5 ms·

A friend in his 40s had a 90s birthday party so I burned some mix CDs as party favors. Those CDrs were 20 years old and have been sitting in a hot, humid attic

by l72 3mo ago

A friend in his 40s had a 90s birthday party so I burned some mix CDs as party favors. 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.

justsomehnguy 3mo ago
Hah! 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.
- dieselgate 3mo ago
  I purchased a DVD player for the first time this past weekend.
  - ColdStream 3mo ago
    It's the funniest thing with DVD and older consoles for that matter. For the first few minutes you can really sense the lower resolution but once you adjust it is perfectly fine. I am actually impressed with how well the image quality on some DVD's are considering it is a 30 year old format. Compare it to the likes of Bink or Sorenson codecs of the time and it looks amazing. Although I think a big part of that is just throwing stacks of bandwidth at the problem.
throw0101d 3mo ago
> The real problem was almost no one had a CD player not even in their car! And here I am driving a 2003 Golf with a tape deck (and CD player).
- netsharc 3mo ago
  My car reads USB sticks with MP3s on them (I was telling a Gen-Z colleague this and felt old...). There are external BluRay drives that connect via USB, but then to he able to play audio CDs, either the car needs to understand CDDA, or the drive needs to understand CDDA and pretend to be a FAT32 filesystem of some MP3s (or... WAVs?) to the car. Huh I also have Subsonic on my home NAS and Symfonium on my phone (connectable via Android Auto). Another Rube Goldberg invention would be to put the audio CD in the drive connected to the NAS, have a driver that pretends to be a filesystem of MP3s but actually encodes the CD tracks (on the fly on every playback, of course!), stream it over the Internet to my phone, that's connected to Android Auto. That's how to play a CD on a modern car!
  - throwway120385 3mo ago
    My truck will actually play MP3s off of a data CD. Maybe I should try that.
    - ryandrake 3mo ago
      Nearly every automobile MP3 player (USB-based or CD-based) I've used was defective in some way. Usually something stupid like only playing tracks in alphabetical order, or inserting audible gaps between tracks that are meant to flow into one another, or not supporting tags correctly, or not handling UTF-8 text... Car companies don't know how to do consumer software.
      - mc3301 3mo ago
        Mine would cut the last few second and first few seconds of each song with some terrible "meld together" business, like the world's worst DJ.
piskov 3mo ago
However if you’ve tried to read those cd-rw after 20-30 years, they would most likely be corrupted. Factory stampted cds are better in this regard
- asciimov 3mo ago
  Factory stamps are still not immune to bit rot, even when stored in ideal conditions.
  - xienze 3mo ago
    Maybe not, but I think the concerns are a bit overblown. Just like the other poster, I've had CDs and DVDs that lived for over 10 years in an attic and a fair number of them are 25+ years old. No problems reading them!
    - asciimov 3mo ago
      Nearly a decade ago I digitized my families cds and dvds. The stamped discs had about a 10% failure rate, which was higher than I expected. Fortunately the vast majority of discs people own aren’t particularly rare, so if they loose a disc from a top 40 artist, they can easily get a replacement.
- shimman 3mo ago
  Is there a reason why or is it just the quality of the materials?
  - kalleboo 3mo ago
    CD-Rs use an organic dye which fades (or in the worst case the bonds holding it on can delaminate). They hold up much better if stored in a dark place. A spindle on a shelf that sees sunlight is the worst case and they can become unreadable in years.
    - Dylan16807 3mo ago
smelendez 3mo ago
The most common CD players around now are probably video game consoles.
- ColdStream 3mo ago
  And even then I think it is only up to the 360/Ps3 generation. After that they only play DVD's/Blu Ray as it is a cheaper laser component.
  - account42 3mo ago
    Wait really? How much can the second laser possibly add to the BOM of a mass produced device? Now I'm wondering if there are also PC drives that cheap out like that - can't say I have tried a CD yet in the one I have right now.
  - ssl-3 3mo ago
    All Xbox consoles can play audio CDs. (Later ones need software added to do that, but that software is free.) Playstations after the PS3, though: Not so much. (Sony lost track of their "It Only Does Everything" schtick[1] somewhere along the way.) [1]: https://blog.playstation.com/2009/08/27/it-only-does-everything/ https://blog.playstation.com/2009/08/27/it-only-does-everyth...
shimman 3mo ago
Funny because the CD player in my car has been dead for like 16 years but the cassette player has never been better. Wonder why the cassette player lasted much longer, guessing the optical drive in the car is damaged because CDs will fail to read after like 10 second.
- 6031769 3mo ago
  Do you drive over a lot of cattle grids? CD players are precision items and don't take kindly to high impulse. Conversely, many tape decks are seriously robust. My dad had an old Grundig tape deck that was built like a tank (or a 380Z). Pretty sure whoever has that now is still getting quality sounds out of it.
  - shimman 3mo ago
    Hmm, I've had for the car for 20 years (it's even older). Where I originally lived the roads were always smooth + paved well (also elevation was basically flat). Now that I'm in a city with actual hills (along with snow plows that ruin the roads), that's when the problems occurred. Seriously never seen so many potholes before in my life! Not a cattle grid, but wouldn't have thought of the pothole angle without it.
mbs159 3mo ago
> The real problem was almost no one had a CD player not even in their car! That's wild. Popping in a CD is part of the road trip experience!
- w4der 3mo ago
  I remember the frustration of hitting a washboarded dirt road and the CD jumping around and messing playback.
kleiba2 3mo ago
One of the hobby projects that I want to do, and hopefully will find the time for before we get rid of my wife's car, is to retrofit it with a CD player, powered by a Raspberry Pi or something alike. It could nicely live in the glove compartment and I believe the in-car entertainment system is already equipped with an aux port.
- grahamburger 3mo ago
  Ha, this reminded me-when I was a teenager I had an old beat-up car that didn't have a CD player or an AUX port. I also had an old boombox that had removable speakers. I removed the glove box from the car and, with the speakers removed, the boombox fit perfectly into the open space. I powered it with an inverter and used one of those old tapes that played from a headphone jack to connect the boombox to the car sound system. It sounded like dirt, and I got a strange look from a cop when I got pulled over and didn't have a glove box in which to keep my registration, but it worked!
specproc 3mo ago
I did the same for a friend's birthday recently: put together a bunch of mix CDs as a present. My concession to the fact he probably doesn't use a CD player much was a QR code, with a link to a matching Spotify playlist.
- MrDOS 3mo ago
  Two years ago, we sent CDs as our wedding invitations. We also received a lot of feedback to the effect that lots of our guests had difficulty finding a way to play the discs (including at least one person who was incredulous that the CD was real; but that might be because we sent vinyl-effect CDs). I put a Spotify code[0] to the playlist on the back cover as a concession to streaming, but if anyone knew what it was and used it, they never told me. [0]: https://www.spotifycodes.com/ https://www.spotifycodes.com/
2OEH8eoCRo0 3mo ago
It's hard to buy people media now. You can't really gift people CDs, DVDs, or Blu-Rays because nobody has players anymore.
- kevincox 3mo ago
  A USB drive with FLAC files works pretty well. It doesn't have the same feel as a CD with art though. For movies there isn't a legal way to acquire proper files unfortunately.
- tiborsaas 3mo ago
  It's safe to assume to buy them a player device too with the CD :)
- tayo42 3mo ago
  Game consoles play all of those. For now I guess lol
  - doublepg23 3mo ago
    Funny enough, neither the PS4 or PS5 support CDs. https://www.playstation.com/en-us/support/hardware/play-video-music-discs-usb-drives/#nodisc https://www.playstation.com/en-us/support/hardware/play-vide...
- m463 3mo ago
  Send a player too. :)
m463 3mo ago
[dead]

by l72 3mo ago

justsomehnguy 3mo ago

Hah! 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.

dieselgate 3mo ago
I purchased a DVD player for the first time this past weekend.
- ColdStream 3mo ago
  It's the funniest thing with DVD and older consoles for that matter. For the first few minutes you can really sense the lower resolution but once you adjust it is perfectly fine. I am actually impressed with how well the image quality on some DVD's are considering it is a 30 year old format. Compare it to the likes of Bink or Sorenson codecs of the time and it looks amazing. Although I think a big part of that is just throwing stacks of bandwidth at the problem.

throw0101d 3mo ago

> The real problem was almost no one had a CD player not even in their car! And here I am driving a 2003 Golf with a tape deck (and CD player).

netsharc 3mo ago
My car reads USB sticks with MP3s on them (I was telling a Gen-Z colleague this and felt old...). There are external BluRay drives that connect via USB, but then to he able to play audio CDs, either the car needs to understand CDDA, or the drive needs to understand CDDA and pretend to be a FAT32 filesystem of some MP3s (or... WAVs?) to the car. Huh I also have Subsonic on my home NAS and Symfonium on my phone (connectable via Android Auto). Another Rube Goldberg invention would be to put the audio CD in the drive connected to the NAS, have a driver that pretends to be a filesystem of MP3s but actually encodes the CD tracks (on the fly on every playback, of course!), stream it over the Internet to my phone, that's connected to Android Auto. That's how to play a CD on a modern car!
- throwway120385 3mo ago
  My truck will actually play MP3s off of a data CD. Maybe I should try that.
  - ryandrake 3mo ago
    Nearly every automobile MP3 player (USB-based or CD-based) I've used was defective in some way. Usually something stupid like only playing tracks in alphabetical order, or inserting audible gaps between tracks that are meant to flow into one another, or not supporting tags correctly, or not handling UTF-8 text... Car companies don't know how to do consumer software.
    - mc3301 3mo ago
      Mine would cut the last few second and first few seconds of each song with some terrible "meld together" business, like the world's worst DJ.

piskov 3mo ago

However if you’ve tried to read those cd-rw after 20-30 years, they would most likely be corrupted. Factory stampted cds are better in this regard

asciimov 3mo ago
Factory stamps are still not immune to bit rot, even when stored in ideal conditions.
- xienze 3mo ago
  Maybe not, but I think the concerns are a bit overblown. Just like the other poster, I've had CDs and DVDs that lived for over 10 years in an attic and a fair number of them are 25+ years old. No problems reading them!
  - asciimov 3mo ago
    Nearly a decade ago I digitized my families cds and dvds. The stamped discs had about a 10% failure rate, which was higher than I expected. Fortunately the vast majority of discs people own aren’t particularly rare, so if they loose a disc from a top 40 artist, they can easily get a replacement.
shimman 3mo ago
Is there a reason why or is it just the quality of the materials?
- kalleboo 3mo ago
  CD-Rs use an organic dye which fades (or in the worst case the bonds holding it on can delaminate). They hold up much better if stored in a dark place. A spindle on a shelf that sees sunlight is the worst case and they can become unreadable in years.
  - Dylan16807 3mo ago

smelendez 3mo ago

The most common CD players around now are probably video game consoles.

ColdStream 3mo ago
And even then I think it is only up to the 360/Ps3 generation. After that they only play DVD's/Blu Ray as it is a cheaper laser component.
- account42 3mo ago
  Wait really? How much can the second laser possibly add to the BOM of a mass produced device? Now I'm wondering if there are also PC drives that cheap out like that - can't say I have tried a CD yet in the one I have right now.
- ssl-3 3mo ago
  All Xbox consoles can play audio CDs. (Later ones need software added to do that, but that software is free.) Playstations after the PS3, though: Not so much. (Sony lost track of their "It Only Does Everything" schtick[1] somewhere along the way.) [1]: https://blog.playstation.com/2009/08/27/it-only-does-everything/ https://blog.playstation.com/2009/08/27/it-only-does-everyth...

shimman 3mo ago

Funny because the CD player in my car has been dead for like 16 years but the cassette player has never been better. Wonder why the cassette player lasted much longer, guessing the optical drive in the car is damaged because CDs will fail to read after like 10 second.

6031769 3mo ago
Do you drive over a lot of cattle grids? CD players are precision items and don't take kindly to high impulse. Conversely, many tape decks are seriously robust. My dad had an old Grundig tape deck that was built like a tank (or a 380Z). Pretty sure whoever has that now is still getting quality sounds out of it.
- shimman 3mo ago
  Hmm, I've had for the car for 20 years (it's even older). Where I originally lived the roads were always smooth + paved well (also elevation was basically flat). Now that I'm in a city with actual hills (along with snow plows that ruin the roads), that's when the problems occurred. Seriously never seen so many potholes before in my life! Not a cattle grid, but wouldn't have thought of the pothole angle without it.

mbs159 3mo ago

> The real problem was almost no one had a CD player not even in their car! That's wild. Popping in a CD is part of the road trip experience!

w4der 3mo ago
I remember the frustration of hitting a washboarded dirt road and the CD jumping around and messing playback.

kleiba2 3mo ago

One of the hobby projects that I want to do, and hopefully will find the time for before we get rid of my wife's car, is to retrofit it with a CD player, powered by a Raspberry Pi or something alike. It could nicely live in the glove compartment and I believe the in-car entertainment system is already equipped with an aux port.

grahamburger 3mo ago
Ha, this reminded me-when I was a teenager I had an old beat-up car that didn't have a CD player or an AUX port. I also had an old boombox that had removable speakers. I removed the glove box from the car and, with the speakers removed, the boombox fit perfectly into the open space. I powered it with an inverter and used one of those old tapes that played from a headphone jack to connect the boombox to the car sound system. It sounded like dirt, and I got a strange look from a cop when I got pulled over and didn't have a glove box in which to keep my registration, but it worked!

specproc 3mo ago

I did the same for a friend's birthday recently: put together a bunch of mix CDs as a present. My concession to the fact he probably doesn't use a CD player much was a QR code, with a link to a matching Spotify playlist.

MrDOS 3mo ago
Two years ago, we sent CDs as our wedding invitations. We also received a lot of feedback to the effect that lots of our guests had difficulty finding a way to play the discs (including at least one person who was incredulous that the CD was real; but that might be because we sent vinyl-effect CDs). I put a Spotify code[0] to the playlist on the back cover as a concession to streaming, but if anyone knew what it was and used it, they never told me. [0]: https://www.spotifycodes.com/ https://www.spotifycodes.com/

2OEH8eoCRo0 3mo ago

It's hard to buy people media now. You can't really gift people CDs, DVDs, or Blu-Rays because nobody has players anymore.

kevincox 3mo ago
A USB drive with FLAC files works pretty well. It doesn't have the same feel as a CD with art though. For movies there isn't a legal way to acquire proper files unfortunately.
tiborsaas 3mo ago
It's safe to assume to buy them a player device too with the CD :)
tayo42 3mo ago
Game consoles play all of those. For now I guess lol
- doublepg23 3mo ago
  Funny enough, neither the PS4 or PS5 support CDs. https://www.playstation.com/en-us/support/hardware/play-video-music-discs-usb-drives/#nodisc https://www.playstation.com/en-us/support/hardware/play-vide...
m463 3mo ago
Send a player too. :)

m463 3mo ago

[dead]