In order to make my kids (2 and 4) be able to play music on their own without having to use a smart device or screen i bought an old boombox for like 10 dollars a couple of years ago. We buy a lot of records, though exclusively in goodwill-like stores, and they love it. They have a lot of audiobooks for kids but also cd:s with music. A favourite right now is Aquas debut album Aquarium (the one with Barbie Girl) I thi…
Anyone else remember the superb manuals that used to come with games? The starcrat and warcraft manuals. Drawings and lore. Diablo. Those old games came with books.
The Infocom games always had fun stuff in the box.
> The real problem was almost no one had a CD player not even in their car! And here I am driving a 2003 Golf with a tape deck (and CD player).
> And here I am driving a 2003 Golf with a tape deck (and CD player). That sounds wonderful. There was a brief, magical moment in history when cars would come with AM/FM radio, a tape deck, a CD player, and an aux port so that you could plug in audio from every other device that humanity would invent for the rest of time. It feels like the most fleeting of moments, and it was so long ago. Maybe it was just one summer…
When I was buying my last car, I was searching for something with a CD player option. Turns out there are no new cars with CD players and the last manufacturer to offer one was Lexus in 2022.
I ripped my collection to my phone and I use CarPlay and it works well enough. But still if I could, I'd buy a car with a CD player.
My next car might be a Slate truck because they supposedly support single or double DIN radios and there has to be an aftermarket option that would work.
> CD sales surged 16% to 16.3 million units, soundly outpacing vinyl’s comparatively modest 2.4% growth. Ok, but the lack of a unit on vinyl makes it very hard to have an apples to apples comparison here. If cds are selling 1000 units and vinyl is selling 1,000,000 units, those 16% and 2.4% numbers are pretty wildly different things. Also, the huge increase is primarily driven by KPOP (in particular, BTS). CD sales g…
Re BTS, really it's just because there is a CD included in the box with all the other stuff you get when you buy the album. My daughter thought it was neat; that's when I realized I don't even have a CD player anywhere. I doubt many people are actually using these CDs
My PC case has a complete flat front, very much regret that choice.
Yep, seems they pretty much all do! I couldn't find a sensible case last year when putting together a new PC for my brother, who wanted it to include a CD/DVD drive. (He regularly buys CDs at 10 for £1, listens for a bit then sells them for a lot more on eBay - the demand is there.) I ended up reusing the case from an old computer of my own. I'm sure on my own next upgrade, I'll continue to stick with my existing 20-…
I've been looking for a retro-style case. There are companies that make cases that look like 90's towers (Silverstone), but I'm hoping to find something more like a PS/2 Model 30 (or any PS/2 - so many beautiful designs) or Amiga 1000. Something I can put under my monitor.
While I'm thrilled that kids are experiencing the thrill of buying physical media, I'm not sure CD's are the best way to go. Most of my CD's from my teenage years are no longer playable (partially due to poor upkeep, but some literally from disc rot). But hey, they'll learn the same lesson in a couple of decades haha. I've personally been buying vinyl both because of the fact I missed out on the excitement myself gro…
I have hundreds of CDs from the 80s and 90s, most of them bought used from charity shops. The vast majority play perfectly, despite some of them having obvious signs of poor storage/handling. I think it's more likely your CD player is failing than your CDs.
I had some CDs that I couldn't get an accurate rip from so I took them to a used games store and they polished them for $1 each and all but one I was able to rip them all perfectly. I think the one that continued to fail must have had a flaw on the label side.
CD Audio may espouse "lindy" properties. No DRM (CD format has resisted attempts) and relative easiness of manufacturing + decent enough audio quality. It is a great engineering achievement and sales are bouncing back!
Buy CDs, buy vinyl, buy merch, go see shows — support artists instead of platforms and middlemen wherever you can. This is a welcome trend.
I've been turning back to radio. So many talented DJs playing great music around the world.
KEXP is great for this - various types of live shows and sets with great DJs. Most of the new music I've discovered over the past 10 years has been from them.
There's a couple of artists that I would absolutely buy their vinyl except the shipping is more expensive than the vinyl. I've done it a couple of times for artists I really like and appreciate, but it is most definitely cost prohibitive. So it's pay their bandcamp prices for the digitals and streaming, but the physical media is just made in too limited quantities to be affordable by anyone but FAANG employees
Shipping on vinyl is rough — even shirts from anywhere outside of the US have tipped towards being hard to justify with shipping and all. I'll usually go for Bandcamp in that case (or buy something licensed in the US in the hopes that the license fee is at least something).
Even keeping vinyl is rough. I used to have a good collection that I had to drop because of moving. Still, some of my vinyls were ruined because I stored them poorly and they warped. It’s almost as bad as physical books, though they store more easily unless it’s mass paperback which will quickly stain to a weird yellow and develop a smell. Records are so fun though. The art, the physicality, the sound of the needle moving across the grooves, so good.