Many monks would spend months on illuminating just one CD.
even he knew
I remember being the first person anyone knew who had a deck to deck burner, it was a Teac, TDK, or a Kenwood, don’t remember that well. I didn’t have a computer of my own at the time and was bootlegging discs for all of the people in my friends group. Everyone would bring their own spindle of blank discs and we would drink and swap discs until we either went out to go party or until everyone had copies of what they wanted. Eventually I got a few more burner decks to make things quicker, and then I sold off the extra decks to friends before moving away. Not too long after the devices were completely useless as everyone started having a burner built into their PC and just about everyone soon had a PC, still sold my last burner deck for more than I bought it for.
When I was a kid I had two radios.
One with a cassette player in it that had a mic built in for recording. I found it in the trash.
The other was a small FM/AM alarm clock that was dangerously hot at all times and had a noise as it was an analog clock with the little cards that flipped and the such. My opa gave it to me when he said it got too hot for his liking.
It was not long before I had figured out that if I played the radio really loud on the clock, the cassette mic would record the songs onto whatever tape you had. Be it blank, or with tape over the security gaps on the top, any tape will do.
Hardest part was the timing to start and stop the tape. And making sure you were in as close to total silence as possible as the mic picked everything up.
Even if the hot buzz of the alarm clock motor fighting to flip into the next set of minutes would make it on the tape, the recording/welfare piracy continued. It was the sneezing/siblings walking in/parents making ugly sounds that were the worst as you’d have to stop the tape, rewind to the part of the tape you were using, and wait for the radio station to play the song again, so you might be able to try and tape it again.
I had one radio that did all of this but if I didn’t hold a fake adapter into the headphone port at exactly the right angle, nothing worked. I put so much effort into being very still to record songs.
So we had special disk drives that basically zapped holes in a CD that played music or stored data. That’s why we call it ‘burning’
And get this: You didn’t burn 4000 CDs. You burned one, sent it up to Sony in New Jersey, they cracked it open and then pushed it again polymer en masse to duplicate the CD. They called this “pressing.”
Pressed CDs had holes (or “pits”) in them. Burned CDs used the laser to change the color of a dye. Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite as cool as “zapping holes” in the disc.
Lol not like any of us actually know how it works, just push the button and the magic lasers make it happen 😹
Don’t forget to hold the CD and candle close to the speaker that’s playing the song. The closer you get, the higher the volume.
Oh, that was an era.
One of the things I remember most is that cheap, defective or old drives can just fuck up the burning process and now you have a useless disk of plastic you can use as a bad freesbee. I never used the fastest burn option for that reason and still had like 1\40 failed burns 'cause my drive was all cheap, defective and old. With how rarely used they are rn, the price of such failure can grow pretty quick. Some of my relatives in the 00s used them as holiday decorations, wall-mounted them on a string as they are shiny and reflective. Although cringe, it’s a little better than just throwing them in a dumpster, I guess.
If you put them in the microwave for a few seconds they get this cool crackle effect on the shiny side. If you’ve got one of those old “skip repair” doohickeys that buffed it in a radial pattern that’s nice too. Keep some plain for a nice contrast.
Surprised they even know what a music CD is.
One year my school had a 3.5 inch floppy disk as part of the school supplies we were supposed to get. Mine was orange and you can tell a kid not to use it as a fidget toy, but they’re absolutely gonna use it as a fidget toy. I don’t think a single disk survived that year.
I also remember when my school got a fancy new “computer lab” that had all the colorful iMacs. There were still a few of the beige machines that read off of 7 inch floppies kicking around also.
This is fake because “burning” is a CD specific term, and no real Gen Z would know that you “burn” a CD to put music on it.
Most would probably just assume it works like a USB stick or any regular digital storage format.
It’s like how a hilariously large amount of people don’t know what the origin of “mixtape” is. They think its just a word that defines music mixes, because no one knows what a cassette player is anymore, or that people actually used to create and sell mixtapes.
Sell? I remember it as how to tell if someone fancied you :)
Do kids these days just make playlists and send links?!
Fuck, some of the younger rappers actually put out mixtape cassettes now. There’s a fairly brisk but low demand market for not only used tapes, but there’s bands releasing them im special editions.
I’m kinda regretting dumping some of my old tapes. I kept the stuff that’s impossible to replace (local bands mostly), but I sometimes get nostalgic for the liners. Not the sound being shitty, or how fast tapes wear out, or anything else about the format, but there was something coool about the way the liners unfolded that isn’t as satisfying with CDs, or even vinyl.
I’m in a band and we make cassette tapes. They sell like hot cakes. Our last run sold out in a single day on bandcamp. Many people buy them and don’t even have cassette players. They’re cheap to make and I think many people just want a cool souvenir.
In fairness to this post, I’m old enough to have asked this same question on the other end lol.
I suppose not everyone had the hardware to cut their own vinyl, so being able to stick the disky thingy in the bleep bloop machine and make your own diskies at home sounded kind of bizarre at first
It started with a Tori Amos lyric about someone burning CDs. I couldn’t imagine why you’d destroy valuable property lol. The term was used originally in industry and later adopted for home use.
It was so popular you could walk into a Walmart and buy blank cds and put it into most computers that have a cd drive in the last 15 years and write it from Windows Media Player.
Even today you can still do it for cheap. USB external CD drive with write capabilities: $18.99
50 Blank CDs, $16.60 https://www.newegg.com/verbatim-52x-700mb-cd-r/p/N82E16817507007
If you wanted to write to a CD more than once you could buy CD-RW’s which had the ability to be formatted (wiped clean) and used again.
The hardware to write disks was so cheap it became standard. The cheapest of laptops or desktops would have the ability built in. example:
$168.99 - Cheap junk computer from Walmart (I would not recommend that computer, just figured it would show just how cheap a computer gets that has it built in) https://www.walmart.com/ip/Dell-Latitude-E5420-Laptop-Intel-i3-WiFi-DVD-CDRW-250GB-Win-10-Professional-HDMI/376791632?wmlspartner=wlpa&%3BselectedSellerId=100001344&%3Bgclsrc=aw.ds&%3B=&%3Badid=22222222228376791632_100001344_153828919326_20723081503&%3Bwl0=&%3Bwl1=g&%3Bwl2=m&%3Bwl3=679332641651&%3Bwl4=pla-2235097983966&%3Bwl5=9013636&%3Bwl6=&%3Bwl7=&%3Bwl8=&%3Bwl9=pla&%3Bwl10=129884431&%3Bwl11=online&%3Bwl12=376791632_100001344&%3Bveh=sem&%3Bgad_source=1&%3Bgclid=Cj0KCQiAy9msBhD0ARIsANbk0A_ZhAcoOfd9b3WACPKd_QXPuq3NIZoFnxorRXOK1Xx-CwQz7SO1jSAaAlfhEALw_wcB
We took a magnifying glass and very carefully burned in the 0s and 1s by hand. /s
Good old
C-x M-c M-Butterfly
I remember many years ago when I was going through a box of my burned CDs and games and realized I could just download any of them whenever I wanted. Plus my computer didn’t even have a CD/DVD drive any more. End of an era.
Why burn it when you can spin it on a Dremel until it explodes from centrifugal force?
