You ever have a car cd player that plays files? You could put every song you downloaded from LimeWire onto a single disc.
That was an amazing time to be alive. I miss it sometimes. No need for a music streaming service when you have 4 gigs of music on one CD. Then If you get bored you can pull out the other CDs that also have stupid amounts of music. Or maybe you burned all of a language learning program onto one disc. ALL of the language discs onto one.
I was a Napster guy, then a Kazaa guy. I had moved on to torrents by the time Limewire was the big thing.
Though I haven’t actually pirated anything in over 10 years. Was thinking of getting back into it and setting up a Jellyfin to keep some family members from giving money to streaming services that support fascists, but don’t even know where to get files anymore. I’ve already got a VPN for privacy reasons, so I think I’m good there, but I can’t imagine Pirate Bay is still a safe source
You ever have a car cd player that plays files?
It’s pretty common.
My current car can do that (2019 Toyota) with the factory player.
As could every car I have owned in the previous couple decades.
“Ripping CDs” was a concerning term for non-technical friends even back then. I had to assure them it wouldn’t ruin their discs. It does sound more violent than it really is.
My favourite name for any application ever is Nero.
What does Nero do?
Burns (CD) ROM!
When I was 15 I bought a CD burner for my PC. This was circa 1999 and Napster. It cost about $250 (which is a little over $500 in 2026) and it had to be installed and in a more complex fashion beyond plug USB and let’s drivers auto install. I was selling custom CDs for $5 with case inserts and paid off the burner in about a month. Then someone snitched on me in school and eventually burners started becoming standard on all new machines

We had to use these dammit.
They’re burning to see deez nuts! Got 'em!

I burnt a cd like 3 weeks ago, this technology isn’t as archaic as you think
We’re on lemmy. Our opinions on how widely used tech is don’t count.
Personally my last 3 PCs haven’t had a disk drive and I can’t remember the last time I’ve SEEN a disc. It was almost certainly before college.
My son who’s 15 now had a word problem when he was about 9. It was something like “Billy burned 9 CDs and April burned 4 CDs, how many CDs did they have in total”. He asked me for help because he didn’t understand how the answer wasn’t 0 CDs. FML.
It’s slang for using Nero burning ROM
Jeez… I’d record on a cassette the top 20 from the radio on friday nights!!
Me and my sisters got a cassette recorder we had to share between us for such things. There were a lot of hours spent listening to the local AM station doing homework and hoping you could catch your favorite song to record.
It took determination and time to fill a cassette doing that. Buying 45’s was faster but more expensive.
Difficulty 1000x https://youtu.be/KkZ-8gcgyCE
Hoping that the deejay wouldn’t talk some vapid shit over the end of the song while they fade it out
There was a day when you inserted a CD into your computer for the last time and you didn’t even realise. Sad when you think about it.
I still have an optical drive, and i just put a disk in it about an hour ago.
The only sad thing is people foolishly abandoning physical media.
I didn’t find it sad. The writing was on the wall for physical media and I ripped it with the highest accuracy I could. I still have those albums in CD quality today.
That track at the end of Further Down the Spiral that relies on CD skipping is sort of lost to us, I guess. You can replicate it but kids won’t accidentally stumble upon it. Just like kids won’t accidentally stumble upon the “3rd spiral” of vinyl records. The Easter egg era is over.
Hey, I’m one of today’s ten thousand! I don’t think any of my LPs have a hidden groove but I want one now!
My Easter egg musical experience was with a CD, Guster’s Keep it Together. I was the first person in the family to get an mp3 player, and when I ripped the CD I found a minute long “Silent Track” before a hidden song, Two at a Time. When we saw them live next and I knew the lyrics to that song my parents were baffled lol.
Hidden grooves on records were not terribly common, as far as I am aware. I have Tool’s Undertow (which — if you have the CD version — you have already heard it) and a Monty Python record Tie and Handkerchief.
Not a terribly strong argument to preserve a format because I have no motivation to revisit either, but a fun little one time experience if you have either of those handy.
And for CDs, before the zero mark, there could be data. I think the X-Files TV show soundtrack had a couple of songs if you inserted the disc and immediately rewound before the starting zero. Like, in minus time. The table of contents apparently didn’t care about minus numbers.
I was still using 3 1/2" floppies regularly until 2014.
My car is a 2001 and has a CD player. Normally, this would preclude playing phone music (without that FM transmitter bullshit, at least), but this CD player was built to accommodate a 6-CD changer in the trunk, and you can buy a little gadget that plugs into the port for this and allows an aux jack to feed audio into the player. This worked great for me until my latest phone which has no audio port. My USB-C to 1/8" jack technically works, but the volume is way too low. So I’m back to burning CDs for my car.
Still doing it today. Its not an old thing. I have hundreds of Cds. Best form of physical media for me.
Especially with insanity HDD costs. I did the math, and while ridiculous, buying blank DVDs vs a 12 tb hard drive is only minimally more expensive and discs last longer. HDDs die all the time.
Obviously I still use drives but disks are definitely viable especially as data centers continue to ruin everything.
Circa 2017, I build my first desktop computer, I get the cheapest disc drive money can buy. Since then I’ve used it to burn one(1) CD. Any software disc I’ve tried using with it was too broken and out of date, leading me to download the driver instead.
I’ve tried using a friend’s game disc on it, assuring them that Wine for Linux supports 16-bit Windows games. Turns out they dropped that support months prior.
It now stands its silent vigil, waiting for its purpose to be truly fulfilled.
According to the Internet, wine 11 added 16 bit support back in for 64 bit systems.






