Asklemmy @lemmy.ml

1y ago

Do you prefer CD-R or CD-RW for music?

For those who use CDs for music, which writable CD type do you use, and why?

Main differences:

CD-R can only be written once
CD-RW is more expensive

128 comments

Did I hit my head and wake up in 2002?
- im sorry i just like cds 🥺
  
  I'm sincerely curious: why?
  Hipsters claim vinyl sounds better than digital, despite a complete lack of evidence, but at least there's a measurable difference between analog and digital, if only in the additional dirty noise produced by the hardware. With CDs, though... digital is digital. There's literally no difference between a wav and a CD; in fact, you can get more bits in a flac recording if it's recorded right, which would only be degraded by recording to a CD.
  So, is it the form factor? Some tactile benefit? Or you like the mandatory ritual of switching out CDs every 60 minutes? Why do you like CDs... because it isn't for the sound.
  
  I think they're a great format to buy, but nowadays not that great to use. They offer the best audio quality of all physical media (fight me, vinyl enthusiasts), are really easy to handle (on par with cassettes), offers track selection (later cassette decks could detect silence but this doesn't work for gapless tracks), the equipment is rather cheap nowadays, it's a digital format without DRM... red book CD might be the best consumer media industry has ever created, my only gripe in the modern world is that its sampling rate is a bit off today's 48kHz.
  However, I only rip the CDs to lossless and then rarely take them out of my cupboard anymore, don't even have a CD player. Using CDs in a mobile setting is a whole different beast, it requires a buffer and can also damage the discs in the worst case. But at home, pressed CDs live very long without any degradation in sounds quality, regardless of use. And ironically, buying them is often cheaper than buying non-physical only, though it often means that you end up with tracks you don't want. But that's an issue all physical media has.
- Shh just go with it, we deserve this.

In 2008? CD-R, they're cheap and you aren't going to change the songs on the disc rather than just burn a new disc entirely.
In 2024? micro SDXC card in my phone.
- Do any phones even have that anymore?
  
  Pretty sure it's easier to find a phone with a mini SD slot than a phone with a CD player.
  
  I don't think I've ever owned a smartphone without one.
  
  Sony phones have SD slots and… gasp a 3.5 mm headphone jack
  
  Mid range Samsungs and pretty much everything that's not made by either Apple, Google, or Samsung still has it. We are just in the ridiculous situation that the more expensive the phone the less functionality it has.
  
  My note 20 Ultra will keep getting used until there is, damn it.
  The next Asus Rog phone is coming out pretty soon, I think. Guessing it will have one, but don't know how many cell networks it will end up fully working on.
  *Nevermind the rog. It seems none of their phones have had an SD card slot. Lame

CD-R has a much wider range of compatibility than CD-RW, so if you're looking to play music you'll probably want to go with CD-R.
And as for data, I wouldn't use a CD at all. Optical Media is absolute shit for data preservation and those early claims of lasting thousands of years are highly exaggerated, the backing on the CDs (and DVDs) lasts for a few decades at most.
If you insist on optical data backups you'll want archival grade discs that are made of glass instead of plastic and don't use glue on foil for the backing but even those are projected to last hundreds of years at most, and they're not cheap.
- Wow I did not know this. I was going to back up some photos onto CD-R as an extra safeguard. I have it backed up on a hard drive and cloud currently but wanted another back up. Will look into something else now.
  
  M-Discs will do the trick for a couple centuries, which should exceed the span in which the data needs to be stored. Requires a burner that can handle the discs though.
  
  Words carved into stone is your best bet. Have GPT-4 describe each picture in a thousand words, then carve those words into the wall of a very deep cave.
  Later if you need the picture back you can just put those thousand words in as a prompt to Dalle
- i get it, but for me personally, its just so convenient to just get in the car and something is already set up and playing.
  
  I learned to get people off my back about xbox (instead of gaming PC) by telling them I like the colorful buttons.

I hate being GenZ I don't even know yet there's more than one type of CD
- CD: the kind you buy from a store with content already on it. Mass-produced with methods and equipment not available in the consumer electronics market, because it was never really necessary. Also includes CD-ROM (Read Only Memory) for data/files read by a computer instead of music alone
  CD-R (Recordable): can be written ("burned") once and only once. As mentioned in another comment, it may deteriorate over time because of how the disc gets written, but by the time that happens you'll probably forget you had that disc
  CD-RW (ReWriteable): Can be written like a CD-R, but you can also erase it and write on it again. More expensive, and I believe some readers had trouble with it, but in a world where data storage was expensive and small this was still a useful thing to have
  DVDs had a similar thing, except there were variants where the - was a +, eg DVD+R and DVD+RW. I can't remember the difference there, but it was pretty trivial. There was also a relatively obscure DVD-RAM that had random access memory. That was pretty cool as well, kind of an alternative to DVR that wasn't a VHS tape. No need to lose everything you had if you wanted to add more to it
  
  The difference between DVD-R and DVD+R is how tracking/timing metadata is encoded on the disc. As manufactured, the disc isn't entirely "blank," it's got tracks for the laser to follow already on it, which include timing marks to help the drive track and index the data. -R and +R discs use different techniques for doing this, almost entirely because Sony just can't handle anything that isn't their own in-house proprietary shit.
  This didn't effect playback. Once the disc was burned, that metadata was still there but an ordinary DVD-ROM drive (or DVD movie player) wouldn't even look for it, for playback, it looks like any other disc. It was only an issue for recording, and as a user you had to know which your DVD burner was capable of using so you could buy the correct discs. Eventually DVD burners were built to handle both, and today unless you have some vintage equipment it's a non-issue.
  
  Thanks
- I'm a mid-to-older millennial. My elders would say shit like "What? You don't know how to use a gramophone? You young whippersnappers are completely worthless." And I find that behavior absolutely abhorrent.
  If you were here in person, I'd offer to spend some time burning some CDs. I've still got a computer with some pretty decent optical drives laying around. I can probably even scare up some blank discs. We'd find some music, burn it to a disc and then try it out on my old boom box.
  
  As long as you gave them the full experience with tossing a disc in the trash because of a buffer overrun. Damn Nero software!
  
  I suspect they were trying to rib you, and you were too young to grok that yet.
- Don't hate it! You were just born in a different time. Your time will come where you have to explain to the young ones about how "smart phones" worked since they'll just have their implants as interfaces. And also jetpacks.
  
  Jet pack is simple. You just strap it on and fly away
- Sure, let's downvote him for being honest, well done redd.. Lemmy.
- Same, there's like 3 or 4 💀

Won't lie, for a short period I had a Sony mini disk set up and I don't think I can ever appreciate other modern physical mediums of music as much.
And I can't explain why other than personal biast reasons, either.
- I can. Subjectively, MD wasn’t as delicate as CD-R was. None of my old CD-Rs are readable anymore.
- The mini-disk could/should have been king!

CD-R is written in an organic-dye, which deteriorates ( I've read the AZO chemistry is more enduring )
CD-RW is written in the crystallization of a metal layer.
CD-RW is permanent record, unless you heat them, or blank them, or overwrite/rewrite them: chemical-deterioration isn't a problem.
I learned this with backups, many many years ago.
I've no idea if DVD-RW discs also are recorded in a eutectic metal layer, but they've multiple record-layers ( 2? ), and I'm don't know how you can make a eutectic-metal layer that is transparent-enough to get through/past it to write the next layer,
so I've no idea how permanent DVD-RW's are.
I've lost data on the -R technology.
I've never lost data on the CD-RW technology.
- I have, incidentally. Not on purpose: My father rearranged a room whilst I was away, putting the entire disc collection on the north-west-facing wall of the house. Bookcase heated and cooked the lot in the afternoon summer sun that January. He was upset when I explained why nothing worked any more.

CD-RW is superior. It's more expensive but you could use it as many times as you need. So if you were for example a 13 year old who loved to distro hop Linux distributions.. it's very useful to be able to rewrite whatever you were doing.
The price difference is quickly made up for with the re-usability factor.
Although I don't understand why anyone would burn a CD anymore. You can buy flash drives with a ton of storage for really cheap these days. You have all sorts of cloud options. You can even rent your own VPS for less than $5 a month.
- Although they are supposed to be forever rewritable I could only ever get quality brand RWs to do 3 to 5 rewrites before burns would fail verification. Source: lots of data migration between servers where USB sticks and networking was restricted.
  
  i think a lot of it depended on your cd burner. i've had differing amounts of success with different burners.
  still though, the price was not 3-5x higher if i remember correctly
- The price difference is quickly made up for with the re-usability factor.
  I don't think that's true, CD-Rs cost pennies. You have to rewrite every CD-RW 4 or 5 times before it's comparable in price. In practice, across every CD-RW ever made, the approximate number of times it is written is probably about 0.5
- My 02 Toyota Camry doesn't have a USB slot and I don't feel like changing head units unless I'm wiring in subs, CDs and tapes still run. Also surprisingly the 02 Toyota Camry doesn't integrate with Nextcloud so no cloud service for my car.
  
  there's all sorts of options there too if you have an old car
  for example there are those CD -> aux or CD -> bluetooth convertors so you can play music off your phone
  but i guess if you do have an old car sometimes it can be nostalgic to put in some CDs. i remember having a belt of CDs on my sun visor. so i get it

In the thick of the cd era I tried to use RW and there wasn’t much rewritable about them. Any attempt to change the data, even to just add a new track, turned the disk into a coaster. Better to stick to CD-R and just burn a whole new disk each update.

How old is this post?

miniDisc FTW
- For sure.
  My mini disc cost as much as the first iPod when it came out. It was either 3 or 5 of the discs equaled it's storage and I think it even took rechargeable AA batteries. Or at least had an attachment that would work with them.
  And it has the remote in the cord that gave song title and playlist info.
  It was better in everyway. But the promise of "new" and the marketing made everyone go iPod. I never met a single other person at the time that had a mini disc.
  But being able to just swap a disc with someone at school and then upload it back to your computer at home would have been huge at the time.
  Literal peer to peer file sharing without the internet. And it might have been normalized for an entire generation if Steve Jobs wasn't so good at marketing.
  
  Wtf man, don’t you know not to copy that floppy? 🙃
  
  just like mine. in fact, i loved it so much, i didn't go iPod until gen 3. man, i still miss my MD player...
  
  Minidiscs rocked! My first model, which I loved, was unfortunately stolen. They hardly took up any room and I could carry loads of them on my travels to college. They were cheap and came in lovely bright colours.
  The replacement model I bought was a Sony NetMD which I thought was amazing. It ran for hours on it's chewing gum battery and if that failed, I could screw on an attachment to use a single AA battery.
  The player used Sony's new compression techniques and I could fit three or four albums on a single disc. It came with a dock and connected to my Windows 95 PC so I could rip CDs or convert mp3s and use the computer to fill in the artist and track name information.
  I found the in-line remote on eBay so I could control it via the little cylinder remote with the backlit blue LCD display, clipped to my jacket.
  I loved minidiscs.
- Okay, so I somehow missed the whole minidisc era. I imagine probably because it was shortlived, or just impractical for me at the time. However I find them incredibly fascinating, especially portable minidisc players. I've low key been on the lookout for one while thrifting, so I have an excuse to dive in.
  
  they were super-cool, and, yeah, it was very short-lived. i had a net-MD player, a small, portable MD player that ran on a single AA battery and lasted ages. it could also record on-device and also played mp3s. i loved that fucking thing!
  MDs were better than CD-RWs because they were 1/2 the size and came in a case while being almost skip-proof.
- If you still have any minidiscs around, glue a couple magnets on the back and they make a great retro fridge magnet.
- Worked in radio for a number of years, and we used mini disks to record phone calls for a while. Still have a number of them knocking around a storage box somewhere.
- I did not have any miniDiscs but I did have a SuperDisk in a PC I built which was a complete waste of time and money.
  The SuperDisk was a waste. Not my whole PC.
  
  oh, i remember those. they were like a super-Zip disk right in the era when usb flash drives and early sd cards and CD-Rs and -RWs were just becoming a thing.
  i remember they never took off because nobody could quite figure out what to use them for since there were several other overlapping storage media that were emergent at the time which were better suited to their needs (and cheaper).
  
  I had an IOMega ZIP (the original 100MB one) back in the 90s, connected to my Amiga 1200. Those were definitely not a waste when they first came out. I used to run a BBS back then, and had a drive crash and yeah backup wasn't quite so easy or affordable back then. So I had to rebuild my file library.
  I went to a local fellow Sysop with a few zip disks and had a file library back up and running in no time.

I used CD-RW and re-wrote them a bit 25 years ago when the price of a CD-R was high, and a CD-RW cost like 2-3x of a CD-R, when the prices dropped it stopped making sense.
Last time I burned a CD/DVD was 10-15 years ago.

Burning CDs back in the day was a sort of art. You had to choose a write speed slow enough that your single-CPU computer could keep the buffer fed, but fast enough that you could get through the whole thing without dying of boredom or needing to use the bathroom, because walking across the room was enough to make the head skip and corrupt the data.
A failed burn with a CD-R turned a disc into a coaster. A CD-RW gave you several chances to get a good burn.
- I had one of the first CD writers with buffer underrun protection (TDK 32x / 12x / 10x if I recall) and suddenly felt invincible because it was pretty near guaranteed that the burn would work.
  
  Kinda like we all take antilock brakes for granted now. Back in the day just slamming on the brakes in a bad situation would mean losing control of the car.
  
  yooo i remember those TDK drives—they were highly coveted. my first CD burner was a 2x external USB drive. it would frequently take about 45 mins to burn a disc

I always preferred R, the RW disks seemed less reliable.
- R if you want rock solid reliability and compatibility, RW if the device supports it

Whats up with the 2000s tech being so hot on Lemmy right now?

I haven't used a cd in 15 years lol

just curious why anyone would bother using a CD—its a digital medium so playing a CD vs just playing a .wav file off your computer or phone is literally the exact same audio quality (unless the cd is damaged and you get skipping which is not optimal…). You can connect speakers to a computer. it is literally the exact same thing. I understand people liking ANALOG media (vinyl or [for some unknown reason] tape cassette) but what is the point of using an out dated, flimsy and easily destructible DIGITAL storage?
- car stereo, without connecting a phone
  
  Yea, but why?

I like CD-R, not for regular use but it occured to me that it's one of the only consumer accessable media formats that are actually write once. It's kind of neat to make a custom disk that is forever unchanged, pop it on years later and go through what was your sound X years back without having to worry about whatever service having pulled licences or modified lists.
- Polaroid is another one

Eh, overall R for the same reason most peeps have said, it was pretty much guaranteed compatibility.
But truth is, RW worked in anything I ever tried it in, and it was nice for having a couple of car discs full of mp3s that I could shift around some. Since I have a small case of those in the car that still work, I ain't mad at RW at all. It's been eight years for some of those, and over a decade for two.
I should probably order some and make a few new ones lol.

CD-RW, of course. But only if the player supports it. I can update the music, that's why.

I have gotten whole cases of CD-R's at yard sales and thrift stores. I do not own a single CD-RW. Even when I purchase them, the CD-R's are so cheap that if I mess up I can just toss the error and still come out ahead. If I needed to overwrite it frequently I would probably just use a different media if available (like a USB drive).
- CD-R GANG

CD-R, rewriting has a higher chance to corrupt. And if you like your music you won’t need to overwrite it
- But what about when the cultural editors publish patches to existing music?

CD-R since it’s better for compatibility and I actually had issues with RW in the past where I could only burn a CD once and not be able to rewrite on it. I was burning them as audio CDs for car use at the time.
Nowadays? Rip ‘em and slap them onto an external drive (maybe even onto the cloud if you wanna go that far), then toss out or donate the CD so you don’t have to lug that shit around. I’d rather buy the vinyl if it’s an album I really like.
- Yeah I remember having the same compatibility and rewrite-ability issues with RW back in the ‘00s, ended up being easier and cheaper to stick with R.

Back when I actually used CDs for music, I had a CD MP3 player made by Rio. I also had a copy of Roxio that could basically use a CD-RW almost like a thumb drive, you didn't have to worry about writing sessions or whatever, you could just add and remove files, so that's how I managed my MP3 player. I think I only used that one CD-RW.
For regular redbook audio discs I would just use CD-Rs.

CD-RW isn’t compatible on many basic CD players like CD-Rs are so unless you have a player that you know supports RW, it’s usually best to go with R.

I'll be honest. When I upgraded my PC I finally moved to one without any bays. So my rewriter that I've not used for probably 10+ years came out of my setup.
Funny story, I did some work on my old setup some 5 years or so ago. I must have unplugged the rewriter to get at some cabling and never re-connected it. I never noticed in those 5 years, until I was taking the parts out I was moving to my new system and saw it was just not connected.
Now, when I DID make CDs around 10+ years ago or more, I used CD-Rs.

I had to do a double take to see how old is this post.

I prefer Ogg/Vorbis for music.

CD-R, all the way.
I'm not gonna waste time constantly rebuilding playlists on the same CDs. I get my ideal track list built, burn it, then that's my one CD for that playthrough. If I come up with another one, I'll burn another CD. Music sets an emotional tone for situations; I have a lot of good memories that I can relive just by playing the CDs I listened to on repeat around that time.
If being thrifty is your game, then the CD-RW is a better choice. Yeah, it's more expensive, but you only need one. You just rebuild your playlist anytime you want something different. Unlike CD-Rs, which require a new disc for every single playlist. That cost adds up over time.
But that's all inconsequential, as burning CDs was only efficient 20 years ago. There are much better ways to transfer and listen to music nowadays. Heck, MP3 players pretty much replaced CDs as a better way to listen to music on the go, and those are outdated now too.
Nowadays, If I want music on the go, I either copy a few albums to my smartphone, or connect to Plex and stream them from my home computer.

CD-R.
I think I bought some CD-RW a looong time ago and never, ever re-wrote with them. Hard to think of a scenario where I would do that.
Also, I just bought some Taiyo Yuden again recently. They're still available (scamazon).

The only time it has ever seemed to matter is for live cds i.e linux. Anecdotally I had more issues with the rewritables than the write once and "if anything goes wrong get another disc" discs.

CD-R for compatibility

In the of mobile streaming, mobile storage or cars having usb / etc why would you still be using cds at this point? If you are doing this for a home stereo, use high quality stored audio on a pc and stream from there locally.
- my car only has: cd player, radio, and aux cord. i can also get the cigarette lighter bluetooth thing, but i dont like connecting my phone to the car just to play music.
  
  Aux cord is your best friend. Get a 3.5mm adapter and use that + everything I mentioned. Best way to go

Used audio CDs are so cheap (most are anyways) that I don't see any point in making your own, other than making a physical play list.
Thinking about it, I have two optical drives in my PC and never even used them to burn a CD...
- if you listen to unpopular music and dont wanna pay a 20$ shipping cost per disc 😔
  
  I've never paid that much for a used CD on eBay and I don't think I only listen to popular or well-known artists...
  Try the Discogs Marketplace if you haven't had any luck on eBay, sellers there tend to know a bit more about how much their stuff is worth. It's pretty nice if you're looking for a particular pressing, too.