However, I have watched Spotify destroy my playlists regularly, and now it seems to happen more than once a year! Songs that they still have a license for and still have on their platform will be removed from your playlist and marked "Unavailable" because some licensing agreement change meant the actual file and unique ID in their system has changed, and they make zero effort to resolve the damage this regularly does to my library and playlists.
It makes staying on the spotify platform, the spotify "ecosystem" as it were, utterly worthless. No playlist you make today can be expected to be usable in the future. Any effort you put in to organize and find stuff is for naught.
Meanwhile, my shitty folder full of mp3 rips from sketchy sources from highschool has stayed with me, and works perfectly.
It's getting hard to justify now. None of the money I pay even goes to the people I listen to, because they are primarily niche and indie groups. Spotify seems to be doing this on purpose, and a close friend of people high up in Spotify is running a business to generate AI music so that spotify can fill up their generated playlists with slop that they don't have to pay anyone for, and which dilutes the rev share for real humans.
The types of nostalgia are not the same. Which is really unfortunate since I would also like more affordable vinyl records.
Now that people aren't listening to CDs in the car, it would be amazing to see some remasters of CDs with the dynamic compression dialed back a bit.
And omit that a lot of music sounds a lot worse on vinyl due to its lack of dynamic range and poor LF capabilities (classical, electronic). This isn't for nothing that the first recording pressed on CD was a rendition of the Alpensinfonie.
I was trying not to. I thought saying "it might sound better to you" would make it clear that it's a subjective matter of taste.
I have myself digitized a few rare cases like Celtic Frost's Monotheist because the CD was horrid and I know pop and rock suffered much more from the phenomenon, but unless the music was released first as a vinyl then got later butchered on CD (so before '85~88), it's very rare to have a situation where the vinyl is objectively better.
One such case I encountered was Unknown Pleasures (https://world-playground-deceit.net/blog/2025/11/music-revie...) but I finally found a CD worth the change. Kraftwerk and Depeche Mode were also bands that gave me much trouble when navigating their haphazard CD master landscape.
You have to flip through a collection and make a conscious decision on what to listen to. You don’t get to just skip skip skip so you tend to pay attention and listen to the full album.
I get the convenience of streaming and love it when I’m on the go or need background music, but it is a totally different experience.
We mastered specifically for vinyl as a format though, the difference between the spotify masters and the vinyl masters is quite significant.
I've personally been buying vinyl both because of the fact I missed out on the excitement myself growing up, and because I have some records that came out decades before I was born that play like the day they were minted. They've outlasted pretty much all of my CD's.
I think it's more likely your CD player is failing than your CDs.
But storage is cheap so also rip it and burn an additional copy in case!
I'm sure on my own next upgrade, I'll continue to stick with my existing 20-year-old case, for the same reason.
And the drives themselves are 2-3 times the price they were at the peak of their demand (makes sense, they're almost a niche product these days).
I still buy movies on DVD but the players are a bit hit and miss. That said, I do frequently see Sony bluray players in second hand stores for a few dollars and that is how I have my collection of players, but that is not a sustainable system.
I just wish my PC case had a slot for the drive bay, that was a foolish choice on my behalf.
This aligns with the broader historical trends of the internet creating deep niches. You have to take the good with the bad. We wouldn't even be discussing physical media at all without the internet being how it is. Despite there being a large audience for physical media, they're not the majority. The majority has moved on.
Of course, 99.9% of other BluRay players will also support DVD/CD, so yeah it still does seem silly.
I also remember my Dad’s disappointment when he put a standard DVD in our Wii back in the day. Those are literally the same physical format as wii disks.
Also I don't think Nintendo wanted to turn the Wii into a cheap commodity DVD player, they make most of their money on the games. It is a shame because the Wii was one of the most TV friendly interfaces and inputs, at least when the Wiimote wasn't being throw at the screen.
Sure, it wasn't cheap at launch and it marked a leap in console prices compared to previous generations, but it was around the same price as a standalone Blu-ray player as those were just coming to market.
So at that point, why not get the more capable console?
Those CDrs were 20 years old and have been sitting in a hot, humid attic for the last 10+ years, but still recorded fine.
The real problem was almost no one had a CD player not even in their car!
Also, I don’t think k3b or any of the other software i tried has been updated since 2005, but it all still worked great!
Most importantly, one of my friends brought it home and his 8 year old was so intrigued by it she came over and we burned a bunch of mix cds for her and her friends! I have no idea if her friends had anyway to play them, but she enjoyed making hand made cover art for each friend.
When I was in the attic looking for blank cds I came across a few other spindles of burned cds. Both mixes from my formative years and a bunch my wife had kept. Those times were magical and I few like kids have missed out.
Last year I bought a USB DVD RW drive just for the sake of it.
My 5.25" NEC 4xxx (with LightScribe) just quietly died in a PC used daily after around ~5 years of an extremely low usage. My only other ODD was in ThinkPad X301 and I had a feeling it would just die someday too most - and I would know it only when I would need read something.
So I just somewhat future-proofed myself a bit.
Number of discs I read on that drive is below 10 I think.
EDIT: oh, I helped out a friend to transfer some MRI records from a CDR with that drive. Somehow it was easier to send them from the other side of the country to a friend who would ask me to copy it and to send them back electronically.
And here I am driving a 2003 Golf with a tape deck (and CD player).
Huh I also have Subsonic on my home NAS and Symfonium on my phone (connectable via Android Auto). Another Rube Goldberg invention would be to put the audio CD in the drive connected to the NAS, have a driver that pretends to be a filesystem of MP3s but actually encodes the CD tracks (on the fly on every playback, of course!), stream it over the Internet to my phone, that's connected to Android Auto. That's how to play a CD on a modern car!
I wrote [1] to post-process my (slightly obsessively) neatly tagged mp3 collection for use in my car.
[1] https://github.com/andyjohnson0/ID3Minimiser
Obligatory note: destructively edits tags, so run it on a copy of any mp3 files.
Sadly when you stream music over Bluetooth there is lossy compression taking place.
People can bitch all they want about "320 kbps mp3 using a modern encoder being indistinguishable from the lossless source", the fact is: mp3 were nice 30 years ago in the Napster day (when I had my ADSL Internet connection).
It's 2026 and I play lossless music, including FLAC files I bit-perfectly ripped from my own CD collection (and the rips have been verified online with a DB of rips, so I now they're bit-perfect) and including lossless music from proper music streaming platform (I pay a Qobuz subscription: amazing quality, huge offering, but shittiest music discovery platform ever btw).
Really: it's 2026 and if people like to listen to lossy music, more power to them. I don't, and hence I don't stream audio over Bluetooth.
My car both takes CDs, memory sticks (mp3 and WAV, no FLAC) and has got its own memory. I've got a few hundred songs stored in the car: they go losslessly to the car's DAC.
High-end luxury car and it's the type of car where people who've never been in one say: "I never knew music could sound that good in a car" (which btw is funny to witness when some car youtubers try a car with an amazing soundsystem).
Now of course it's still a car. Don't get me started on home stereo because I've got that too (and when you know what you're doing you can get amazing audio for a really very reasonable price: for example I won't put 30 K in a McIntosh amp where a Yamaha amp costing 1/30th of the price will do).
Call me an audiofool and... Enjoy your lossy Bluetooth streaming adding a layer of lossyness on your already lossy mp3 on your car stereo system which sounds like crap anyway.
I have a budget android phone with a jack and it's miles more convenient than a dongle or Bluetooth headphones which are never comfortable to me.
Nothing could sell a phone with a jack, but then you don't need to pay 300$ for some crappy Bluetooth headphones
Have you looked at the price of actually mediocre Bluetooth headphones recently? They’re like… $20 for a distinct fine set of true wireless headphones, including the case, even from a real brand. Certainly comparable to $20 wired headphones.
What do you mean by this? AAC or SBC is perfectly fine for $20 headphones. Definitely for that quality of headphone. LDAC or Apt-X are pointless for a headphone in that price bracket.
I have some $70 wired headphones from AliExpress that literally beat anything I've personally tried wireless up to like $300 or so.
Why? I used to use wired Bose noise cancelling headphones in the late 2010s.
Also, a significant advantage to wireless when using ANC is you don’t have to deal with cable noise. Especially in a quiet office environment, noise from the cable moving around on your body gets amplified and you can hear it.
I don't feel like having to charge two devices.
On long international flights a traditional headphone jack beats Bluetooth every time.
Bluetooth headphones last as long as their batteries do. Wired headphones, particularly ones with replaceable cords, last forever.
I'm not sure why your being argumentive here, it's a known fact that Bluetooth has to compress everything down and sacrifices quality to do so.
Current gen over ear ANC headphones have battery life in excess of any international flight. Most in excess of a round trip, even. True wireless ones don’t, but that’s not typically what you use on a plane. If you’re using the in flight infotainment, you’re corded anyways… so it’s a bit of a moot point. I can’t possibly imagine flying without ANC headphones at this point though, which requires a battery. The cable is also such a pain on a long flight. Any time you get up or move around, it’s inevitable you have to relocate or move the cable around to prevent it from getting snagged. If I could have Bluetooth on every infotainment system I’d love that.
> I'm not sure why your being argumentive here, it's a known fact that Bluetooth has to compress everything down and sacrifices quality to do so.
My point is that although that’s technically true, it’s practically not true. The quality is sufficient that you’ll hardly notice for most environments. If you’re in some listening room, sure fine. Use your fancy wired headphones.
In public, with environmental noise, etc or especially on planes? The picture is a lot muddier.
You know the neat thing about phones with an audio jack, you can use Bluetooth or wired headphones.
Apple figured out they could print money by selling AirPods and now every phone brand has some crappy Bluetooth headphones they want to sell.
Thus most phones don’t have jacks anymore. I don’t see any advantage to the end consumer.
Sorry that occurs with you. I know some people are much more sensitive to it than others. Also, lower quality or older ANC products have a much stronger “head pressure” effect which is definitely undesirable. Modern high end stuff from Apple, Sony, or Bose basically have all eliminated that effect in my experience.
I’m not sure what your vendetta here is against phones without jacks. There’s so, so, so many decent USB to 3.5mm jacks that are nearly free these days. Same with ones that also offer pass through charging.
The fact is today Bluetooth headphones are 99% of the market for phone users, and for the rest of folks the dongle is a perfectly suitable solution. In fact, dongles are a way to offer superior performance to most phone 3.5mm jacks. If you really care about the audio performance of your headphones, most phones offered mediocre or even outright bad audio quality out of their headphone jacks.
There's literally no benefit to the end user.
Dongles are a great way to put stress on a single point of failure. If your USB c port stops working your phone can't be charged anymore and is useless.
I have more Bluetooth earbuds then I can count. At 30$ a pair they almost always go bad within 6 months. My wired headphones work for years.
It's not like my opinion matters that much. Literally the only flagship phone with a jack is a 1300$ Sony Xperia.
The benefit to the end user is lower cost, fewer parts that can break, more area for other components, and potentially improved form factors from not having to have a 3.5mm cutout. Maybe all of those don’t immediately translate to tangible benefits from consumers, but there’s quite a few phone form factors that have existed that would not be possible with 3.5mm jacks.
> If your USB c port stops working your phone can't be charged anymore and is useless.
Pretty much all phones have wireless charging in some form now. That’s your backup, or potentially primary if you’re in the wireless charging ecosystem. Also, most phones have a method of repairing/replacing the USB-C port. Not convenient of course, but this is no different than damaging a phone from yanking the charging cable or whatever.
> I have more Bluetooth earbuds then I can count. At 30$ a pair they almost always go bad within 6 months. My wired headphones work for years.
Then… don’t buy cheap products? I’ve never had a battery go bad in over ear Bluetooth headphones, and even if they did I’m pretty confident a replacement set of batteries would be widely available. I’ve replaced parts on extremely old Bose headphones without an issue.
As I started this thread Nothing doesn't include a jack on their phones because they want to sell you a 300$ pair of Bluetooth headphones that I can guarantee are inferior to my 70$ Fiio headphones.
You'd have a point if *every* single phone oem wasn't trying to sell Bluetooth headphones.
>and even if they did I’m pretty confident a replacement set of batteries would be widely available.
Airpods , which are above and beyond the most popular Bluetooth buds don't have user replaceable batteries. You have to ask Apple to do so at 50$.
Apple did this as an outrageously anti consumer move. And they've made billions of airpods in doing so. Then they brought Beats which sound worse than 30$ sennheiser HD201s.
Nobody is forcing you to buy their most expensive headphones. Also, the cheapest Bluetooth earbuds that Nothing offers are literally $25. I don’t get your point here. They’re offering a range of competitive headphones and you’re free to choose other brands. There’s also nothing forcing you to buy the same brand of headphones or earbuds.
> Airpods , which are above and beyond the most popular Bluetooth buds don't have user replaceable batteries. You have to ask Apple to do so at 50$.
I said over ear headphones. Pretty much all of those have user serviceable (without destroying the device) batteries. Even the AirPods Max you can do it.
And for true wireless earbuds, form factor makes that difficult. Nonetheless, there exist earbuds that do actually have user serviceable batteries. I’ve personally replaced a pair of batteries in Sony WF-1000XM3s. At a cost of $10… hardly a lot for the original price of these things.
I'm one of those people who cannot tell until the bit rate gets stupidly low or the encoder cannot handle the symbols on drums but that is no universal.
Even then I stick to headphone jacks when possible. If it is a low quality podcast, occasionally my $20 bluetooth buds come out but that is a reasonable trade off.
This might seem pretty obvious, but I wasn't expecting it to matter as much since the end result was compressed again (and yet again on my car's Bluetooth) using a different codec.
This isn't on anything close to audiophile gear either. My car stereo is thoroughly mediocre and my home stereo is speakers I literally found in the trash.
Now I'm (belatedly) rebuilding my music collection in FLAC...
I really like CDs and enjoy buying them second hand when on road trips. It was fun to put in something new while traveling, but now it requires an extra device on the off chance that a CD is found.
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 afternoon in the early 2000s.
Anyway, I think we've largely been going downhill since then. For whatever reason, humanity achieved a lovely little peak of engineering, and then we immediately abandoned it for worse options.
Your comment does not disagree with GP's in the way you think it does
In audio connectors, I've had some pretty crazy builds getting from various formats when the exact right thing isn't available but a giant milk crate of random cables was on hand.
I've never had any of those issues with a short piece of wire operating at audio frequencies.
Except that rust is eating it and I'll have to replace it soon-ish.
But I understand that it is a different kind of magic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-kqUkZnDcM (VW Cabrion Pink Moon ad)
I also found the 'night drive' ad to be interesting:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U9I7QrpSkk
> That sounds wonderful.
I don't know if people are really serious but there seems to be a good market interest in car's that's not just equipped with touchscreens and Apple CarPlay. It's interesting (and perhaps understandable) how no car manufacturing is interested in tapping into such a niche segment.
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.
I went through two phases:
1. I ordered some type of Walkman-like car kit that came with a portable CD player, glue strips to adhere the CD player to your dashboard, and a cassette tape adapter that plugged into an aux port (on the CD player) and inserted into the tape deck. I'd burn CDs to play in the car that way.
2. I got a Zen Stone, a tiny mp3 player with no screen that was easy to operate by feel. I stored mp3s on it... and plugged the cassette adapter that I still had into it. That was as good as in-car music can get without being voice operated.
They still make the adapters: https://www.amazon.com/Arsvita-Audio-Cassette-Adapter-Auxill...
Factory stampted cds are better in this regard
They hold up much better if stored in a dark place. A spindle on a shelf that sees sunlight is the worst case and they can become unreadable in years.
Anecdotally, every time I've tried: A burned CD that works well with one reader works with all others.
It was a hobby of mine at that time. I tried a lot of combinations: I was working at a local hifi shop where we had all kinds of stuff rolling through to play around with.
Fortunately the vast majority of discs people own aren’t particularly rare, so if they loose a disc from a top 40 artist, they can easily get a replacement.
One thing factory CDs don't do well is spin. I think they were probably balanced good enough for 1x, but trying to rip some of them at 48x is noisy and feels close to explosive deconstruction.
I even burned a CD of the smallest ubuntu distro I could find, and its happily running linux and hosting Immich, among other things.
Playstations after the PS3, though: Not so much. (Sony lost track of their "It Only Does Everything" schtick[1] somewhere along the way.)
[1]: https://blog.playstation.com/2009/08/27/it-only-does-everyth...
CD players are precision items and don't take kindly to high impulse. Conversely, many tape decks are seriously robust. My dad had an old Grundig tape deck that was built like a tank (or a 380Z). Pretty sure whoever has that now is still getting quality sounds out of it.
Not a cattle grid, but wouldn't have thought of the pothole angle without it.
That's wild. Popping in a CD is part of the road trip experience!
I put a Spotify code[0] to the playlist on the back cover as a concession to streaming, but if anyone knew what it was and used it, they never told me.
For movies there isn't a legal way to acquire proper files unfortunately.
For now I guess lol
It is a ceremony, a ritual, a physical engagement of respect for the artists that created the work.
You don't do that to discardable music, the kind of crap they play on shopping malls, gyms, supermarkets and elevators. You do it to what you recognize as art and worth attention and care.
I wish more bands hired better designers or at least had shirts I wouldn't overheat in
[1] I own and wear this one so it's not always a deal breaker https://merchbar.imgix.net/product/174/7292/6127313518766/Zs...
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
I'm well aware. I used to co-operate a vinyl store and very familiar with shipping heavy vinyl. I really wish there was a bandcamp distributor model so that artists could ship to each distributor in bulk so the consumer did not have to pay international charges rather than drop shipping per order.
I made an album and sell the vinyl on our website. The sleeve to ship the vinyl safely in was somewhere between £0.5 and £1 depending on where we bought it from. Actually shipping it cost £5. So the £30 vinyl came with £6 in shipping fees. Lots of people complained to us that it was expensive, but that's just what it cost.
Maybe you have the fortune of being on the same continent the item is being shipped. Your use of pounds is a big clue there. Shipping it across the pond is routinely doubling the price of the album plus taxes on top of that
That's bold. Who are you to say what is worth something to someone you don't know. I've already stated that I have done this, but it is a limiting factor on how often I do.
But that was wordy
Sometimes you can't just outrun the bad guys. You have to fight them head on.
A few years back I saw some people buying collections of thousands of discs for maybe $100. Even if 10% of it was good, that was still a huge win. Those huge hauls are becoming rare now as they have been picked clean.
If only Minidisc had better audio quality, it would have REALLY been the perfect medium.
I gave it a shot, and while profitable, just not for me at all.
Flash storage developments came too late, but the spinning disks and risk of physical damage to the plastic are an annoying risk to have to deal with. Even Minidisc still required some form of physical motion.
As ridiculous as it sounds, but there is some intent in doing all of that and listening to the files on your hard drive. We have a vynil/CD player as well, but they are not at my workplace.
Turned out he really love it and I also bought more cassetee as requested from him, and the cost of those cassetee seem surpass the player itself
What I find the child seems feel more real if the music play from some gears instead of digital ones, and he know well how to use and find a track in the middle
I also want to buy a new cd player which is also I want when I was youth...
Maybe people are just tired of the streaming and I also find that there seems to be a surge of new album and music in youtube music now, the album's cover seems being generated by AI, and maybe also the music itself is generated by AI
The internal forum.
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 growth was like 6% without them.
I don't know that we can draw a conclusion from that 16% except BTS can move physical media.
Speaking as an older vinyl collector myself, with kids who have also gotten into it...it would surprise me if the total unit numbers were even within 2 orders of magnitude.
Vinyl just feels different. The feeling of holding the cardboard cover and the weight of the album on a turntable can't be replicated at all with CDs.
I think it is really nice for kids to get something physical they can look for themselves in stores and find music that they think looks interesting rather than just what the algorithm would give them were they to use screens (They watch some tv though). But they also seem to love just looking in the booklets and the pictures of the artists or they characters from the books. But it also gives them more freedom to just put on a record if they want rather than having to ask me to put something on our Google Nest.
Vinyl records are still too hard to put on and there isn't that much good kids stuff you can find and cassettes are so easy to accidentely tangle. They are still not that good at handling the cd records so they get smudged and jacks and stuff, but i'm looking into buying a CD-R writer so i can easily make new copies of the cd:s that stutter and won't play.
You'd read the lyrics, see some pictures, and best you'd scour through the thank you section and those would be the bands you'd look for next time you were in the record shop. Great times.
For myself, the motivation was ownership over streaming and wanting to support the long tail of artists (or, anyways, the subset whose music I happen to like).
For my kid, my motivation looks just like yours: not wanting to give him access to smart devices and wanting to keep him away from screens.
The big learning was that, almost inevitably, one has to divorce the medium used for purchase from the medium used for consumption (which eliminates vinyl from consideration right there). When I started actually buying cassettes from artists on BandCamp, I quickly realized that I was paying way more for shipping costs and customs duties than for the actual media. Artists often offer the cassette including the digital album on BandCamp at similar prices to just the digital. Makes sense, if you consider that the digital doesn't add any real marginal cost. But, once you factor in the cost of tape stock, production, packaging/handling, often done by the artists themselves, I almost feel bad about taking advantage of their generosity. My intention is to financially support them, but I'm finding it hard to believe that, on the other end of all of these costs, there is any money left over for them. ...so, I tended to use the BandCamp feature for tipping/overpaying, but too much of that got eaten up by taxes and my collector / music enjoyment hobby just became too expensive over all, that way.
So, I stopped buying physical. My plan is to set up some kind of system to help me stay organized with self-hosted music files, and then re-booting my collecting hobby by buying one-time digital downloads on BandCamp Fridays or directly from artists. Maybe, I will also make mix tapes from time to time for myself or to give to other people. -- I think, in this context, the degrading-quality of analogue is a feature not a bug, because the ideal outcome would be for friends to enjoy single tracks from albums in degraded quality from the mix tapes, and then look up the artists they like and buy full albums as high-quality digital downloads, and support the artists that way.
For the kid, I got a vintage Fisher Price cassette player, and am finding it hard to believe that anything based on CDs could match the sturdy build quality. Also, with a toddler, it's a given that the media will be in contact with the floor a lot and scratch. So, this is another area where the cassette is a clear winner.
The third learning is about the actual process of making the cassettes: Right now, I have a tablet connected to a vintage tape deck through an analogue cable, and that's a surprisingly low-friction way to turn any kind of content that you can actually play into a cassette. Trying to stay within the digital realm to burn a CD means fighting the DRM platforms of each channel you're sourcing content through separately (with each presenting a moving target through time). That can get quite exhausting. I guess, if quality is not so much of a concern (which, with cassettes you're throwing out the window from the get-go), one can always use some kind of a screen-recording tool to record desktop audio, so, maybe, this is not a fair comparison.
Fourth, cassettes are easy to recycle: If I have a mixtape that I no longer listen to, or my kid outgrows a given piece of content, I can just record over it. I can buy boxes full of old cassettes as attic-finds on e-bay dirt-cheap, and get some use out of that stuff. This seems more environmentally friendly and sustainable than paying an industry to keep producing something that will inevitably be garbage one day. Maybe CD-RWs present a similar opportunity; not sure (never really looked into it much).
I also buy some new tape stock from Recording The Masters, though, because I dig what they're doing, and want to support them.
So, regarding that whole trend of bringing back physical media, my pick is the cassette.
But you have a great point regarding the durability (and the sound and esthetics). I have been a bit afraid of them playing with the tape and me having to detangle it, but maybe that is not such a big problem. Especially when it comes to compact players, i bought a cheap second hand portable cd-player for my 4 year old to listen to with headphones, but they seem very easily breakable compared to an old tape deck. But now i'm feeling pretty inspired so I think I might try getting hold of an old portable tape deck and try!
I think the way to go is lossless digitial downloads purchased as one-time purchases and optimized for lowest non-artist revenue share for sourcing and then probably also hobbyist archiving (combined with sensible backup strategies, etc.) Recording to tape then instantiates the tape as the medium that creates an enjoyable experience and cultural artefact around it. But there's no reason not to have your cake and eat it too, going back to the digital for maximum quality. -- I just don't think the two are in competition all that much.
Unfortunately, I purchased Baldur’s Gate 1/2 many years later with no manual. I’m sure it had an awesome manual as well.
I recall SimEarth having a multi-hundred page spiral-bound manual (though my memory is hazy)
I pored over them obsessively.
I'm looking at you, 1993's Journeyman Project....
There are entire sects of people on the internet that share this incredibly frustrating memory from their childhood. [1]
[0] https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/1995-packard-bell-sof...
[1] https://steamcommunity.com/app/359420/discussions/0/13550947...
That booklet doesn't appear to be available online anywhere :(.
That's awesome. I remember when that song came out. Those were the days...
(I hope it isn't driving you crazy haha(
Nonsense. Me and my bro happily put records of fairy tales and Disney movie adaptations back in the 80s on our crappy portable record player (don’t you dare call this thing a turntable). Harder than a cd? For sure. Too hard for a 5 year old? Certainly not, as long as you don’t mind the record itself facing some rough handling. Which they survived just fine, anyway.
It is always nice to take younger folks to the used DVD/CD store and let them explore. It is not expensive.
There's also a strange paradox, where the better stuff is cheaper. (technically it is probably popular stuff is cheaper). The dvds of season 1 of Friends is usually $1.
and sometimes you can get 4k UHD disks for cheap.
Nowadays, I can buy a $3 microcontroller board and make it play mp3's. And it'll outlive most CDs that are pressed today, so what?
In some case I do buy MP3 directly from online stores, if not available as CD, and burn the CD as well.
Never had a Spotify account, nor plan to.
I was a teenager in a small provincial town in the Netherlands. It had two record stores. They were small. There was also the library with a small collection of decent cds that you could "borrow" (copy to tape). If it wasn't on the radio or in those stores, or in the library, I had no access to it. That was how I built my music collection. Buying albums properly was expensive. I only had about 10 or so. I had a few dozen tapes. Maybe 60 Albums or so and some mix tapes. That was it. Compared to what I have on Spotify, that's nothing.
There's all this BS. how everything was better on "hifi" equipment of the 1980s. The reality of course was that most poor teenagers did not have access to either decent equipment or decent music. I tracked down most of what I had in physical form on Spotify ages ago. And I even listen to some of it regularly. Sounds great with decent modern headphones. I'm perfectly happy with my Sennheiser bluetooth headphones. It probably sounds infinitely better than what I had back in the day. I alsp have a much wider selection of music. Anything I want really.
And of course I'm now in my fifties and my hearing isn't what it used to be in terms of high frequencies. I'm about average in hearing loss (i.e. not going deaf) but any absurdly priced headphones would probably be wasted on me. That's the irony of aging audiophiles, right when they can afford all the right gear, their hearing starts deteriorating. You can't compensate for that with gold plated plugs or any of the other nonsense people are into. Records and analog amplifiers sound nice mainly because of the sound distortion and compression. This isn't all that hard to emulate with digital processing. The pop music of the nineteen eighties was optimized for the cheap FM radios that most people had. That's why a lot of albums got remastered later. The original sound is not actually all that great on modern equipment.
I don't buy into these crackles. I stopped using MP3. A high quality OPUS file format is the way to go for me. I can take the whole music library in my pocket to the places with no internet, listen through good enough in-ear headphones, or with a small speaker (if for more people), and charge that stuff with a small foldable solar panel on the go, next to the tent. Try this with your gramophone.
YMMV.
That's simply incorrect on the face of it, as others have pointed out vinyls offers a curated physical object per clump of music tracks.
Maybe that's not for you, which is fine; but for a number of people, young people today and older people that grew up with records that's a different way of engaging with the media and the artists presentation of media than a faceless, artless, beige device on shuffle.
A large physical album cover with artwork, lyrics, details, etc. is something that some people just like - and was liked even in the days when there was no nostalgia attached to the packaging.
Yoto has a market for children because it has a device driven by physical cards.
Yeah, I've got an original metal tin from a 1968 purchase as a child: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogdens%27_Nut_Gone_Flake#Desig...
I don't think vinyl ever fully went out of fashion.
It started as an impulse purchase and then evolved into hunting down various electronic remixes from the 90s heyday that are not available (legally) in electronic form.
Then I started to notice more & more how my streaming services were revoking songs out of my playlists, which reminded me I don't own anything I can't hold with in my hands.
My final annoyance with the enshittification of streaming music is just the UI/UX of these apps now. I don't want the buttons to move, I don't want a notification, I don't want a popup. I want to press play and listen to music like a big boy. Despite our phones being 100x faster, it seems to take longer and longer to simply do that.
Vinyl, Casettes, and CDs may be the last physical audio media forever.
That shifted again in the mid-teens when I started noticing more bands selling cassette tapes, especially in the more underground scenes. Then it was back to vinyl when things got back in action post-COVID.
But what I've noticed over the last couple of years is everyone's selling CDs again. What's more, they're *actually focusing on CDs*. Over the last 20-30 years it's been more an assumption that one is going to download the music and sure, maybe buy some physical media at the merch table. Now it seems like the assumption is you're going to just buy the physical media.
I've found that interesting.
Journalists have been saying this like it's a fact for like 15 years now. It's wishful thinking, sorry.
