I never stopped. How else am I going to burn PS1, Dreamcast, and 360 games?
Mix tapes were better
When I first burned my first CDs(after long time), I was happy, and I quite liked, but but since I buy CDs, I don’t do that anymore. When I found my burned CDs after some time, I was intrigued to listen what was in it.
How 'bout we tweak that just a tiny bit and use flash drives instead?
I still have my Blu-ray burner and a bunch of blank blue rays. When does the digital orgy start?
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.
The reason I got a cd burner was the frustration of dealing with Bluetooth in my car. I got a Bluetooth capable, simple, CD compatible head unit. The best part about using a CD is it begins immediately when the car starts, versus fumbling with a phone. Though swapping CDs obviously isn’t as great as using digital / streaming.
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.
Feels like the article is slightly off base, the people today looking for something physical and memorable have been buying vinyl. In 2026 most people I know don’t have a CD player let alone a CD burner. But lots them do buy and play vinyl and have record players for that purpose.
Or… if the article is just a nostalgia deep dive then why the commitment to CDs? You could do the same passing around USB sticks if the purpose is to share music with friends.
Also wonder if the article writer’s own discs actually still work, burned discs don’t last that long. They mention having a a whole box of old discs but I don’t know if they actually tried to play them and checked them for errors. A while back I was doing some data recovery for a friend who had all her stuff burned to discs over the years, turned out about 20% of her discs were either unreadable or full of errors.
Even just buying a new drive is not exactly easy. There is no market. I got a new* BD DVD CD burner eventually, Asus BW-16D1HT, they were introduced more than 10 years ago!
*used one prior only lasted a year before it smashed the CD and DVD laser head into a CD.
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.
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.
That’s totally on your hardware. All those DVD burners you can buy do work.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
I think people undervalue cd/dvd/bluray. Up to this day it’s best format for giving away data like family photos.
With any usb device there’s much larger security risk. Also people want to get storage back.
My friend and I got an old optiplex and upgraded it with a burner so we can make CDs. It’s actually quite nice to have a physical medium for music in the car, and make mixes for different moods that you can switch between. We also know some people with older cars that only have CD and radio or the Bluetooth sucks so we’ll make CDs for them too. Tons of fun and you can buy a usb CD / DVD burner for like $10 or $15 and CD-Rs are fairly cheap.
And why is burning an audio file onto a CD better than having the same file on flash storage?
Being old does that to people
That authors’ view is explained in the article.
Unlike a burned CD from a friend, there’s no social contract that compels me to sit with something new, and take the time to better understand it. There’s very little on Spotify that will compel me to dive into the catalogue of a new-to-me artist, then seek them out when they go on tour.
Why do some people like vinyl? Why did the iPod’s scroll wheel evoke joy when used? Why is the OG PSP’s UMD drive clicking open and closed enjoyable?
If you’re looking to abstractly optimize consumption and sharing efficiency, it’s worse. But if you’re looking to optimize personal connection to the art and to other people, having some tactile interaction and giving a physical object that embodies the music arguably does that better.
I’d even bet that if you scanned brain activity of someone opening an MP3 versus someone putting in a disc and hitting a play button, the disc’s physical interaction very likely creates stronger neural pathways that trigger more chemical rewards.
Its not inherently better than sending someone a playlist by any other means but on the other hand I just think its neat to have a physical thing that you have to intentionally plug into something and listen to in a specific order and way. That and the way that tech/streaming is changing the ways we interact with music on a personal and cultural level is overwhelming to me, makes me nostalgic for the limitations of older mediums. When you had to be intentional about what and how you listened, it (at least to me) made a deeper connection between me and the music as a listener. Fortunately we can still be intentional in many ways, its just easier to not do that with streaming and algorithmically recommended stuff.
I do wish that my friends would still send each other playlists in any format.
Elitism
Cassettes would like to have a word.
That word
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.
Jumping across the bed to hit record when a song came on is a core memory.
Um no. Having to rewind the tape was annoying. If you had a janky player it would eat it.
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.
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?
