The types of nostalgia are not the same. Which is really unfortunate since I would also like more affordable vinyl records.
Now that people aren't listening to CDs in the car, it would be amazing to see some remasters of CDs with the dynamic compression dialed back a bit.
I've personally been buying vinyl both because of the fact I missed out on the excitement myself growing up, and because I have some records that came out decades before I was born that play like the day they were minted. They've outlasted pretty much all of my CD's.
I think it's more likely your CD player is failing than your CDs.
But storage is cheap so also rip it and burn an additional copy in case!
I still buy movies on DVD but the players are a bit hit and miss. That said, I do frequently see Sony bluray players in second hand stores for a few dollars and that is how I have my collection of players, but that is not a sustainable system.
I just wish my PC case had a slot for the drive bay, that was a foolish choice on my behalf.
This aligns with the broader historical trends of the internet creating deep niches. You have to take the good with the bad. We wouldn't even be discussing physical media at all without the internet being how it is. Despite there being a large audience for physical media, they're not the majority. The majority has moved on.
Those CDrs were 20 years old and have been sitting in a hot, humid attic for the last 10+ years, but still recorded fine.
The real problem was almost no one had a CD player not even in their car!
Also, I don’t think k3b or any of the other software i tried has been updated since 2005, but it all still worked great!
Most importantly, one of my friends brought it home and his 8 year old was so intrigued by it she came over and we burned a bunch of mix cds for her and her friends! I have no idea if her friends had anyway to play them, but she enjoyed making hand made cover art for each friend.
When I was in the attic looking for blank cds I came across a few other spindles of burned cds. Both mixes from my formative years and a bunch my wife had kept. Those times were magical and I few like kids have missed out.
Last year I bought a USB DVD RW drive just for the sake of it.
My 5.25" NEC 4xxx (with LightScribe) just quietly died in a PC used daily after around ~5 years of an extremely low usage. My only other ODD was in ThinkPad X301 and I had a feeling it would just die someday too most - and I would know it only when I would need read something.
So I just somewhat future-proofed myself a bit.
Number of discs I read on that drive is below 10 I think.
EDIT: oh, I helped out a friend to transfer some MRI records from a CDR with that drive. Somehow it was easier to send them from the other side of the country to a friend who would ask me to copy it and to send them back electronically.
And here I a driving a 2003 Golf with a tape deck (and CD player).
It is a ceremony, a ritual, a physical engagement of respect for the artists that created the work.
You don't do that to discardable music, the kind of crap they play on shopping malls, gyms, supermarkets and elevators. You do it to what you recognize as art and worth attention and care.
A few years back I saw some people buying collections of thousands of discs for maybe $100. Even if 10% of it was good, that was still a huge win. Those huge hauls are becoming rare now as they have been picked clean.
If only Minidisc had better audio quality, it would have REALLY been the perfect medium.
You have to flip through a collection and make a conscious decision on what to listen to. You don’t get to just skip skip skip so you tend to pay attention and listen to the full album.
I get the convenience of streaming and love it when I’m on the go or need background music, but it is a totally different experience.
Of course, 99.9% of other BluRay players will also support DVD/CD, so yeah it still does seem silly.
I also remember my Dad’s disappointment when he put a standard DVD in our Wii back in the day. Those are literally the same physical format as wii disks.
mrguyorama•1h ago
However, I have watched Spotify destroy my playlists regularly, and now it seems to happen more than once a year! Songs that they still have a license for and still have on their platform will be removed from your playlist and marked "Unavailable" because some licensing agreement change meant the actual file and unique ID in their system has changed, and they make zero effort to resolve the damage this regularly does to my library and playlists.
It makes staying on the spotify platform, the spotify "ecosystem" as it were, utterly worthless. No playlist you make today can be expected to be usable in the future. Any effort you put in to organize and find stuff is for naught.
Meanwhile, my shitty folder full of mp3 rips from sketchy sources from highschool has stayed with me, and works perfectly.
It's getting hard to justify now. None of the money I pay even goes to the people I listen to, because they are primarily niche and indie groups. Spotify seems to be doing this on purpose, and a close friend of people high up in Spotify is running a business to generate AI music so that spotify can fill up their generated playlists with slop that they don't have to pay anyone for, and which dilutes the rev share for real humans.