CDs in 2021

2021-06-21

This is the story of my recent CD collecting adventures, born out of necessity because my new-to-me car doesn't have anything more modern than a CD player.

My first thought to try to get my own music in the car was to get one of those cassette to aux adapters. And it... well, it works. The audio quality for music makes you wish you were just driving in silence, but it at least is acceptable for podcasts so it still gets some use during long drives. The next step was to turn to CDs.

Even though I do most of my music listening through Spotify I still have a pretty decent-sized local music collection, a lot of which is stored in flac. Perfect for burning to a bunch of CD-Rs. I managed to find a pack at Walmart (there were hardly any), and got to work since my laptop already has a built in disc drive (and it's not even that old!).

I ran into problems right away when the first disc I tried burning failed halfway through. I tried slowing down the burn speed and ran into even more issues. In desperation I turned to Windows -- same thing.

At that point I figured the problem must be the hardware. Fortunately my wife has a USB disc drive, so I gave that a try and all my problems disappeared.

Or at least, until I got on the road. I found out half the CDs I burned came out as just a single track of pure silence, which means they must have somehow gotten burned as data CDs instead of audio CDs and were unusable with most CD players.

What had happened is that I had used multiple different programs I already had installed to try to figure out which one worked the best, and one of those was the Windows built-in disc burning utility. How it works is you select the files you want, then if you have a blank disc inserted an option to burn the files to disc will come up in the right click menu. It then asks you if you want a data CD or an audio CD -- but I'm positive I hit "audio CD" for every single disc I burned. I'm guessing that Windows looked at the flac files I gave it and didn't know what to do with them, so it just decided to fallback to making a data CD without warning me.

But my luck didn't just stop at discs I tried to burn myself! I ordered a few CDs of my wife's favorite music, and even one of those is unplayable in the car's CD player for some reason.

Having a physical music collection is neat, but at this point it should come as no surprise that I'm just shopping for a new receiver for the car. Which, in a final twist of irony, probably won't even be able to make use of the CDs I went through such trouble to get.

- moddedBear

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