as far as I am aware. I have Tool’s Undertow (which — if you have the CD version — you have already heard it) and a Monty Python record Tie and Handkerchief.
Not a terribly strong argument to preserve a format because I have no motivation to revisit either, but a fun little one time experience if you have either of those handy.
And for CDs, before the zero mark, there could be data. I think the X-Files TV show soundtrack had a couple of songs if you inserted the disc and immediately rewound before the starting zero. Like, in minus time. The table of contents apparently didn’t care about minus numbers.
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.
My old pc’s still have drives I use sometimes. Or well, only my previous pc. My oldest one, the one I built when I was 18 (21 years ago), still works but it’s a time capsule. Running state of the art XP and photoshop 7, Winamp, C&C red alert 2, age of empires 2.
Last time I burned a cd was to copy a CD a friend bought in North Korea. Maybe I’ll backup some photos on a dvd in the future. Because fuck cloud services.
I was bored one weekend and went through all the photos on my phone and sent a bunch them to Walmart to be printed into photos. Now I have an old school photo album in my living room that friends and family can look through when they come over.
I plan on doing the same for my current vacation to South Africa. Otherwise I’ll never look at the photos again.
I was still using 3 1/2" floppies regularly until 2014.
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.
