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It may be hard to believe now, but there was a time when iTunes was a great piece of software. It used to have two jobs - play your music and manage your music

It may be hard to believe now, but there was a time when iTunes was a great piece of software. It used to have two jobs - play your music and manage your music - and it had a good UI for both tasks. iTunes had a "brushed metal" interface - the Apple HIG said brushed metal was for apps that represent "devices", as opposed to standard "Aqua" (or "Platinum" if you go back far enough) for apps which represent "documents" - and in the top-right corner was a recessed "iris". When you put a blank CD into the drive, then clicked the iris with a playlist selected, the iris animated opening, revealing a glowing yellow and black "Burn" button (using this same icon). You clicked the glowing button and your playlist would be burnt to CD. Burning a CD was an expensive operation (both in time and compute, as it slowed the machine down, plus it tied up your CD drive), so the "safety cover" iris and the animation revealing the button underneath used to delight me every time I used it.

xattt 4y ago
Please stop describing something I remember experiencing like yesterday the same way they talk about ox ploughs at a pioneer village museum.
- raldi 4y ago
  Now, we’re didn’t have Bluetooth back then like you do today, so we used to plug our headphones in through that little hole you see on the side of every computer. I bet you've always wondered what that hole was for! We used to have them on our phones, too, only back then they didn't have wifi and we called them iPods...
  - donohoe 4y ago
    “The dinosaurs of our youth had mounted pigeon boxes below the saddle. Messages could be exchanged on the go through…”
  - steve1977 4y ago
    I had a Bluetooth headset for my Palm Treo 650 actually. But I think I still had to sync it via USB.
  - kridsdale1 4y ago
    I was having an awful time yesterday using a white noise file to drown out office sounds. My Bluetooth connection kept dropping for a few ms and the white noise would cut to silence. So I rooted around and found the proper analog cable for my Bose to plug in to the MacBook Pro. No hole.
    - raldi 4y ago
      How did you plug it in without a hole?
- a4isms 4y ago
  My first program was written in FORTRAN on punch cards, back in those days we tied an onion to our belt—no, we didn’t do that, and I was just a kid, so Truthfully what I observed was that in those days mainframes had a “machine room” where the cabinets were cooled with air conditioning popes that ran under the raised floor. The engineers had those suction cup handles glaziers use to carry panes of glass, they were used to lift floor tiles up to access the cabling and AC running under the floor. Because of the AC, the space under the floor was cold. And that’s where they stored the beer, or a can of root beer for the kid who was hanging around writing simple programs. I remember that like the day-before-yesterday, but to everyone else it’s as like telling an anecdote about Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage commenting on your pull request against the Difference Engine.
  - dhosek 4y ago
    Ah, I remember the old machine room days. (and I love the typo of air-conditioned popes). A few years ago, my department had a field trip to the Blue Cross/Blue Shield data center in Waukegan for a tour. So unlike the machine rooms of yore, although they did have an IBM big metal machine up there alongside all the rack-mounted servers (and even that was tiny compared to the old IBM mainframe I used to work with at UIC back in the 80s).
unfunco 4y ago
I used to use Disco, the website is still alive: https://discoapp.com https://discoapp.com When a CD was burning, smoke would emanate from the app, and if you blew on your microphone the smoke would disperse.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  I guess a mac only application for disk burning becomes a bit pointless when there’s no macs with disc drives any more.
  - grishka 4y ago
    Not entirely pointless. You can connect an external optical drive even to most modern of macs and it'll work. That contraption consisting of a full-size DVD drive and a SATA-USB adapter with external power, plugged into a USB-A/USB-C adapter and then my M1 macbook, for that one time when I was given a CD and was curious to see what's on it? It worked flawlessly. Though I've never tried burning discs on macOS, I don't see a reason why it shouldn't work.
    - giantrobot 4y ago
      Burning discs, even from an M1 Mac, works just fine. I burned a CD just the other day.
    - steve1977 4y ago
      Unless you have a Pioneer drive and macOS 13.2 https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/macos-13-2-breaks-compatibility-with-pioneers-cd-dvd-drives.2379431/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/macos-13-2-breaks-compa...
  - reaperducer 4y ago
    there’s no macs with disc drives any more The drives still exist. They're just optional now. Like bucket seats. https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MD564LL/A/apple-usb-superdrive https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MD564LL/A/apple-usb-super... Best optical drive I own. When nothing else will read a crusty disc, the SuperDrive always does.
LaputanMachine 4y ago
At the bottom of this page is a picture of the "Burn CD" button: http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/audio_only_fcp_cd.html http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/audio_only_fcp_cd.html
eddieroger 4y ago
> Burning a CD was an expensive operation (both in time and compute, as it slowed the machine down, plus it tied up your CD drive) Discs were also decently expensive then as well, so financially expensive too. Not prohibitively so, but not like today where a failed disc is just a coaster not a headache. This may have been near the cusp of when that balance shifted, but I remember quite a bit of angst when I was a young'in burning mix discs for my Discman.

xattt 4y ago

Please stop describing something I remember experiencing like yesterday the same way they talk about ox ploughs at a pioneer village museum.

raldi 4y ago
Now, we’re didn’t have Bluetooth back then like you do today, so we used to plug our headphones in through that little hole you see on the side of every computer. I bet you've always wondered what that hole was for! We used to have them on our phones, too, only back then they didn't have wifi and we called them iPods...
- donohoe 4y ago
  “The dinosaurs of our youth had mounted pigeon boxes below the saddle. Messages could be exchanged on the go through…”
- steve1977 4y ago
  I had a Bluetooth headset for my Palm Treo 650 actually. But I think I still had to sync it via USB.
- kridsdale1 4y ago
  I was having an awful time yesterday using a white noise file to drown out office sounds. My Bluetooth connection kept dropping for a few ms and the white noise would cut to silence. So I rooted around and found the proper analog cable for my Bose to plug in to the MacBook Pro. No hole.
  - raldi 4y ago
    How did you plug it in without a hole?
a4isms 4y ago
My first program was written in FORTRAN on punch cards, back in those days we tied an onion to our belt—no, we didn’t do that, and I was just a kid, so Truthfully what I observed was that in those days mainframes had a “machine room” where the cabinets were cooled with air conditioning popes that ran under the raised floor. The engineers had those suction cup handles glaziers use to carry panes of glass, they were used to lift floor tiles up to access the cabling and AC running under the floor. Because of the AC, the space under the floor was cold. And that’s where they stored the beer, or a can of root beer for the kid who was hanging around writing simple programs. I remember that like the day-before-yesterday, but to everyone else it’s as like telling an anecdote about Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage commenting on your pull request against the Difference Engine.
- dhosek 4y ago
  Ah, I remember the old machine room days. (and I love the typo of air-conditioned popes). A few years ago, my department had a field trip to the Blue Cross/Blue Shield data center in Waukegan for a tour. So unlike the machine rooms of yore, although they did have an IBM big metal machine up there alongside all the rack-mounted servers (and even that was tiny compared to the old IBM mainframe I used to work with at UIC back in the 80s).

unfunco 4y ago

I used to use Disco, the website is still alive: https://discoapp.com https://discoapp.com When a CD was burning, smoke would emanate from the app, and if you blew on your microphone the smoke would disperse.

Aeolun 4y ago
I guess a mac only application for disk burning becomes a bit pointless when there’s no macs with disc drives any more.
- grishka 4y ago
  Not entirely pointless. You can connect an external optical drive even to most modern of macs and it'll work. That contraption consisting of a full-size DVD drive and a SATA-USB adapter with external power, plugged into a USB-A/USB-C adapter and then my M1 macbook, for that one time when I was given a CD and was curious to see what's on it? It worked flawlessly. Though I've never tried burning discs on macOS, I don't see a reason why it shouldn't work.
  - giantrobot 4y ago
    Burning discs, even from an M1 Mac, works just fine. I burned a CD just the other day.
  - steve1977 4y ago
    Unless you have a Pioneer drive and macOS 13.2 https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/macos-13-2-breaks-compatibility-with-pioneers-cd-dvd-drives.2379431/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/macos-13-2-breaks-compa...
- reaperducer 4y ago
  there’s no macs with disc drives any more The drives still exist. They're just optional now. Like bucket seats. https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MD564LL/A/apple-usb-superdrive https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MD564LL/A/apple-usb-super... Best optical drive I own. When nothing else will read a crusty disc, the SuperDrive always does.

LaputanMachine 4y ago

At the bottom of this page is a picture of the "Burn CD" button: http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/audio_only_fcp_cd.html http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/audio_only_fcp_cd.html

eddieroger 4y ago

> Burning a CD was an expensive operation (both in time and compute, as it slowed the machine down, plus it tied up your CD drive) Discs were also decently expensive then as well, so financially expensive too. Not prohibitively so, but not like today where a failed disc is just a coaster not a headache. This may have been near the cusp of when that balance shifted, but I remember quite a bit of angst when I was a young'in burning mix discs for my Discman.