Sigh. I work in medical IT. They still burn shit. I’ve written procedures for USB, but alas…
I’m baffled at how many people here still burn cds…
Work with medical data in Germany and you’ll burn CDs every day, probably for the next 50 years.
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.
What’s burning a cd?
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.
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.
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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)
Happened around 2010. Trust me I remember.
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.
My last ISO was hirens boot CD. Shit like me test and whatnot
Why is this written in the past tense?
My barely consumed blank cd tower somewhere in my basement agrees.
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??
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 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.
Homeburning can be surprisingly robust as a backup method, and as an option of physical media, but I’d still keep backups on an actual NAS as well. There’s also a ton of variables that affect the lifetime of a burnt CD, like dyes used (cyanine - phthalocyanine - azo), lamination quality, storage and the burner used. Especially the quality and intensity of the build has a surprisingly strong effect, despite things being set in a standard – you can get a lot more storage life out of a CD burned using a quality 5.25" burner compared to a budget slim drive.
Also early discs based on cyanine had a notoriously short shelf life compared to the later archival quality discs, around 30 years or so in optimal conditions (and typically a lot less), so much of the stuff burnt in 90’s and 00’s has already began deteriorating. More recent quality discs can last over a century if stored properly, but the older ones can’t.
DVDs can also often have issues with delamination, meaning that especially the outer rim of the disc can start exhibiting bit rot quite early if you’re using low quality media. I’ve noticed even new discs having signs of early delamination between the two disc halves (DVDs have the data layer in between two acrylic discs, unlike CDs which have it on the backside directly under the reflective coating). I’ve also experienced a lot of issues when burning multilayer DVDs that might affect how long they last in storage, so for actual backups I’d prefer using a single layer disc instead.
But as per reasons for still using discs – they’re an unparalleled cold storage solution. With proper care you can actually leave them be for decades and be sure the data is still readable, unlike with SSDs which will lose their data when unpowered for a long period of time. Tape is a good option, but not really viable for consumers – also tape needs more active upkeep, since you typically have to copy over the old data to new media every 20-30 years or so (promised life in archival is 30 years, after which it might not be possible to get new drives for reading the tapes). Optical is also king when you need to transfer data into air-gapped environments, since with optical media it’s relatively easy to audit that what’s burned to the disc is unalterable. There’s a reason why I still keep a full install set of Debian handy.
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Mdisks are a viable offline long term backup solution, and cheaper to get started with than tape drives.
