RIP obsolete tech

CDs are geat, still burn them all the time. I have a Jellyfin server that hosts my digital music collection, but sometimes I may be going on a long drive without internet and CDs are unmatched for that. No battery, no internet requirement, and hold hundreds of hours of music in a a small book in my backseat.
- I have an old android phone running lineage and I host a hotspot if I want it to have data, it's amazing how well Android Auto works without Internet access compared to having data though.

I have a CD player in my 2004 car and I burn CDs regularly.
- I have a 2005 car, but I don't burn CDs. I plug my phone into a cassette adapter.

I’m gonna burn a bunch of music to cd this week just because I can. Might even archive some movies.

Burning cds of my punk band to sell
Encountering the first bunch of “I don’t own a cd player” people.
Cracking the music biz during the collapse of it was a bad idea.

It was Armin Van Buuren's Intense. Burned it for a road trip.

Remember me Nero Express, good memories, awesome name for a CD burner.
My brother recently found 15 year old CDs with family photos and they still work.
It's funny how video game media often degrades quickly due to use, but well-packaged and lightly used discs can last for many years. Maybe still a great solution for data that doesn't need to be accessed constantly.
- Except disc rot is a thing.
  
  It's why I've gone through all of my old media and transferred them to my media PC. But I have to admit it's more satisfying when it's in the form of physical media, when it's all computer files I hardly ever look at them.
- As a kid I always thought that Nero is a stupid name for a program because in Finnish nero means genius. To be honest I still think that it's a stupid name.

I had to do it last year so my school would let me listen to music during tests. Had to be on a burned cd so they could review it for cheating. I'm just lucky I still put a disc-drive in my pc builds.

I remember the day I burned my last CD. The fire department paid me a visit.
- Haha thanks dad

It was only a few years ago, when I ran off some Dreamcast games.

Work with medical data in Germany and you'll burn CDs every day, probably for the next 50 years.
- Yeah, I have a CD with some x rays lying around here somewhere.
  Although the MRT images I got done recently were accessed via QR code (+password) on an online portal, so yay progress.
- Little known fact, German doctors love to make cd's for every procedure. The most famous of these as shown by German medical data is Heinrich's Proctology Polka Mega Mix.

I thought that I burned my last cd a long time ago until my uni required me to hand in my thesis on a cd.
Buying a 4-pack of CDs (with cases) was more expensive than buying a 128gb sd card.

What's burning a cd?
- Fuck the irony of a child calling themselves the grammar police.
  The internet is a lie and I take no one seriously.
  
  Bro, I'm an adult male
- The act of ‘burning’ an optic disc was to write data onto a CD/DVD/Blu-Ray. It was called that because a laser would literally burn the information into the disc.
  
  Thanks grandpa🙏

Bullshit. Just two weeks ago I burned an audio CD as a gift for someone who enjoys listening in their car or on their player in the bathroom. Not everything needs to be always online streaming or has the ability to read SD cards or USB sticks.
Burning a FLAC and hearing on a HiFi system with nice cable headphones sounds so much better than a garbled compressed audio stream that gets recompressed to be send over Bluetooth.

I'm baffled at how many people here still burn cds.....

Sigh. I work in medical IT. They still burn shit. I've written procedures for USB, but alas...

I burned an audio CD just a few weeks ago. My car doesn't have Bluetooth audio, so I've kept going old school all along. I bought a few stacks of empty CD-R's and DVD-R's when the stores wanted to get rid of them.
I have zero streaming subscriptions and no intention of getting any. The number of films, games and music albums I've bought from flea markets and second hand stores during the past 10 years has to be in the hundreds. And not one has cost more than 3$.
Even my kids haven't complained about the lack of streaming, they seem perfectly happy using my physical media library.
- Whoa, you sound exactly like an improved version of me!
  Where do you get .wav files these days??
  
  I get them by ripping CD:s or digitizing vinyl albums.
  EDIT: Typo.

My barely consumed blank cd tower somewhere in my basement agrees.

Last week isn't really that long ago. Going through my mom's old things and found a PC she bought new back in 2013. A Dell Optiplex 790 with a dvdrw in it.
I just happened to have a couple of blanks so I verified that it worked before pulling it out and using it as an external drive. Works that way as well on my much newer Ryzen 5800x build in a case with no 5.25" bays. (Or externally accessed 3.5s for that matter. No external bays of any sort other than some USB ports on the front.)
My 2006 Honda also has a 6 disc changer and it sounds better than the Bluetooth adapter I connected to it. (It is wired to the back of the factory sound system, but Bluetooth audio just sounds flat to me, even on the best speakers)
- Assuming your head unit is double-din, you could upgrade your radio that has an equalizer feature built in
  
  That won't do anything about Bluetooth audio compression.

Happened around 2010. Trust me I remember.

We should go back to doing it, physical media is where it's at.
- minidiscs are a good sweet spot if youre looking for something physical. theyre not too big so you can fit a few discs in your pockets. the player itself can easily fit in your pants pocket as well. any minidisc player that has ~~webMD~~ netMD support will let you add or remove tracks using a web browser. theres the LP mode that lets you fit more music on a disc
  
  I would legitimately switch back to one of my old MD players in an heartbeat if I had access to a decent software to load music on. Those little wired remotes with LCD screens were when technology peaked, IMO.
  Any recommendations for an alternative to SonicStage (or whatever Sony’s proprietary crapola from back in the day was called)?
- Physical media yes, CDs or DVDs no. Most discs I burned are probably unreadable by now. I remember my favorite artist explaining how he probably had to stop making music because it just wasn't financially viable. So I decided to buy all his albums (I had all the albums in mp3 format for years). Its about 10 years later, all the CDs are lost or destroyed (most in my car). I still have a NAS with the original mp3s I downloaded 20 years ago.
  
  Yeah, I burned 100s of music cds as well about 20 years ago, and stored them in those books with slots. They weren't stored in a car, but still about a quart of them doesn't play anymore, and I am sure it won't be long before none of them will. All my store bought cds of the same age or older still works fine though.
  Homeburning is not a good physical media alternative.

My last ISO was hirens boot CD. Shit like me test and whatnot

Why is this written in the past tense?

Mdisks are a viable offline long term backup solution, and cheaper to get started with than tape drives.

i sure was fucking hoping it was though

I have not yet begun to peak. I'm gonna make a driving CD eventually

You can go burn a CD and know that it would be the last time. Not only is it not yet dead, it is still pretty widely used.

I just burned one today, it was the easiest way to transfer a game to a Windows 95 notebook. 🫠
- Wait is that in the background supposed to be the tardis?
- Friggin Keener
  
  Why didn't you just zip drive it?

Jokes on you, I still burn my acquired digital media to BluRay discs
Disk rot is like 25 years while an SSD still doesn't have that kind of shelf life
- Doesn't it make more sense use harddisks?
  I mean, the ultimate long terms storage medium seems to be tape, but that stuff is very expensive, but outside that harddisks seem to have the best balance of accessibility and shelf life.
- Right post there chief
- Who are these mad men who are dumping stuff to SSDs and then sitting them on a shelf? Can't get my mind around it.
  
  You'd be surprised. And then they tell me disk rot makes BD not recommended.... meanwhile this happens after several decades and is exceedingly rare

i burned a cd 2 weeks ago.
- Ok, boomer
  
  unneccessarily rude!
  They might be just genX.
  
  I don’t think burning CDs was much of a boomer activity.
  
  No boomers are the ones reading the CDs not writing them. Their kids are writting them.
- ... and you didn't know it was the last time
  
  Every time is the last one, at least for a while
  
  naw, we have a cd juke box at my work. pretty sure ill be burning them for the foreseeable future.
- Cd.....or DVD?
  
  cd, thats why i said cd.

I burnt about 100 disks last year as an offsite, nuclear resistant backup... though, if nuclear war broke out, that would be the least of my worries
- Even if nuclear war breaks out, at least the bank will still have records of how much we still owe them :)

I still have a big stack of blank CDs and DVDs. I burned a DVD late last year. I don't think I've hit my last time yet. But maybe.
- No way crazyyyy this generalization didn't apply to SOMEONE on the internet. no wayyyyyy
  
  You know 4chan is back online, right?

Unless I die tomorrow, you're wrong.

Occasionally break out the burner, it’s just very rare. Plus these days it’s a portable little usb drive.

Burning one today just because of this post.
- lightscribe for old time's sake?
  
  — still use one of these from 2011.
  
  There where points in time where I had a lightscribe disk, and points in time where I had a lightscribe drive. But never both at the same time. I feel like this says something, but I dunno what.
  
  I went out of my way to buy a LightScribe drive for my 2008 build [C2D E8400, 4GB DDR2 800, AMD HD 4870, Vista Ultimate + Linspire], and I never even used the feature. Burned less than a dozen discs total as well.
  I feel like optical media died around that same time. Netflix introduced its streaming service, torrents entered the mainstream, Blu Ray flopped, and MP3 players replaced CD players (and then streaming replaced MP3 players shortly after). Didn't even bother with an optical drive in my 2014 build [i5-4670K, 16GB DDR3 1866, GTX 780, Win8.1 + Ubuntu]. Current build doesn't have one, either [7700X, 32GB DDR5 6000, 4090, Win11 + Arch]. Just been hanging onto the same drive since 2008, for the rare occasion that I actually need to burn a disc. At this point it's been over 5 years.

I do the opposite now. I buy discs cheap from bin stores, rip them onto my desktop and then upload to my home library for more affordable 'streaming'.

It was a CD rw and didn't actually work. The data wasn't there.

I burn Blu-rays once in a while. They work for backup.
- They don't last very long. About 5-10 years at most, and that's if you bought special archival burnable DVDs. If you depend on them for backups, you should check the integrity annually (always include a checksum like SHA256 with any backup archive).
  
  I have CDs that I burned in the 90s that still work fine. I’m assuming the blu-rays I burn now will probably last as long, which is decades longer than I need them to.
- ...you need so much specific equipment. You do realise that the day blue ray was announced we collectively gave up on physical data storage in the form of polished mineral disks right?
  
  So much equipment.
  First you have to buy the DVD writer and then you also have to get yourself blank DVDs.
  
  We definitely did not gave up on discs. They may no longer be mass consumer oriented. But bluray for backup, archiving and data transfer are still a thing. Nothing beats the bandwidth of a plane filled with hard drives. The media itself is not relevant, magnetic tape is still available and used to this day. The first time I held more than a terabyte in my hand was in a data tape cartridge. Consumer hard drives hadn't gotten there yet. Even today, new optical media is being researched. There are fascinating breakthroughs on laser engraved crystal storage.
  Anyways, I just wanted to remember that wasteful mass consumption media is not representative of humanity as a whole.
  
  I just use a USB Blu-ray burner. Similar to this one:
  https://a.co/d/0KIB1LJ
  
  Polished mineral? Like a silicon wafer? um??
- I use them all the time. If you plan to leave any data behind that even theoretically exists in 50 years, readable or not, optical media is your only option. Or Ardrive if you want to spend 1000x the amount and make it public. Or microfilm if you are a masochist. In case you plan on leaving any videos around for your grandchildren.
- NOOOOO! You must use cheap AliExpress SSDs, because something something 1980's tech something something technological advancements must be pushed at all cost!
  
  Tape or bust (if you can afford it)
- I've never had a Blu-ray player and at this point I expect I never will.

I still store offsite backups on CD and DVD disks

I still burn CDs. This whole streaming thing won't last. Also, my back hurts...
- The real meta is to have a hard drive full of flac files and use tailscale to stream them wherever you are from your computer at home
  
  Plexamp is also good for this
  
  That's the dream. Currently debating what to do with a spare laptop and "make it a server" sounds ideal.
  
  I need to learn how to do this.
  
  Yeah well... Can you set the time on a VCR?

That's sad but true, man. Miss you "Car Rock VI".

June 13th, 2022. 7:13pm. If that's the last one I burn, I will at least know when. It was Windows XP Media Center 2005, for my fleamarket Dell Demension E510. Well, more accurately, an E310 with a E510 motherboard.
- I'm about to drop a supermicro Xeon board plus an E3-1275 and 32G of ECC ram into the guts of this old Optiplex 790 mini tower I have. (i3 2100, so a generation newer, and a Xeon instead of an i3)
  I plan to eventually get a better case but for now this is fine. Right now it's running Plex media server on FreeBSD on bare metal, but I'm planning to swap to proxmox once I get the new board installed.
  Unfortunately that won't be for another week. While the board will be here today, it is a little more power hungry than the old system, and I'm already pushing the OEM 375W PSU with 5 drives (SATA SSD and 4 7200rpm SAS drives) so I also have a PSU coming. But that is not expected until middle of next week.
  
  Oh, that sounds like a fun project! Going to post it to Lemmy when you're done? I'm not familiar with proxmox. I see it's based on Debian, is it basically an os specifically for running vm instances or something?
  I like the look of that generation Optiplex. My current main PC is a slightly upgraded XPS 8930, which is IMO one of the ugliest Dell cases. And the airflow has been a terrible challenge. But since it's not a standard board, I can't just pop it in a better case. And there's no way im buying a new mobo for an LGA 1151. So, I'm stuck until I build something new.

There are plenty of people who never did that at all.
- ✋

I doubt it. Although, I imagine I may have recorded over my last tape.

If we include DVDs I probably put a Linux distro iso on one in 2010 or 2011. CDs? Maybe a CD I made for a road trip on 2009 or 2010.

I literally have to do this for work so unless I lose this job it's gonna be another decade

Last time I saw this template it was "Someday your parent will carry you in their arm for the last time and neither of you will know it was the last time."
😭
- My grandfather made it a point to lift everyone until he couldn't get then off the ground anymore.

I'm not dead yet and have a Blu-ray burner and some blanks.

I did know. It was 2 years ago when me and my neighbour pranked our neighborhood grandma by burning shitty music and leaving the CD in the mail.

I was hoping for it tho.

I still burn them sometimes for the car.
- The car you downloaded? Because YOU would totally download a car?
  
  I downloaded a dealership, and i don't know where to put it.
- I think that was the last CD I burned too, before I just started auxing in my phone with Spotify.
  Based on my phone and car-stereo timelines, I guess that means my last burn was probably in 2009 at the latest.

I loved DVD-RAM. I could just mount them in Linux and copy backups on it. They are even reusable, like you could just delete a super old backup and put a new one on it. I think I stopped using them, because of capacity.
- That sounds like slow-ass RAM.

I didn't know it was the last time, and I don't know when exactly it was, but I do know what it was that I burnt:
A Linux install CD
- Haha same. Honestly I think that was the only reason I ever burned CDs.
  
  For a while, burning CDs was my way of keeping backup of stuff. I might still have a bunch of them stored somewhere and if I still had any way to read them I would be picking them up right now to see which ones still worked and if there was anything interesting in there.

I miss lightscribe
- I still have a lightscribe drive in my main PC. No lightscribe discs though.
- I used to use the work lightscribe to burn my band's cds.
- I was just about to comment that the last time I did it, it was because I had some lightscribe disks that I wanted to try, but already had no use for anything on a CD.
- Wasn't that the label making thing? I think I had a laptop once that had that as a feature but it was literally never used

Jokes on you, I've never burned a CD