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119 replies

lemmy.world

You ever have a car cd player that plays files? You could put every song you downloaded from LimeWire onto a single disc.

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lemmy.world

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.

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Noxyreply
pawb.social

how did you 4 gigs of music on a 700m CD??

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They probably mean the mp3 equivalent of what it would be in wav, since most any CD player that could genuinely care about files could play mp3's. ... Although that could easily get past six CDs on one's worth so... I dunno'!

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You could push the limits to 900mb, and even the 1gb late in the era, but 4GB no hosé.

Guess "4gb worth" of wav in mp3.

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feddit.org

When I started listening to the harry Potter audiobooks I had the first 4 on tape. They filled a small suitcase.
I got 5 and 6 on CDs, each with ~20-25 CDs.
The 7th book came on mp3 CDs. Just 3 for the whole book. It absolutely blew my mind

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It has taken me at least a decade to stop calling audiobooks, books on tape...

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chiliedoggreply
lemmy.world

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

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Pirate bay is still a great source if you use your brain in terms of the types of files you are downloading etc. I get a lot of TV shows etc from there with no issues at all.

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piefed.social

I had a 6 disc changer in the trunk AND a head unit that could play mp3s … coolest nerd in the parking lot

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lemmy.world

Could the disc changer play files? If you filled all 6 with files, I think you would have had all of music ever made up until 2004. Which is when I'm assuming you had this car.

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It was a mk4 Jetta, I had a stupid wiring harness adapter from an Acura spliced inbetween the Bose system and the aftermarket head unit, but … yes.

We discovered the 6 disc changer in the trunk cuz my mom had been driving the car and hated it because she “needed” to use a portable cd player with a cassette adapter. I put a head unit that could handle mp3s and had a usb port, no cd slot because of the 6 disc changer.

Loved that car.

We had so much music at our disposal whole smoking blunts in it

7

Weeeell, say 10h/CD, 12h if youre lucky, and it's 72h of music. So all music up til 2004 I guess 😁

1

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.

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anarchist.nexus

I saw some post the other day by a teenaged girl, saying something along the lines of “y’all are mixing up the Challenger explosion and 9/11. There’s NO WAY teachers actually turned the classroom TVs on to watch the towers fall. You millennials didn’t watch it happen live.”

Oh girl, we absolutely watched it live.

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lemmy.world

Oh girl, we absolutely watched it live.

then got sent home from school that day and saw it covered everywhere and it was the only thing everyone would talk about and wouldn't shut the fuck up about. After a while it was just fucking annoying to hear about it.

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I'm in Europe. I still remember my dad calling me on the landline after school, telling me to "turn on the TV and have fun". To this day I don't understand why he added the "have fun" part..

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slrpnk.net

I believe you (I'm 29) but why did everyone's teacher wheel in the TV cart?

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smhreply
slrpnk.net

My school, we had a CRT TV up in the corner of each room. How else would we see the student-produced morning announcements?

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Mine didn't, if I remember correctly. She thought we were too sensitive or something.

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I was literally in between jobs, at home which at the time was in The Netherlands and by chance was watching CNN International and saw the second plane hit the Twin Towers as it happened.

So, live, a 1/4 of the way around the World.

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It was our generation's Pearl Harbour. You remember the exact moment you heard about it and what you were doing.

For me, I was in the car, getting driven back to school after having gone home for lunch.

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I was in my first year of graduate school when it happened. When we got out of class at 11 am, I rolled up to my laboratory and it was empty. At around 3 pm, one of the techs came into the lab and was like, "Why are you still here, NYC is under attack." No one notified the graduate students what was going on, and I had way to much work to be fucking around with looking at the news. The best part was, I was from NYC and most of my family was down there. I was pissed no one in graduate administration checked in with me to let me know what was going on.

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retrofed.com

My mother just gave me the walkman I had in high school, which I guess was in a box somewhere in her house. It still works, and in it was a cassette I taped off the radio

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lemmy.world

Everything about computers was slow then. There was a time when you could read text faster than modems could run text through them.

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I wish I was born in 1970 so I could've experienced all the old technologies as well as the premium LSD of the 90's. So many people used to tell me, "You would've done great int he 80's," I didn't know what that meant until I was older and they're right, I would've enjoyed myself and I would've been one of those nerdy fuckers. Then again, I've enjoyed myself throughout my life and I am a nerdy fucker lol.

The first OS I ever used was Windows 95 in 1998 at 6 years old. I didn't grasp the inconvenience of dial-up until I was a little older but everything after Windows 2000 was fast.

3

We all taped the radio. If we ran out of cassettes we’d get sticky tape and put it over the hole at the top to allow recording over recorded stuff we didn’t want

A friend of mine spent weeks creating a single cassette mixtape off pausing recording while songs were being played.

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Yeah, it would be fair use. Selling the tape would be illegal tho.

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lemmy.ca

No, it was not legal. Did I give a fuck. Nope.

Had an audiophile buddy who bought tons of Japanese import vinyl records which he would burn(copy) to tape for me. Later on to CD then even later to DVD’s. Many years later bought tons of original CD’s at flea markets at rock bottom prices. Mainly got them for the artwork. Was not ever worried about the illegality of it.

Edit: I also have a boatload of .flac rock songs and oldies I downloaded as well and have stashed away.

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Amongst other things it dependend on the country.

As a kid in 1980s Portugal, I used to go to a store selling software for the ZX Spectrum (which loaded the software from audio tapes) where the guy just had a bunch of tape copiers and would copy the game as you waited. This was in the outskirts of Lisbon, so hardly an out of the way place.

Good thing too - that's how I got my hands on an Assembly compiler and decompiler (this was before the GNU tool suite) and really started my way into programming.

So it was de facto legal enough that somebody could have an actual store doing it.

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It was 2002. Was going on a 1 year assignment to Australia.

Spent almost 24 straight hours feeding CD after CD into my fancy 6x reader, ripping and converting to MP3. Brought my whole 5' high tower of music on the plane in a harddrive.

Almost 25 years later(!), same direcory has been added to and copied to a hosted VPS from which I stream.

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Anyone else remembers having to cook eggs to replace the ball on the mouse? It was ridiculous.

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lemmy.world

Eh... What?! Certainly remember pre-optical mice, but replacing the balls with eggs was surely not a thing?

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my brother (at the time 10yo) told me (4yo) that it would explode if i drop it on the floor.

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Its get used and dirt for the table. You can clean the ball but eventually it lost material and became too small to work functionally and you had to overcook an egg to replace it

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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

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Remember the audio cable that had to be installed inside from the CD player/burned to the motherboard?

If you didn't install that you couldn't actual hear the music from audio CDs (which had a different format than data CDs) because it was the player itself processing on the fly the audio tracks like the in the standalone audio-only CD players, rather than it coming in as data to the processor (this was probably done like that because the processors back then were pretty weak plus PCs didn't have that much memory and audio CDs had the data in PCM format, which is not compressed, so we're talking tracks of 90MB in systems with less than that in memory).

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“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.

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lemmy.ml

I think burning CDs is a hate crime. They should be loved, and maybe given better wigs

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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.

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You can get Bluetooth to aux devices so you can send music over Bluetooth. Works great, did that for a long time myself.

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tmyakalreply
infosec.pub

I've got a similarly older vehicle. I ended up buying a little Bluetooth dongle that plugs into the aux jack for, like, $10.

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From waaaayyyyy back in the day, most cars didn't have FM radio, just am band. You could buy an add-on FM band device that would receive the FM signals and then transmit them to the AM radio to hear.

Today, you can get a cigarette lighter powered unit to connect to your phone by bluetooth and then to an unused radio station to listen to your phone. About $10 to $20 or so. They work fine. I have one in a Jeep.

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Have you tried USB-specific players? I remember using USB player pro or whatever it was called, did the job perfectly.

If you're going to get BT adapter, may I recommend this?

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lemmy.world

I burnt a cd like 3 weeks ago, this technology isn't as archaic as you think

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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.

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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.

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I'm actually considering going back to doing this.. just with blurays.
My data hoarding illness is getting out of hand and m-disks are starting to look attractive to me.

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lemmy.world

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.

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JoeBigelowreply
lemmy.ca

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.

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lemmy.world

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.

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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.

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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.

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TigerAcereply
lemmy.dbzer0.com

My old pc's still have drives I use sometimes. Or well, only my previous pc. My oldest one, the one I built when I was 18 (21 years ago), still works but it's a time capsule. Running state of the art XP and photoshop 7, Winamp, C&C red alert 2, age of empires 2.

Last time I burned a cd was to copy a CD a friend bought in North Korea. Maybe I'll backup some photos on a dvd in the future. Because fuck cloud services.

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lemmy.world

I was bored one weekend and went through all the photos on my phone and sent a bunch them to Walmart to be printed into photos. Now I have an old school photo album in my living room that friends and family can look through when they come over.

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I plan on doing the same for my current vacation to South Africa. Otherwise I'll never look at the photos again.

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feddit.uk

When I upgradedy pc a few years ago I realised the case doesn't have bays for my bluray burners. Instead I bought an external case with usb 3.something.

It's not an amazing setup but it means on the rare occasions I need to use a disc I can. Usually it's ripping CDs bought from charity shops and adding to my collection on my NAS or the occasional Blu-ray rip.

What was on the north Korean CD?

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TigerAcereply
lemmy.dbzer0.com

North Korean music. Typical propaganda music in North Korean style. Women singing about soldiers and the great leader (I assume, I don't speak Korean but this is what I was told). If interested I can share, in September after my vacation in South Africa.

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lemmy.world

Jeez... I'd record on a cassette the top 20 from the radio on friday nights!!

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Bluewingreply
lemmy.world

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.

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Hoping that the deejay wouldn't talk some vapid shit over the end of the song while they fade it out

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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.

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According to the Internet, wine 11 added 16 bit support back in for 64 bit systems.

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When I was 10 or 11 I once stole a shitload of blank cds from the church my father was the pastor of so that I could burn pirated audiobooks to listen to at night.

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0% chance you didn't grow up to be a nerd.

If you had said music, it would have been 15-20%. But audiobooks? 0.

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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.

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lemmy.ml

used to have a bunch of DVDs with my favourite shows. but I kept them on a spindle and didn't look at them for years, only to find out they had all become unreadable

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sh.itjust.works

I keep hearing this but Ive yet to find an unreadable disk. I think they are way more robust than most think. Same with vhs. Never had an issue even after being stores in non climate controlled storages for years.

Meanwhile ive had dozens of HDDs and sdds die.

Just 2 years ago i got 3 DOA Wd red HDDs. The nice ones, not cheapo seagates barracudas. Those are shit.

Funnily enough I have a Seagate constellation which is supposed to be trash and its over 6 years old now. Maybe more.

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lemmy.ml

maybe if you store them better than I did they dont become unreadable son quickly. personally I've sadly not much luck with them. Thankfully it did push me to find new encodes of the shows and I got much better quality replacements for most of them

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I was referring to vinyl records sold in stores. That stuff is definitely copy written. I’ve never taped any radio stuff before so I don’t know the legality of that stuff.

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This is what happens when kids technology is capped at a phone.

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