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
  • SagXD@lemy.lol
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    10 months ago

    I hate being GenZ I don’t even know yet there’s more than one type of CD

    • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      10 months ago

      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.

      • spongebue@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        10 months ago

        As long as you gave them the full experience with tossing a disc in the trash because of a buffer overrun. Damn Nero software!

        • squeakycat@lemmy.ml
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          10 months ago

          And weird bugs like Windows audio somehow creeping into audio CD burns. Or the times in Linux where the tray would refuse to open or close. I used to keep a paper clip next to my next to force it open sometimes…

          I don’t miss that hardware.

          • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            10 months ago

            I had pretty good luck burning discs, they would occasionally fail.

            I had a CD-RW I used for my mp3 player, and the software I used (Roxio) had this mode where you could treat the disc like any other mass storage device, you could add a single file.

            For our young friend SagXD, burning a CD usually had to be done as a whole. You’d arrange all the files (if a data disc) or audio tracks (if an audio disc) in a buffer, and then burn the entire disc in one shot. If done at “1x” speed, it could take an hour, but “8x” speeds were pretty common, if more error prone. With my rewritable CD, I could add a single file if I wanted to and not have to rewrite the entire disc. Adding a single song to the iPod I got in college wasn’t much less rigamarole.

    • spongebue@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      10 months ago

      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