I imagine there's gonna be a pretty sharp cutoff in awareness of this between those who embraced MP3s before MP3 players became cheap enough to buy for your kids - and those who only learned the ins and outs of MP3 _after_ they became cheap enough to consider replacing the Discman. I'm the exact right age to have _been_ the kid at that time so my perspective might very well be unique, but I wanted to explain this "format" through my own eyes. If it turns out this was way more well-known than I thought - oops!
Dude i used this shit before it was cool. I was cross platform plug and play before it was a thing, looting the RAM sticks from my parents old PC to upgrade mine and it worked, slippin and slappin CDs and Casettes into things and it worked, hell i even used my old audio receiver up until recently to listen to all sorts of formats. I even remember those "completely legal" 1000 hits CDs being sold or exchanged by people and those were all mp3. IMO people used it more than you would think.
Love your channel. I'm old I had a Kenwood and an Alpine from around 2000 that both supported mp3 data CD's. when I "grew up" my first adult car in 2005 got a trunk mounted multi CD player that also supported MP3 cds. (that was the best). my current old 2011 Jetta still has support for MP3 CD's. I did need a USB CD-Burner to make a disk. average 125-150 mp3's per CD
@@aaakkk112 I think we ran it for a year it was actually my mother's work walkman so the battery stayed for a long time, and by the time MP3 came to the scene we used to hear it on PC
It is weird, but in tech years, this was a hundred years ago. I burned many MP3 discs, but the elephant in the room is Napster. He doesn't mention where all those internet songs came from, the legal issues, etc.
Well, when current New automobiles & computers have both phased out being able cds 💿 at all, it’s dead ☠️ dead Side note : its wild being the parent of a teenage freshman that has no concept of what “burning a cd” even is 😂
Back in 1994 I got on the internet for the first time, I found newsgroups sharing music bootlegs, encoded in mp2 - Mpeg Layer 2. I had no way to burn CDs, so I'd record these to tapes and make compilations for my car. At the time the computer I had couldn't reliably decode MP2 in realtime, so I'd have to decompress it to PCM audio on the hard disk, play that audio back via the sound card while recording to the tape. Then pause the recording, delete the file for disk space, so I could decode the next one. Rinse, repeat..... rock on. Oh yeah, one other thing, I would download the data at the university computer lab, but my recording setup was at home, so I'd carry half a dozen floppy disks to move data around, each song would take 3-6 floppies. It could take weeks to get the compilation together.
Love your channel, and that's absolutely bonkers. I thought using a dozen floppies for moving a single game was ridiculous: multiple floppies for a song, that's arcane!
I don't think a Technology Connections video has ever made me feel so old as this video has. I'll be 42 in a few weeks and I thought everyone knew all of this information twenty-five years ago.
Many did, but the knowledge has become dated and, thusly, lost to the passage of time... Until Technology Connections was kind enough to immortalize it on UA-cam, that is!
I not only took advantage, i've ABUSED this format as a teenager. There are still piles of CDs with handmade labels in my parent's house. That portable CD player(with 120s anti-shock memory!) was my best friend!
I loved MP3-CD´s because of this. and also the fact you could have like 8 hours on a single CD. Also my first car did not have Bluetooth or an Aux Input but had a MP3-CD reader.
Lol! same here....had a Panasonic portable mp3-CD player and for quite a long while became obsessed with burning/creating the "perfect mix" of 100+ songs on mp3 CDs....Those packs of blank CDs became a staple bday or xmas gift for my sisters and I........and then it all changed when i got my hands on my first iriver mp3 player...and then later my first ipod....ah the good old days!
It was the continuation of the mix tape. Mix disc? One of the first things a "rich" friend of mine did with his 1x scsi burner, was make audio cds with just the songs he liked.
When I was a teen, I repurposed country & western recordings to put bands like Pink Floyd, Queen and The Doors on 8-tracks we could play in the car. My 2011 Focus has a CD player and I LOVE it!
My man just explained my teenage time as a history professor explaining dinosaurs. cd-roms with MP3 files is how we shared music with friends back in the day.
@@lazymass Absolutely. I had a portable Philips eXpanium Mp3 CD player and that thing was the business. In fact I still have it, and it still works. You could fit so much damn music (for the time) on one disc; I mostly had 128-192kbps music files back then.
I can tell you exactly why. Core memories of preparing to take your computer out back and smash it with a sledgehammer because something as simple as the OS refuses to properly reinstall, only for it to miraculously work the 5th time, leading to one of the most exasperated sighs of relief in your life as Windows XP finally loads to desktop and you can go to sleep. Usually because a random trojan infected your computer, which means it's time to back up the most vital of files, wipe the drive, and start a clean install. Or because a bad driver bricked your computer. XP was generally a nice OS to use/navigate, but people don't realize how spoiled we are with system stability nowadays. And OSes auto-downloading missing vital drivers is so, so nice versus relying on 1.0.0 CD-ROM drivers while your PC limps onto the internet in search of updates for everything.
Loading up my iPod with Korn and Slipknot back in '07 is half of why I'm still here today. Never used an Apple product since, but music is damn near everything to me. This channel, man.. it takes these seemingly small things we take for granted and brings them to life. It's so cool to learn about stuff that can not only apply to today, but also about things from your past; like when you were 8 years old and your family had a clapper lamp. Technology is part of the human condition. It is a result of us, and, it makes us. Thank You, and keep making this great timeless content.
Well said. Listened to Korn and Slipknot extensively myself. Saw Slipknot 2 weeks ago.. 25 yr anniversary of the first record - they only played stuff from that one 🤘 . As for the 'why I'm still here' - hardcore did that for me: Hatebreed ("I will be heard"), Terror ("Overcome"), Throwdown ("Never Give Up"), Sick Of It All ("Built to Last"), Bane, Blood For Blood ("Ain't Like You"), Lionheart ("The Will to Survive" / "Built on Struggle")... Bands like that got me through some tough times. I miss my iPod Nano.. The good old days when your music wasn't interrupted by phone calls or notifications...
My Dad was one of those that discovered that the DVD reader in his car could also be used by the audio system. I think he put almost his entire music collection on a single DVD and basically never had to change it out.
@@dustojnikhummer Some later ones did, but by that time I had either modded the rear inputs of the deck to accept a 3.5mm, or bought decks with USB connectors in them (such as my Pioneer in my 87 Hyundai, which I think is from the mod 2000s)
I did a similar thing for a while too for listening music on a DVD player. It could also read double layer ones, which was great. But i never tried MP3 on Blu-Ray. My current MP3 library is in 320k and ~190GB in size, it may fit on a double sided double layer disc, but that would be cursed.
The wildest thing to me is that he was surrounded by mp3 players and didn't know this was a thing until reading a manual. When I was in middle/ high school in the late 90s and early 2000s pretty much everyone was burning and sharing their music collections with each other on mp3 CDs. It wasn't some sort of hidden technology that only tech wizards could figure out, it was insanely popular.
Yeah one of my cars I bought after college had that feature. The filesystem format was very specific for the CD. If you got it wrong unfortunately, the cd-player in the car would not eject the CD. It kept trying to read the bad format and would ignore the eject button. You had to pull out the player and partially disassemble it to get the CD out.
I started downloading mp3s off mIRC in 1997. By 1999, I had a discman that could play those mp3s. It was revolutionary. I was always on the lookout for mp3 compatibility because to me, it was an essential feature which gave me access to my Thunderpuss and Hex Hector library while riding on the bus or in the metro, to and from work, roughly 2 hours a day. I noticed stereo systems starting to display the mp3 logo not long after 2000. Like you said in the video: 750 MB was a ton of space that could fit a LOT of music (especially since my ears weren't yet trained to hear the fickleness of 128/192kbps). I had my entire music library on 4 CDs that I lugged everywhere with me at the time. Today, my entire CD collection is ripped in WAV and takes up 60+ terabytes. Just goes to show that no matter how much tech moves along, we find a way to outgrow it.
I came to say something similar. So compulsively precise. I can picture him saying just "letters" first, or maybe "letters and numbers", but then hating that that wasn't Technically Correct.
I used to make my mom MP3 CDs for her car full of videogame music. She loved that stuff and rightfully so. She was amazed by how many tunes could fit on a single disc. It'd be weeks before she heard the same song again.
This channel, im so glad i discovered this channel for myself. This is a dying format of video i miss seeing more of, combined with a dying presentation style ive always liked, all totally thriving? Youre amazing, man!
That's what you get for being born in the first world. Here in the third world we pretty much jumped from cassette player directly to mp3 CDs. Digital audio CDs were almost an item for rich people, or at the very least not an impulse buy. Also up until the 2010s you could find MP3 CDs sold from a rag on the floor at the side of the street or in pedestrian areas or parks.
i am first world scum, but i believe video cds where also much more a thing for yours? this was the format we always got movies with from the internet.
In Russia it was a huge blast, since the whole country is literally a real pirate bay, we had MP3 CDs being sold in shops, featuring the whole discography of some bands. Even more than that, in the dial-up era I visited a website, where I just ordered whatever music I wanted, and it was remotely burnt to a CD-R and sent to me via mail. This was the way I made myself familiar with a huge library of Finland's power-metal :)
Ooo the Rio ce2100! Me and the merry team of Rio engineers in Cambridge, UK developed that one 😀 (Rio acquired empeg, my startup that made the empeg-car in-car DIN sized mp3 player in 1998, in 2000 and in the years following we developed all the Rio players) Nice to see your one still boots!
Came here to say exactly this. I'd say up to the late 2000s. If you have a stereo system supporting a mp3 cd, you're the man. I was a teen back then and almost everyone knew about this, it was a desired feature that was used all the time - at home and in the car.
@@MrSakavik For sure they did, in the early 2000s there were even legit businesses burning mp3s with whatever album you want (guess if they paid any artist rights), wild from today's perspective
Nero, Clone CD/DVD, sort of dealing albums at school, which later turned into "I have this movie/album, if you want it, just get me a a disc the burner can write on, otherwise, I'll charge 50 cents" or something. Good bad old times. My father was the first in prettty much the area to have a burner in his PC, showed me how it worked, and a small, not quite legal, "allowance improvement" business was born. Hell, I'm not even sure I remember how everything was done, but I do remember that you could even use Windows Mediaplayer to rip CDs. I also remember the failed attempts. Pretty much just burning shortcuts onto a disc, which resulted in an error, or, depending on the player, seriously awful screeching noises. Later on burners became very affordable, so my allowance extension turned into "let's trade copies of whatever we have"
He says in the opener that not too many people took advantage of or noticed... What? Everyone noticed, and everyone had MP3 tracks burned to CDs. The fact that you could fit so many tracks on a CD at the time was amazing. Everyone I knew had new car head units that played burned CDs full of MP3 Tracks. It was the rise and fall of Napster. The start of Cable Modems in the home. It was a great time!
If you lived in Mexico in the 00's, it was harder to find someone who *_didn't_* know about MP3 CDs. Piracy was (and still is) a HUGE industry in Mexico, and you would have stores upon stores all selling MP3 CDs, VCDs, DVDs and video games, all pirated, all dirt cheap. People weren't out there ripping their own CDs and turning them into MP3, rather they bought a bunch of pirated music.
In 2010 I was in Bahrain, and on the pier was a shack store that sold snacks and also pirated movies and shows. I watched all of The Walking Dead season 1 before my girlfriend back home got to finish it. They had unreleased movies of course. It was great.
Mp3 CDs was a really common thing in South America, I remember that it was a really common thing to find people selling compilations of pirated albums in red lights and street markets. So people would buy compilations of their favorite artists or genres to play in their car stereos. Being a little bit tech savy I remember doing disks for family members and friends. Also I remember it was a way to avoid damaging original CDs by switching and transporting them in your car.
CDs where a bit too expensive for working class people in my country. 10usd for a disk made no sense when you could get a compilation of mp3s for 5usd on any streetlight....
oh yeah, eastern european here, and as he started talking i realised these may have been the only kind of cd s in my house whenever i told someone about a mixtape, it was one of these
Oh believe me, I knew all about it. I was a fierce advocate for MP3 CDs. Why waste a disc for 15 songs in standard format if you can fit around 100? It was just economics at the time. Discs weren't free lol
Thank you! I did the same thing! I loved it. I used to make artist discography mp3 cds. It was nice having a whole bunch of cds on 1. It never took me a day to burn either like this guy says. I used Roxio, and there was another I can't remember. Edit: it just hit me. The other burner program was Nero.
Not only that, I would put these on a CD-RW so I can reload old and new tracks whenever I wanted for the player in my car back in the day, and be so proud not to fidget with those fandangled iPods 👵😎 (for some reason younger me was anti Apple so....yeah)
I'm in a completely different camp. I used MP3 CDs all the time back in the early 2000s. I got a PC in 1998 that had both a CD burner and a DVD player. I was that kid burning.....stuff...for my friends at school. Once MP3 became a thing, CDs for me were just potential MP3s for my library that I just needed to get my hands on for a few minutes. I learned about MP3 CDs the same way you did, by seeing the MP3 "logo" on my portable CD player, and rather than read the manual I just burned some MP3s to a CD and popped it in and it worked. After that, I basically never burned a Red Book audio CD again. I'd just burn CDs with a band's entire discography on them. When we got a car that had a CD player built in, it supported MP3 CDs, and I can't recall ever playing a music CD there, though my parents certainly did. Being in the retro gaming scene, I still have and use a CD/DVD burner with some regularity. You can find USB CD/DVD drives for cheap online. While USB bas basically replaced the CD for portable MP3 storage, I can say that I have burned an MP3 CD in the past 5 years. Even my kids' bedroom CD player supports MP3 CDs (since it can also play MP3s off a USB stick), and I have made CDs for them to listen to at night using that format. Projecting USB sticks are a bump risk, but I can put all of my kids' bedtime media on one MP3 CD and access it through the same menu as MP3s via USB.
Yeha same here. I was doing this all the time in the early 2000s. I believe I had been storing mp3s on cds and as soon as I saw a CD player with that logo I popped in one of my mp3 cds and it worked. I remember being excited because I didn't read the manual either and I was like.... "Is this really gonna work?!" Sure enough it did.
Yep, same here. I couldn’t afford an MP3 player, but I had a bunch of MP3 CDs! I think what let me know that I could do. It was in Nero, it had the option and explained what it was.
I definitely knew that portable players could play MP3's, and had a couple -- just needed a couple -- CD's burned until MP3 players came out, and then it was just too easy.
It was by reading the manual I learned the AUX jack on the head unit in my car also takes composite video in if you use one of those TRRS to RCA cables that were commonly used with camcorders. I can connect a PlayStation to my car!
I love videos like this because it never occurred to me that slightly younger people *wouldn't* know about this, but of course...why would they! I actually still have some of my old MP3 CD's knocking about - hours spent ripping audio CD's and, ahem, acquiring MP3's through other means. As a 40 year old, it's crazy how quick we went from tape players in cars, to MP3 CD players
Same. It's kind of ironic he's poking fun at the zoomers for not being familiar with physical media but then didn't know about MP3s on burned CDs when it was a major selling point at that time period. It wasn't exactly a hidden feature. It was just too complicated for the average consumer to use.
@@ozmer People were also more sophisticated than he's giving credit to. For example, some car players were extremely restrictive like only playing 128 Kbit CBR MP3s. Car forums at the time were full of people posting verifications that X new car could or could not play media in certain formats and bitrates.
@ozmer Yep, and dodgy MP3 CDs with pirated tracks were being sold in the 90s between fairly normal people. A random guy on our street used to get them and he wasn't overly techy by any stretch
I dunno, this vid feels like it's vastly overstating how many people don't know this. Discs as a data storage format are still used commonly for video games, so it's not like the idea of storing data on a disc is something wildly unheard of, even to younger kids. I don't think they'd be that shocked to find out that older disc formats couldn't store as much as newer ones, or that not every device could play any type of disc. You can't pop an Xbox game into a Playstation and expect it to work for example. They might not know about this particular use case, but in general I think people understand discs can store data in different ways and not all disc players would be able to read that data.
@@degande-d1wI get the impression that Alec is a nerd who grew up among less tech literate normies - online discussion forums of the time would inherently be populated by more tech literate people because online forums were just more obscure as a concept at the time and one of the main uses of the format was downloaded music so people using the internet more are naturally going to be more aware of these. I think it's also easy to forget that we as an audience are not a representative sample of the population at large, and I'd be willing to bet a majority of people in wealthier countries like the US did indeed go straight from audio CD to dedicated MP3 player without the intermediate step with price likely being a huge factor in areas where less tech literate people did take it up frequently (I was a long way from being poor growing up and yet I was nowhere near wealthy enough to go to a school where most people had MP3 players in that era for instance)
Fun trivia about the CDDB lookup that identifies CDs by track lengths: I put a Mandrake Linux install CD into my drive while my MP3 player (with automatic CDDB lookup) was open, and it identified it as an audiobook of Michael Ende's "Die unendliche Geschichte," known in English as "The Never-ending Story." And now I realize Kids These Days don't know what Mandrake Linux, install CDs, and "The Never-ending Story" are.
This makes me feel so old 😭 I used to make massive compilation CDs out of MP3 files and had a program that I could design jewel case inserts and a printed label for the CD lol.
Regarding the "why wasn't it advertised more prominently", at least for one case I know that there was quite a lot of internal pressure from Sony (the music publishing company) towards Sony (the electronics manufacturing company) to not advertise support for "that dreaded pirate format".. but they couldn't leave it out because it would cost them points in Hifi reviews.
Back then I remember the box that a CD player came in would be plastered with a dozen logos for various formats it supported. The less well known the brand of player, the more logos!
Again. Propably only in USA/rich countires. In poorer ones this was the feature. Thats why they use so in your face letters. No body would buy any player without MP3 support.
@@cyrkielnetwork also in rich countries it was a feature. Putting the MP3 Logo on your car stereo, discman or ghettoblaster was a great way to pump sales. This also revolutionized the market, as established Hifi-Brands were much too slow to innovate - their products were not only outdated, but also too expensive.
I bought a limited edition 2001 Mazda Protege MP3 brand new July 15, 2001 from Santa Monica Mazda and, AFAIK, it was the first cars sold in North America with a factory fitted stereo capable of playing MP3 CDs. I used the heck out of the feature and it was a great car to boot. Laser Mica Blue paint meant it stood out and Mazdaspeed suspension made it one really fun handling small sedan. Can confirm MP3 CD playback was something most people did not know about or understand.
my friend in high school had one of those, it was real fun to drive around. he kept it mint in a garage once he went off to college. finally sold the thing in 2021, under 25k miles i think.
Haha, love the tiptoeing around "informal sharing", which was by far the most common use case for MP3s. The combination of internet + MP3 compression + file sharing software (Napster, Kazaa, etc) was truly a revolution in the music industry. It probably would have happened even faster/earlier if people had better understood MP3 CDs. I remember using them in my stereo back then and it was amazing.
@@MostlyPennyCat My roommate got an email from our college IT dept asking him why he was using so much bandwidth. After which he decided maybe he should add data limits and connection speed limits to his file share ftp.
At least in Finland CDs, cassettes and even hard drives used to be more expensive because the price included a compensation for artists union as it was assumed you would use them to store copyrighted material.
@@Antipico In Italy we still pay this tax, on every storage media (even hard drives). It's just one of the annoying taxes that shall not exist these days (since everyone is streaming anyway).
Ohhh, we used them for audiobooks! Instead of lugging around a 12 CD box set of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, you could throw everything onto one single disc (with spoken word, bitrate really doesnt matter too much), and still have 6 CDs worth of space in the CD changer left over for Discworld and such! Edit: Oh, he talks about that at the end of the video. Neat!
I definitely remember bit-crushing my collection down to 64k at one point so I could fit closer to 500 songs on a single CD. The result was audio tape quality (very hollow sounding) but was still good enough for me to have that many songs on one disc for my MP3-CD player... before I got my smartphone.
I was looking for an explanatory video on how Air Purifiers work. I thought "Oh boy, I bet Technology Connections has a video on that!". I was disappointed that I couldn't find one. So I watched a few more of your recent videos instead. Still don't know how air purifiers work (do they work?), but did learn a few other things. Please make one on air purifiers!
Air purifiers remove particles by filtering the air, and some gasses by catching the molecules in the porous cavities of the activated charcoal. The particle filter gets more effective as time passes, whereas the charcoal becomes saturated almost immediately. Air purifiers are effective at catching the particles suspended in the air that passes through them, but most of the particles you're interested in lands on the surfaces of your house before they travel to the purifier.
oh man as a kid who grew in the 2000's, I loved burning CD's , doing that really gave me the love of music I have today. I remember when I first got into music on my own I would make custom cds with different songs from different albums, over the years I have managed to salvage some mp3s . Burning Cds will always have a special place in my heart.
In USA Audio CDs and DVDs were very popular, but in many other countries they were often way to expensive, so MP3 CD and DivX CD become the most popular formats. This is why so many audio hardware supported MP3 CDs. People had only MP3 pirated music collection and DivX movies. In my country DVD players sold poorly, but in mid 2000's multimedia DivX players become a thing. They could play MP3, AVI (with various Xvid, DivX etc. codecs) and they had also a Video CD and DVD playback on top. Though no one cared about DVD Video and the only use case was DVD-R that could store multiple DivX movies. It was so popular, that magazines with a movie on a disc were sold in stores. Of course they were official releases. First they were Video CDs, since every disc player and most computers were capable to play them. Then some started releasing DivX CDs compatible with standalone DivX players and they also had EXE player with proper codec on CD. Lastly normal DVDs were introduced, but rather late, before HD Blurays become available. Fun fact: Movie piracy was so popular, that Blurays never got any popularity, since people simply started downloading HD movies in MKV format. Even early HD TVs supported USB storage and played AVI, MP4 (HD video) and MKV files. This is the reason why Netflix and other streaming services were quickly adopted outside of the USA. At that point we had more than a decade of "streaming" audio and video content. This is also a reason, why teenagers in early 2000's wanted a PC. It gave nearly unlimited access to music, movies and other content. Along with slow modem internet. For example a group of friends could coordinate their downloads to get as many MP3s with their limited hours on the internet each month. All of this might be the reason why PC gaming dropped physical media 15 years ago, while consoles still have discs and cartridges. PC gaming was dominating in regions with heavy piracy and Steam got popular, because it become more convenient than piracy. Especially with huge sales it had many years ago. People were buying old games they once pirated. Lastly iTunes and iPods were never a thing in many countries. WinAmp was something everyone used along with various ways to rip Audio CDs to MP3. I've seen way more portable CD players than MP3 players. Those got some popularity in 2006-2008, though people were often using phones with MP3 players starting with Siemens SL45i and then Sony Ericsson Walkman phones become really popular. Until finally Android phones dominated the market (I've had iPhone 3G and oh boy, like everyone had to ask me do I know it don't support MMS and multitasking).
Oh I remember when I watched unreleased movies, recorded with a camera by some insider, in an "empty" movie theater, downloaded from some torrent site.
@@danpedersen55I detested camrips. One time I downloaded a movie from a dorm DC hub and it was unmarked cam rip. I figured out where the guy lived and went to yell at him to mark his files properly, in person.
Your side comment about ATRAC made me think that a video discussing Sony's long list of proprietary format successes and failures would be fun... Betamax, MemoryStick, UMD, MiniDisc, etc.
One of my favorite electro artists did a (very limited) minidisc release of one of his albums about three years ago. When I say very limited I mean he made 20 and I bought one even though I don't have a player for it, but minidisc still lives!
It’s funny that they’re still doing that today, IIRC the PlayStation Portal doesn’t use bluetooth but instead uses some other thing Sony pulled out of their butt. Nobody complained though because nobody bought a PlayStation Portal.
Ah, MiniDisc. Pretty much everything has been said that there is to say about it, but it's one of those formats that if it had come out just a **few** years earlier, it might have had some decent success outside the professional realm. I used it for radio production, but for consumer uses, for various reasons, it never stood a chance.
MiniDisc did well in Japan, the UK and other markets but sold poorly in the US. That said, there are not many British people that have seen an 8 track cartridge and those that have heard of them are probably old tech nerds.
30:00 I believe the recording industry was a huge reason why you wouldn't see MP3 CDs being sold in stores. It basically would allow someone to instantly copy + paste the files in windows explorer and start sharing them. The industry hated file sharing with a passion, and they're the ones selling the CDs in the first place.
@@obliviouz As said in the video, this wasn't a big deal since the lossy compression was often unnoticeable with a walkman, a car equipment, a standard PC or even the mini combo in most house. Only audiophiles with proper high end equipment could hear the difference during that time.
@@PainterVierax In addition, many of us were still used to listening to cassette tapes or FM radio, which were both objectively worse sounding than a compressed MP3.
I would like to add that as being a kid/teenager between 2000 and 2005, I can tell you that from my personal experience, MP3-CDs (and MP3-CD-Players) were very central to my existence! I am from Western-Europe and these were definitely a big thing in the early 2000's. My last use of MP3 CD's was indeed in my car as a young adult driver (up to as late as 2013), but my first use of MP3-CD's was in fact in my Panasonic portable MP3-CD-Player from 2003 (already featuring a Lithium-Ion battery for an extremely thin form factor: it was no thicker than 5 CD's). And whilst iTunes was a way of importing MP3 to your PC, at least in Europe (unless you had an unaffordable iPod), you would probably use other software to import CD's to MP3 (or simply get MP3 files from your friends ;-) I have dozens of burned MP3 CD's back from the 2000's, including some with Audiobooks. Whilst it's true that stereo's was maybe less of a thing, as whilst at home I'd just happily play my musing from my desktop computer, on the go, they were definitely a thing. Also playing MP3-CD's on our DVD player that included a surround sound system was definitely also a thing, although the UI was usually so appalling that it made this use more sporadic than ritual!
My '05 Mustang has a six disc changer with mp3! And since there's no aux jack, you bet that's how i listen to music in it! Loading it up for the first time was fun, watching it eat the discs one by one and listening to them being placed in the magazine.
Like a lot of the commenters here, I already knew and understood every word you spoke, but I still watched the whole thing because it was just such a joy hearing you explain it. It takes a rare talent to be able to explain something to someone who already knows and to still make it compelling content, and you have it. Love your work.
This was my hack back in the day. I owned a couple cars that supported MP3 via CD, and they both had CD changers. And, I was a nerd. My friends were keeping their giant CD binders in their cars, but I had 7 CDs (6 in the changer and 1 in the head unit) filled with tons of albums worth of music. It was like endless music. My favorite second hack from the time was using the CDs you could burn graphics onto the front. I’d use that to list the artists and albums I had on each MP3 CD. I was living on the edge at the time and I was loving every minute of it!
17:20 who wants to see an AgingWheels crossover short about sun visors that drooped down slightly due to neoprene disc holders up there (with each pocket double or even triple stuffed) containing CD-Rs that rocked some of the best 3D block lettering in mult colored Sharpie? 💿📀💿📀💿📀💿📀😁
I just looked this up on Google Images, and yeah... I don't remember seeing too many of these in real life but they did exist and people's sun visors did droop a tad with all of those CDs weighing the neoprene down. A real millennial "back in my day".
@@eliaugliono4098yeah, check them now. I had mine in climate-controlled storage and none lasted more than 10/15 years. Thankfully, there was nothing on them I didn't have on an actual hard disk somewhere.
So, if I need to save something to make it accessible 20-30 years from now, I wonder what the best option is? Even getting an optical drive by them may be a long shot. The most recent place this came up was with regards to about 40 years worth of daily journaling that the author wants to make copies of for all the (great)grand-kids. The expectation that any maintenance will be done (beyond not tossing it in the trash) is "almost never" (in the mathematical sense).
@@GobrinDesuka Research I've done suggests that the stability of flash RAM beyond about 10-20 years is highly questionable. We just don't know. The stuff you can get new-off-the-shelf today we really only have a few years of empirical data about and the vast majority of that assume's it will be turned on at least ever few years. Stick it in a safe deposit box for 20-30 years? Tape does seems the most likely to be stable, but the cost to find a drive to read it might make it "functionally unreadable" without a really good idea what data is there and a really good motivation for extracting it. Frankly, micro film seems like a real contender. It looks like the "Datamatrix" 2D bar code format can store up to about 1 page of text so stuff those long one margin if you need the digital version back?
@@GobrinDesuka I was under the understanding that SSDs were not good for long term storage, especially off-line. Setting aside holding up on-line, I heard that the charge stored in the drive faded over time (a longer period of time than other mediums) unless it was connected to power and it could restore the charge. This isn't talking complete data loss, but more like some bits becoming unreadable after years of off-line storage, resulting in having uncorrectable errors. This may be off base though.
I assume it's just an age gap, because everyone I knew, including myself, had binders full of mp3 discs. Also, some cars still have CD players, so it's no that far in the past.
Yes some vehicles still have CD players, it is mainly by 2027 that experts think vehicles will not haver CD players in them but maybe they will, at least companies are being forced to have buttons on the vehicle again instead of a screen behind the drivers wheel and one on the dash, unless you are Elon Musks brand Tesla where he is having more and more flaws to the point his vehicles are not going to be passing safety laws in the USA mainly requiring buttons again for a few major market states like California, New Jersey, and a few other New England states with even worse some of his vehicles rusting out being unsafe or having bad setup for housing the airbags, being unsafe in a year or two.
I never had mp3 CDs, just audio CDs, thought there was some protection on the music preventing me to play mp3 CDs instead of audio ones. Had binders full of CDs with games tho
@NuchiAsaki like TC,I grew up in the era and was/still am a huge PC nerd. I had many MP3 disks worth of music and my 2003 Ford Ranger Edge with Pioneer Audio could play them AND was a multi disk changer! What an era! My brother's Ford Ranger required him to use the Tape to 3.5mm converters to listen to music since he is 6 years older than me.
Alec, your videos usually hold my interest for showing the depth behind something I encounter every day, or in showing me the wonders of technologies before my time. But this is one of your first videos that hit like a nostalgia sledgehammer. Great work!
I think a lot of people found this feature "accidentally" on their cars or stereo. When was just very kid i burned MP3 to discs the "wrong" way and created CD-ROM instead of CD Audio. And when i plopped it onto 2008 Vios ... It read and the playlist button switches folders! This is so cool and since then we made a LOT of these CD's.
Many older gamers will relate: when you inserted a game CD-ROM into a CD player, game sound effects, background music, and even voice acting often played directly from the disc.
@@georgesiv2082 My little mind got absolutely blown when I inserted the CD of Age of Empires into my mom's CD player on a whim and got to listen to the soundtrack.
So, I'm still driving a fairly old car with an optical drive, and a few months ago I bought a burner and a bunch of blank CDs hoping to put my collection of video game soundtracks in there. I was disappointed by the 80 minutes limitation and put the idea to rest for a while but I checked and sure enough, there's the little MP3 logo. You've just made my original idea possible by putting this video out, thank you!
It is very interesting to note that in developed countries, legitimate forms of audio distribution were widely used. In Brazil, for example, many people have never bought an original CD or DVD in their entire lives. Most of us started using CDs and DVDs when the popularization of piracy meant that basically everywhere you could buy a CD with MP3 songs updated with the hits of the same week. You would hardly see a child with any Apple or MP3 device, even if it was from a cheap brand, basically we all depended on these types of CDs to be able to listen to any type of music in the car. In the 2010s, easier access to USB drivers retired CDs.
Same here in India. Almost all of the CD players could play MP3 and it was an expected feature. Most people didn't even know that there are multiple formats in CD. The assumption was that if I have a CD player and if I put a CD having audio in, it did just play that audio.
@@matt5721 Yes! LOL Cds and CD players were so expensive that most people used Old Cassetts or just the radio XD When people started using cds here it was already a large sea of piracy. And DVDs too. Nobody here have original copies of anything.
Great video. I was one of the few people i knew that used MP3 CD's in the early 2000's. I ripped all my cd's at 192 bit rate and put every album I owned on MP3 CD's so it made it super easy to have all my music in the car. I also loved having the track and album titles displayed.
it was at least popular enough for AUDIOBOOKS in german. i rememberd having to very carefully look at the Audiobook case if it was regular CDs or MP3 CDs because we didnt have a MP3 CD player at home at the time
There's even a hybrid CD format that has audio as an actual CD and then a partition with MP3s. It would comply with the red book standard for audio CDs and then mount as MP3s on a computer
There were actually two hybrid CD formats that combined a filesystem and CD audio. "CD Extra" placed the audio on the first, separate, session of the CD and the data on a later session. This was the most compatible with old-style players as they always tried to read the CD from the beginning, so they would find the audio first. However, it would break on players and old computer disc drives that couldn't handle multi-session discs, of which there were some. "Mixed-mode CD" placed the data on the first track of the CD and the remaining tracks were all audio. This didn't require separate sessions, so it would be recognized by almost every player and drive, but really dumb audio players ones would try to play the data track as audio making a horrible noise.
Many games on CDs back in the day also used a hybrid format. Track 1 was data and further tracks were Red Book audio. I remember listening to the soundtrack of Civilization 2 straight from the game CD.
There was one other common issue due to the lack of standardization: file and folder name length. Some players supported Joliet extensions while other early ones only used raw ISO 9660 which only does 8.3 file names. I had a 32mb flash MP3 player which also did this for some ungodly reason.
excellent video, as always. just wanted to say that I really appreciate your somewhat interactive captions. it's a really nice touch to your videos and it feels like a secret extra way to interact with your content!
Thank you for making this video! I drive an older car with a 5 cd changer. You'd think 5 cds is a lot of music but I drive a lot and they get old. Changing them out is a bit slow and a hassle as well. I do have all these ads in my laptop via iTunes. Now I will make an mp3 cdr and fill up my cd changer with them. I'll have my whole playslist and more on the go! Wow!
i remember there being two options to burn music to a CD. one way could hold 20, the other could hold like 200. i remember discovering the 200 option and couldn't even think of what to put on it to fill it up lol
@@MarcelAgvanyan 200 three-minute songs at 128kbps could easily fit onto one CD and the quality was more than good enough for car listening especially if you had been used to cassette tapes. Each one would be about 3MB.
I want to argue with you that mp3 CDs weren't as esoteric of a "format" in the early 2000s as you're making them out to be - I had an entire CD wallet full of burned discs of mp3s, I took it to work everyday to listen to as I did my job... coding websites. Ok, I may have been one of those weird techie people.
I knew tons of people that had portable MP3 CD players. I had the Rio Volt and burned entire CD boxed sets on a single discs. Also I'm close to 50 and find it funny that I now have to explain things to the "youngin’s'. Didn't think that would happen for another 20 years.
I had tons as well. A lot of friends did too. At the time it was cheaper to have discs over an mp3 player. Or if you had a car with an aftermarket stereo that had a USB port, the discs were cheaper than a $50 8gb flash drive. Give or take a few dollars
Actually, you could burn iTunes purchased music onto a rewritable CD as audio and rip that audio back into iTunes as DRM-free MP3 ;) The MP3 CD format was way more popular in Europe. I had the first MP3 discman available from a major manufacturer (Philips) - paid a fortune for it in 2001 and it still works. I had a Panasonic car unit in my Mazda that played MP3 CDs (and AAC). It was the greatest thing ever. But then iPods came.... but they were expensive so MP3 CDs had a good run for a couple of years.
The CD-Player-Navi-Multimedia Device in my 2010 Peugeot still had only a CD-Player (no usb and SD card only for Navi-Data /Firmware update) therefore the MP3-CD Function was heavily in use until 2020 when I sold the car. The replacement Pioneer CD-Radio for my 2000 Smart that I owned before also has had the mp3 feature. My current Toyota can play mp3-CDs but also can play mp3 from USB-Sticks. The old Citroen from my brother with a old Sony Radio still can only mp3-CDs additional to Audio-CDs. The only reason to burn a CD today (when he want a new mixed "Tape" aka mp3 CD for his car. Sometimes maybe once every two years I burn a DVD with some important Data (MAils, scans from contracts) as Backup but mostly as last resort for the worst case scenarios I use Bluray for my digital photos (no encryption virus can encrypt allready burned data).
I was thinking this may be a regional thing, as usual with this channel. Where I'm from the iPod was a bit of a niche product and while digital MP3 players existed and were popular people had been trading MP3 mix CDs for ages, so by the time MP3 CD players came around I had a huge library of pre-burned ones ready to go. I'm pretty sure I have the exact portable player he shows here somewhere in the house, and I bought it very specifically to play that library.
32:20 This is actually a thing you can do with some modern blu-ray players. I haven't tested a ton, but I know that on modern sony players you can burn an 8GB mp4 video file onto a DVD, with aac surround sound and everything, and the sony player will play it back just fine (as long as you keep the maximum bitrate under control).
This was a trip, I'm 42 so I was recording songs off the radio on to tapes when CDs were becoming more common. I remember these kind of discs in the early 2000s. We called them the data CDs and the other just music CDs. Great vid
You mention the idea of having H264 DVDs with 1080p video and what a fascinating world that could have been...we actually had/have it, and I even used it for my demo reels when I was shopping around my portfolio to colleges. There was another standard supported by Blu-ray players called AVCHD discs, and like the name suggests, are simply DVDs with AVCHD encoded video on them. It supports menus and everything, and while you definitely couldn't fit much video on there, it was more than enough to show a short demo reel without any loss in quality, but on way cheaper writable media.
It's funny because I kinda independently "invented" a similar thing, but using x265 instead. I can get like a 20:1 compression ratio before the quality is too bad for my tastes, definitely enough to get a movie's length of 1080p video with 5.1 audio (ac3 at 500 kbps is good enough) into under 2 GB. I used a Blu ray copy of Fantasia 2000 I ripped to my computer to test, the ripped file came out to 20 GB and I got it down to around 1.3 GB. I call it the S-DVD or the SVD (super video disc) since HD-DVD was at one time a thing. It's basically only useful for me as I can store my massive movie library on disc without sacrificing too much quality, freeing up HDD/SSD space for games. Downside is it takes my PC like 27 hours to reencode a feature length AVC into x265 lol Next is to attempt HDR and eventually 4k support, perhaps using dual layer discs if necessary.
@@Aquatarkus96 aren't hdd's way cheaper per gigabyte at this point? also, if hardware acceleration is working properly encode shouldn't take longer than the length of the movie, especially at 1080p
@@game-tea Yes. Monumentally less expensive, especially when we're talking about relative oddities like burning multi-layer discs. I can't speak to the encoding speed side, since HDDs _are_ so inexpensive, I just leave everything native. There's not a ton of reason to compress much of anything anymore that is being played locally. Even 90GB for a 4K UHD Blu-ray is tolerable. With only around 2000 titles in existence, you could back up the entire catalog for a couple grand.
Such a thing would be an interesting compromise. A 1080p movie compressed to fit on a dual layer DVD would still be vastly superior to streaming quality, and with DVDs being a format without licensing fees it would be significantly cheaper than blu rays.
@@game-tea yes but have you considered how cool it is to have your movies on separate digital disks? Also it's hard to argue with the price of an old stack of DVDs that you haven't used yet.
I can almost see every single viewer smirk, when he mentions rightfully owned audio CDs as the sole source for MP3 files. Man, did we „exchange“ them files with „friends“ ;-)
I made hundreds of MP3 CDs in the late '90s - early 2000s. I didn't know it was an obscure thing. Seems like everyone I knew was doing that before MP3 players got big.
LOL... I know right... CDs with MP3s were the the main format until High capacity memory cards and decent walkman phones were a thing... I never could afford an IPOD, nor did I want a flash MP3 walkman with stupid 128 Mb storage when a CD is much cheaper, faster and bigger
@@DaRush-The_Soviet_Gamer are you sure about mp3 CDs being "the main format?" Can you elaborate? I feel like there's an important distinction between a CD ROM full of MP3s and an audio CD made _from_ MP3s.
SAME. and this was just intuitive to me I haven't really paid attention to this I just knew if it had the MP3 label that the random CD I'd burned with mp3's would work in it.
its true though, while my tech savvy friends knew about them even before I did, even in 2024 I will tell the "common folk" about them and their mind is blown
Yep. I had a $40 generic Walkman style MP3 CD player in 2001 that played burnt CDs full of MP3 files- the batteries lasted a long time. My roommate had a MiniDisc player, and I eventually got the Creative Nomad Jukebox 20GB.
Check out EAC, Exact Audio Copy, a windows tool to rip files from a CD. It's data base knows not only meta data but also how to detect less than 'exact' digital rips. I've let it loop on poor quality discs until it was finally able to announce it got a 'good' rip.
I remember finding an audio sharing site called UberNode (?) run by a guy named Chris Myden. He had a strict rule on using EAC and file naming schemes etc. I never joined, but really wanted to.
And some level of "will continue to work." Around 2005 when mobile convergence started to happen and especially with things centered around internet services there are devices out there that will never work again. iPods are dying like flies, meanwhile my old Rio Volt CD player works like brand new.
We just loved that steady whinning sound of data being written onto a cd/dvd, after a quite dramatic buffering and lead-in writing with some disc motor spin ups. And pray the burning process completed successfully.
As a long time subscriber, I already knew that you are my kind of nerd. But I really started to grin when you showed your TMBGs MP3 CD. It pleasantly reminds me of my TMBG compliation on Minidisc.
The matrix display on his Discman is exactly the same as the matrix display on my minidisc player and I was immediately transported back to my walk home from school listening to Prodigy and RHCP and feeling like a boss for having all that music on this awesome device
I was a high school kid in Germany in the early 2000s and MP3 CDs were an extremely common music-format, for listening and "sharing" music with friends. But it was clunky having a knock-off discman in your bag or pocket that'd skip if you didn't move carefully, along with CDs that were always in those brittle plastic cases that'd crack and break so easily, especially the part that holds the disc. And I remember the earplugs or headphones wires were either so short that you couldn't turn your head in some directions or way too long. I once had these great Sony headphones, but they had a 3m (ca. 9 foot) cable, that I wore like a belt while biking around, lol. In the mid 2000s I moved on to various cheapo 512MB MP3-players and then iPods all throughout the early 2010s. I still have my old PC somewhere in the basement, with my massive and meticulously curated iTunes library, where every song even has the correct album cover image.
I'm a bit of an older They Might Be Giants nut, so I had a 10-disc CD changer in my car (the changer was in the trunk) which typically had 8-9 slots filled with TMBG CDs. When the "Then: The Early Years" compilation came out, I was really happy because it condensed 3 discs (Self-Titled, Lincoln, and Misc T) down to 2. I even ended up burning Long Tall Weekend to AudioCD to play on it. That "CD-R/RW" compatibility note on players was no joke, as early CD players could have problems with even CD-R discs, let alone CD-RW. I had some special "gold" CD-R discs that worked better than others to minimize skipping, if it played at all. I also had MP3 CDs before there were any standalone CD players that could play them, because that's how I backed up my data. Ripping a CD took long enough I didn't want to do it again, so periodically burned a CD full of MP3s so I could restore from that if my HDD failed. I actually switched to a Creative Zen MP3 player before I owned a car that could play MP3 files. However, later when I would travel and rent a car, I'd stick an MP3 CD in my CD wallet just in case the car I rented could play them.
This was the biggest benefit of MP3 CDs for me. Being able to fit 10 hours or so of music on a single disc was a game changer for car audio. No more fiddling with disc swapping while driving or needing a fancy bulky multi-disc changer.
You're telling me DIN HiFi slots were a thing until 2015? I would have sworn by 2005 there were no cars anymore that had no weirdly convoluted integrated mandatory "infotainment system"...
About those h.264 DVD players: yes, they exist. Not in the form of DVD players that will play them, but more importantly, Blu-Ray and/or HD-DVD players that would play h.264 MP4 files recorded on standard DVD-RW discs. I remember reading the owner's manual for a friend's Blu-Ray player, which said that it would play AVCHD-encoded DVDs, which were what some HD cameras recorded on. Mine didn't, but I found that 1) if I copied the SD cards that my camera recorded on over to a DVD-RW, this Blu-Ray player (don't remember the brand) would indeed play them. And also 2) if I edited movies recorded on that camera, and exported them as a single MP4 file, it also played those, not caring that the directory structure expected by AVCHD wasn't there. Which was great because at the point I was doing this sort of stuff, Blu-Ray recorders were still pretty expensive, and it meant that I could burn MP4 videos onto cheap DVD-RW discs that at least SOME other people could play, even in full HD. I recently bought a USB BDXL drive, mainly for backing up data to 100 GB archival discs, and it seems to be backward-compatible all the way back to red-book CD, at least for playback, and while I haven't tried making MP3 CDs with it, it does claim to be able to write on CD-RW, DVD-RW, and several BD variants, so I have little doubt that I could put a freaking huge CD collection on a single disc. Which is really only meaningful for making backups, since every other device I have can already play audio or (where applicable) video from SD cards, even up to at least 512 GB. But yes, as soon as I saw "MP3" on the front panels of CD players, I guessed what that meant, and quickly discovered just what you did. But by then, the compact form factor of MP3 players made more sense to me than actually using CDs for playing music. That, and I didn't have a car CD player anyway.
I remember MP3 compatibility was a must-have feature on all new CD players once they started coming out. That is why the CD-RW label came out. People wanted re-writable MP3 CDs.
I first discovered MP3 around 1996/1997. I was blown away that a 3 megabyte file could sound fairly close to a much larger uncompressed wav file. In those early days I had to run a DOS command line app to make the mp3 files.
The software that came with my first CD burner was from HP when I was probably 12. It only took wav files, so after Christmas morning trying to burn my mp3 collection to CDs was a nightmare. I ended up having a buddy come over and download some command line program that converted mp3 to wavs so we could burn CDs. Wasn't until later that I realized you can use any software to burn CDs and not the one that came with the CD burner. That one took mp3s and I was much happier. Lon, I like your channel too!
I always love the random things I learn from your videos. I remember once when I was a kid we had a pirated DVD that did not have the standard video format on it. We stuck it in like 4 DVD players before finding one that would play the file format.
Right around 2000-2001, I was regularly driving from Silicon Valley to San Diego, about a 500 mile drive without a lot of radio coverage. I dropped a bundle of cash for a car stereo that had MP3 CD playback. I would make a "mix tape" disc, set it to shuffle, and just roll.
My car is from 2009, and I still use MP3 CDs. Once a year, I download all the new music from my playlist and burn it onto a CD, It works well, it also had USB port for Pendrives, but I burnt the USB port by charging my phone with it, back in the 2000 I used Emule and Ares to download MP3 music for my portable player, that was before mobile internet was a thing.
@@joakoc.6235 I bought a new car around that time. It had a MP3 CD player but what I really wanted was a USB drive in my car for larger audio storage capacity. I asked the dealership if there was a way I could get a model with a USB drive and they looked at me like I had just spoken in Latin or something. They had no idea what I was talking about.
I actually love this idea! Burning all the new music from the past year would serve as a really cool archive to look back on in 5-10 years. I find specific songs bring me back to specific checkpoints in my life, so literally having a CD with all of those songs all in one place would be a really cool way to remember times past.
"Time wasn't the only issue" ...well yeah, but remember that time on a modem DID actually cost you money - since back in the days many of us had to pay some cents per minute online. So, yeah, download one CD over the course of one day and say goodbye to your allowance 😂
I imagine there's gonna be a pretty sharp cutoff in awareness of this between those who embraced MP3s before MP3 players became cheap enough to buy for your kids - and those who only learned the ins and outs of MP3 _after_ they became cheap enough to consider replacing the Discman. I'm the exact right age to have _been_ the kid at that time so my perspective might very well be unique, but I wanted to explain this "format" through my own eyes. If it turns out this was way more well-known than I thought - oops!
wait.. there were more than TEN TMBG albums?! I always thought they were kind of a one hit wonder..
I was the walkman Cassette as well as Cd music generation
Dude i used this shit before it was cool. I was cross platform plug and play before it was a thing, looting the RAM sticks from my parents old PC to upgrade mine and it worked, slippin and slappin CDs and Casettes into things and it worked, hell i even used my old audio receiver up until recently to listen to all sorts of formats. I even remember those "completely legal" 1000 hits CDs being sold or exchanged by people and those were all mp3. IMO people used it more than you would think.
Love your channel. I'm old I had a Kenwood and an Alpine from around 2000 that both supported mp3 data CD's. when I "grew up" my first adult car in 2005 got a trunk mounted multi CD player that also supported MP3 cds. (that was the best). my current old 2011 Jetta still has support for MP3 CD's. I did need a USB CD-Burner to make a disk. average 125-150 mp3's per CD
@@aaakkk112 I think we ran it for a year it was actually my mother's work walkman so the battery stayed for a long time, and by the time MP3 came to the scene we used to hear it on PC
mmm, "Unknown Artist", allegedly best DJ in 2000s, everybody had one of his tracks somewhere
I feel that. The first artist I uncovered was Linkin Park
Oh, I still have some because it’s not worth the effort to fix the tags. lol
Dude, UA slaps!
He was way better when he was still part of Various Artists
[Album artist] - [Track title] is one of my all-time favorite songs!
God it’s so wild to hear “burning MP3s to blank CDs” explained like some arcane knowledge from the Before Times.
I mean, it kind of is. Once the iPhone really came into its own, downloading music started to fall by the wayside.
I had piles of burned CDs like this for my car because it supported MP3 cds.
It is weird, but in tech years, this was a hundred years ago. I burned many MP3 discs, but the elephant in the room is Napster. He doesn't mention where all those internet songs came from, the legal issues, etc.
Well, when current New automobiles & computers have both phased out being able cds 💿 at all, it’s dead ☠️ dead
Side note : its wild being the parent of a teenage freshman that has no concept of what “burning a cd” even is 😂
We old as hell lol
Back in 1994 I got on the internet for the first time, I found newsgroups sharing music bootlegs, encoded in mp2 - Mpeg Layer 2. I had no way to burn CDs, so I'd record these to tapes and make compilations for my car. At the time the computer I had couldn't reliably decode MP2 in realtime, so I'd have to decompress it to PCM audio on the hard disk, play that audio back via the sound card while recording to the tape. Then pause the recording, delete the file for disk space, so I could decode the next one. Rinse, repeat..... rock on.
Oh yeah, one other thing, I would download the data at the university computer lab, but my recording setup was at home, so I'd carry half a dozen floppy disks to move data around, each song would take 3-6 floppies. It could take weeks to get the compilation together.
Love your channel, and that's absolutely bonkers. I thought using a dozen floppies for moving a single game was ridiculous: multiple floppies for a song, that's arcane!
Omg the rocket guy is here!!! Way to go Scott ❤️
Being a pirate was hard work back then!
Wild
Wonder how many times a floppy disk would fail to read. I remember using and being terribly unreliable. Fly safe!!
one of the best channels on youtube. your commentary could make drying paint entertaining
I'd happily listen to Alec making his usual remarks while watching grass grow. 🙂
I don't think a Technology Connections video has ever made me feel so old as this video has. I'll be 42 in a few weeks and I thought everyone knew all of this information twenty-five years ago.
I’m 44 and feel the same…
@@brainwashingdetergent4322 Ditto. The early 2000s was actually pretty lit.
I'm 42, right there with ya!
I’ll see you at the early morning breakfast spot soon brother.
Many did, but the knowledge has become dated and, thusly, lost to the passage of time... Until Technology Connections was kind enough to immortalize it on UA-cam, that is!
I not only took advantage, i've ABUSED this format as a teenager. There are still piles of CDs with handmade labels in my parent's house. That portable CD player(with 120s anti-shock memory!) was my best friend!
I loved MP3-CD´s because of this. and also the fact you could have like 8 hours on a single CD. Also my first car did not have Bluetooth or an Aux Input but had a MP3-CD reader.
Lol! same here....had a Panasonic portable mp3-CD player and for quite a long while became obsessed with burning/creating the "perfect mix" of 100+ songs on mp3 CDs....Those packs of blank CDs became a staple bday or xmas gift for my sisters and I........and then it all changed when i got my hands on my first iriver mp3 player...and then later my first ipod....ah the good old days!
MP3-DVDs was the only logical choice when getting the first car! haha
It was the continuation of the mix tape. Mix disc? One of the first things a "rich" friend of mine did with his 1x scsi burner, was make audio cds with just the songs he liked.
When I was a teen, I repurposed country & western recordings to put bands like Pink Floyd, Queen and The Doors on 8-tracks we could play in the car.
My 2011 Focus has a CD player and I LOVE it!
My man just explained my teenage time as a history professor explaining dinosaurs.
cd-roms with MP3 files is how we shared music with friends back in the day.
+
I'm truly ancient--we made mix tapes on actual cassettes!
@@FrostyDog9186 I did both.
Yeah I had a CD Walkman that could play them, was absolute edge of technology those days 🤣
@@lazymass Absolutely. I had a portable Philips eXpanium Mp3 CD player and that thing was the business. In fact I still have it, and it still works. You could fit so much damn music (for the time) on one disc; I mostly had 128-192kbps music files back then.
MP3 CD's were the best! Just one CD in your car and you were basically set with all your favorites, with a few backup CD's for different playlists.
I love that your CD burner drive is named "burnadette"
Also, hearing the Windows XP startup music was oddly relaxing.
*CD name
I can tell you exactly why. Core memories of preparing to take your computer out back and smash it with a sledgehammer because something as simple as the OS refuses to properly reinstall, only for it to miraculously work the 5th time, leading to one of the most exasperated sighs of relief in your life as Windows XP finally loads to desktop and you can go to sleep.
Usually because a random trojan infected your computer, which means it's time to back up the most vital of files, wipe the drive, and start a clean install.
Or because a bad driver bricked your computer.
XP was generally a nice OS to use/navigate, but people don't realize how spoiled we are with system stability nowadays. And OSes auto-downloading missing vital drivers is so, so nice versus relying on 1.0.0 CD-ROM drivers while your PC limps onto the internet in search of updates for everything.
@@Supercohboy When was the last time anyone saw the Blue Screen of Death? For me it must be a couple of decades at least. Windows has come a long way.
@@RebeccaTurner-ny1xx it's been replaced by an automatic update in the middle of doing something important, even when you select update later.
@@RebeccaTurner-ny1xxyesterday, my PC does not like me
This was the first episode of Technology Connections where I wasn't learning, I was reminiscing. Thanks for the nostalgia.
Same!
Well said - same here. I actually delayed watching this one because I needed to be in the right mindset for nostalgia.
OMG Me too!
We're almost at No Effort November.
I'm ready for this.
You mean no more listening to random stupid no fill in the blank november nombmber?
TV remotes
@@CosmicAggressor but that's my favorite parts
Didn't that just happen? Wait. Holy crap where has time gone.
"Ready" That's cheating. Making an effort in advance. tsk..😺
Loading up my iPod with Korn and Slipknot back in '07 is half of why I'm still here today.
Never used an Apple product since, but music is damn near everything to me.
This channel, man.. it takes these seemingly small things we take for granted and brings them to life.
It's so cool to learn about stuff that can not only apply to today, but also about things from your past; like when you were 8 years old and your family had a clapper lamp.
Technology is part of the human condition.
It is a result of us, and, it makes us.
Thank You, and keep making this great timeless content.
Well said.
Listened to Korn and Slipknot extensively myself. Saw Slipknot 2 weeks ago.. 25 yr anniversary of the first record - they only played stuff from that one 🤘
. As for the 'why I'm still here' - hardcore did that for me: Hatebreed ("I will be heard"), Terror ("Overcome"), Throwdown ("Never Give Up"), Sick Of It All ("Built to Last"), Bane, Blood For Blood ("Ain't Like You"), Lionheart ("The Will to Survive" / "Built on Struggle")... Bands like that got me through some tough times.
I miss my iPod Nano.. The good old days when your music wasn't interrupted by phone calls or notifications...
My Dad was one of those that discovered that the DVD reader in his car could also be used by the audio system. I think he put almost his entire music collection on a single DVD and basically never had to change it out.
Wait, MP3s on a DVD-R? How have I never tried that...
@@dustojnikhummer Some later ones did, but by that time I had either modded the rear inputs of the deck to accept a 3.5mm, or bought decks with USB connectors in them (such as my Pioneer in my 87 Hyundai, which I think is from the mod 2000s)
How OLD am I? What YEAR is it? I, too, did this, in a '98 Escort ZX/2 (Hot) - my used green car I affectionately called "The student loan special" :)
I did a similar thing for a while too for listening music on a DVD player. It could also read double layer ones, which was great.
But i never tried MP3 on Blu-Ray. My current MP3 library is in 320k and ~190GB in size, it may fit on a double sided double layer disc, but that would be cursed.
@@Konarcoffee Some cars had DVD readers, for example BMW e46 used them for navigation system. Not wondering it could work to play music.
"agressively 2004" and "quite big letters number" you're on top form today old chap!
I came here for this comment. "letters number" floored me...
And the very literal "sidenote"
I cracked up at "aggressivley 2004". LOL
Yesterday's jam was a deep cut
21:03 "stuff"
The wildest thing to me is that he was surrounded by mp3 players and didn't know this was a thing until reading a manual. When I was in middle/ high school in the late 90s and early 2000s pretty much everyone was burning and sharing their music collections with each other on mp3 CDs. It wasn't some sort of hidden technology that only tech wizards could figure out, it was insanely popular.
Same here
Early on, we traded CD's with MP3 files, but they only worked in computers, until the CD players got MP3 decoders. That was the game-changer for us.
and it ended as fast as it started...I still have a few cds with 80 or so mp3s on them
Yeah one of my cars I bought after college had that feature. The filesystem format was very specific for the CD. If you got it wrong unfortunately, the cd-player in the car would not eject the CD. It kept trying to read the bad format and would ignore the eject button. You had to pull out the player and partially disassemble it to get the CD out.
There was always all kinda crap mixed in on those cds.
I started downloading mp3s off mIRC in 1997. By 1999, I had a discman that could play those mp3s. It was revolutionary. I was always on the lookout for mp3 compatibility because to me, it was an essential feature which gave me access to my Thunderpuss and Hex Hector library while riding on the bus or in the metro, to and from work, roughly 2 hours a day. I noticed stereo systems starting to display the mp3 logo not long after 2000. Like you said in the video: 750 MB was a ton of space that could fit a LOT of music (especially since my ears weren't yet trained to hear the fickleness of 128/192kbps). I had my entire music library on 4 CDs that I lugged everywhere with me at the time. Today, my entire CD collection is ripped in WAV and takes up 60+ terabytes. Just goes to show that no matter how much tech moves along, we find a way to outgrow it.
'in quite big letters number' is one of the most Technology Connections things I've ever heard.
I came to say something similar. So compulsively precise. I can picture him saying just "letters" first, or maybe "letters and numbers", but then hating that that wasn't Technically Correct.
I love these kinds of wordisms. Tech Connect is very much so a good/comical writer first, excellent presentator 2nd. This is such a great channel tbh
I used to make my mom MP3 CDs for her car full of videogame music. She loved that stuff and rightfully so. She was amazed by how many tunes could fit on a single disc. It'd be weeks before she heard the same song again.
What a cool memory, Joe. Thanks for sharing!
Game Sack! I watch that channel too! Eagerly awating a GameSack/Technology Connections crossover vid
Hi
Legend of dragoon soundtrack ?
A Wild Joe spotted!
This channel, im so glad i discovered this channel for myself. This is a dying format of video i miss seeing more of, combined with a dying presentation style ive always liked, all totally thriving? Youre amazing, man!
That's what you get for being born in the first world. Here in the third world we pretty much jumped from cassette player directly to mp3 CDs. Digital audio CDs were almost an item for rich people, or at the very least not an impulse buy. Also up until the 2010s you could find MP3 CDs sold from a rag on the floor at the side of the street or in pedestrian areas or parks.
Totally agree
What a great jump to make.
i am first world scum, but i believe video cds where also much more a thing for yours? this was the format we always got movies with from the internet.
to be fair even in france it was the case. mostly for cars. we burned TONS of them. i buya used car and... yes we fid a burned cd filler with mp3.
@@tja9212 you mean DivX? 😁
In Russia it was a huge blast, since the whole country is literally a real pirate bay, we had MP3 CDs being sold in shops, featuring the whole discography of some bands. Even more than that, in the dial-up era I visited a website, where I just ordered whatever music I wanted, and it was remotely burnt to a CD-R and sent to me via mail. This was the way I made myself familiar with a huge library of Finland's power-metal :)
Got a lot of these MP3 CD on our markets and shops…. Got a anti-shock player for mp3-cd (cached data for 3-5 min playback while shaking) in late 90s
iriver CD players were all the rage :)
Having it burned onto a disc and sent in the mail made it nearly as fast as downloading it AND you didn't hog the phone line!
@@kirillpetrovsky5830my uncle got an iriver and gave me his old philips. It got a remote control with a display that did text from id3 tags!
those were some great days... and the same for the bootleg cassette shops everywhere!
I LOL'd at your burner designation - "burnadette". Keep up the good work, love your style.
I'd have called it Burnard..
I have never witnessed this shtoyle before
WAIT WHAT
People are searching for
The kind of love that we possess
My CD burner was named Trogdor and my PC was Compy386.
Now I better take some aleve and go to bed, it's nearly 10pm.
@@fryingsquirrelXNA TROGDOOOOOOOOORRRRR!!!
Ooo the Rio ce2100! Me and the merry team of Rio engineers in Cambridge, UK developed that one 😀
(Rio acquired empeg, my startup that made the empeg-car in-car DIN sized mp3 player in 1998, in 2000 and in the years following we developed all the Rio players)
Nice to see your one still boots!
MP3 CDs was very popular in Eastern Europe in 2000s. But we just called it "MP3 disks". And now I understand how it works. Thank you!
In western Europe it wasn't unknown either, but not a lot of people had a computer with a CD burner to take advantage of this.
Yeah, just now hit me that it wasn't *normal* in terms of how CD audio was supposed to work
@@LutraLovegood Yeah, so some guys with CD burners made pirate collections of artists or bands discography and sold it
Came here to say exactly this. I'd say up to the late 2000s. If you have a stereo system supporting a mp3 cd, you're the man. I was a teen back then and almost everyone knew about this, it was a desired feature that was used all the time - at home and in the car.
@@MrSakavik For sure they did, in the early 2000s there were even legit businesses burning mp3s with whatever album you want (guess if they paid any artist rights), wild from today's perspective
"CD-R" skin wrinkles
"Windows XP" old man coughs
"Nero" crumbles to dust
Yup.
Nero, Clone CD/DVD, sort of dealing albums at school, which later turned into "I have this movie/album, if you want it, just get me a a disc the burner can write on, otherwise, I'll charge 50 cents" or something.
Good bad old times. My father was the first in prettty much the area to have a burner in his PC, showed me how it worked, and a small, not quite legal, "allowance improvement" business was born.
Hell, I'm not even sure I remember how everything was done, but I do remember that you could even use Windows Mediaplayer to rip CDs. I also remember the failed attempts. Pretty much just burning shortcuts onto a disc, which resulted in an error, or, depending on the player, seriously awful screeching noises.
Later on burners became very affordable, so my allowance extension turned into "let's trade copies of whatever we have"
The computer I type this with still has Nero 7 installed. I burn rewritible CDs for my car with it. Mostly Audiobooks.
He says in the opener that not too many people took advantage of or noticed... What? Everyone noticed, and everyone had MP3 tracks burned to CDs. The fact that you could fit so many tracks on a CD at the time was amazing. Everyone I knew had new car head units that played burned CDs full of MP3 Tracks.
It was the rise and fall of Napster. The start of Cable Modems in the home. It was a great time!
Burning rom with picture of colosseum in Rome
If you lived in Mexico in the 00's, it was harder to find someone who *_didn't_* know about MP3 CDs. Piracy was (and still is) a HUGE industry in Mexico, and you would have stores upon stores all selling MP3 CDs, VCDs, DVDs and video games, all pirated, all dirt cheap.
People weren't out there ripping their own CDs and turning them into MP3, rather they bought a bunch of pirated music.
In Russia as well)
Here in Brazil too! Reading MP3 files was a must for any tech 😆
I need to go to Mexico then...
I bought many of those in México City's subway, DJ shark was the most memorable and with the best compilations
In 2010 I was in Bahrain, and on the pier was a shack store that sold snacks and also pirated movies and shows. I watched all of The Walking Dead season 1 before my girlfriend back home got to finish it. They had unreleased movies of course. It was great.
Pure nostalgia. Thank you for what you do. This is history that deserves to be remembered.
Mp3 CDs was a really common thing in South America, I remember that it was a really common thing to find people selling compilations of pirated albums in red lights and street markets.
So people would buy compilations of their favorite artists or genres to play in their car stereos. Being a little bit tech savy I remember doing disks for family members and friends.
Also I remember it was a way to avoid damaging original CDs by switching and transporting them in your car.
CDs where a bit too expensive for working class people in my country. 10usd for a disk made no sense when you could get a compilation of mp3s for 5usd on any streetlight....
You are absolutely right. To this day you can get USB memory sticks full of pirated music in most south american countries.
I remember burning mp3 CDs with Windows Media Player!
oh yeah, eastern european here, and as he started talking i realised these may have been the only kind of cd s in my house
whenever i told someone about a mixtape, it was one of these
thank you, you wrote the comment I was going to write! same thing here in Brazil
Oh believe me, I knew all about it. I was a fierce advocate for MP3 CDs. Why waste a disc for 15 songs in standard format if you can fit around 100? It was just economics at the time. Discs weren't free lol
Thank you! I did the same thing! I loved it. I used to make artist discography mp3 cds. It was nice having a whole bunch of cds on 1. It never took me a day to burn either like this guy says. I used Roxio, and there was another I can't remember. Edit: it just hit me. The other burner program was Nero.
recordables weren't. AOL mailed you 3 non recordables a week.
@@spleenforsoul it was downloading over dialup that took a day.
Ideal for use in the car, once they included MP3 playback from CD. That was roughly the same time as the 6 disc autochangers stopped being fitted.
Not only that, I would put these on a CD-RW so I can reload old and new tracks whenever I wanted for the player in my car back in the day, and be so proud not to fidget with those fandangled iPods 👵😎 (for some reason younger me was anti Apple so....yeah)
I'm in a completely different camp. I used MP3 CDs all the time back in the early 2000s. I got a PC in 1998 that had both a CD burner and a DVD player. I was that kid burning.....stuff...for my friends at school. Once MP3 became a thing, CDs for me were just potential MP3s for my library that I just needed to get my hands on for a few minutes. I learned about MP3 CDs the same way you did, by seeing the MP3 "logo" on my portable CD player, and rather than read the manual I just burned some MP3s to a CD and popped it in and it worked. After that, I basically never burned a Red Book audio CD again. I'd just burn CDs with a band's entire discography on them. When we got a car that had a CD player built in, it supported MP3 CDs, and I can't recall ever playing a music CD there, though my parents certainly did.
Being in the retro gaming scene, I still have and use a CD/DVD burner with some regularity. You can find USB CD/DVD drives for cheap online. While USB bas basically replaced the CD for portable MP3 storage, I can say that I have burned an MP3 CD in the past 5 years. Even my kids' bedroom CD player supports MP3 CDs (since it can also play MP3s off a USB stick), and I have made CDs for them to listen to at night using that format. Projecting USB sticks are a bump risk, but I can put all of my kids' bedtime media on one MP3 CD and access it through the same menu as MP3s via USB.
Yeha same here. I was doing this all the time in the early 2000s. I believe I had been storing mp3s on cds and as soon as I saw a CD player with that logo I popped in one of my mp3 cds and it worked. I remember being excited because I didn't read the manual either and I was like.... "Is this really gonna work?!" Sure enough it did.
Yep, same here. I couldn’t afford an MP3 player, but I had a bunch of MP3 CDs! I think what let me know that I could do. It was in Nero, it had the option and explained what it was.
I definitely knew that portable players could play MP3's, and had a couple -- just needed a couple -- CD's burned until MP3 players came out, and then it was just too easy.
DVD's with hundreds of hours of music would have dominated if they were known about
@@manitoba-op4jx overnet. share reactor? what are those?
I like how as soon as the screen said "Goodbye" on it and turned off, we see a B-roll to mask turning the player back on. Pretty smart I gotta say.
See kids, this is why you should read your car’s owners manual
It was by reading the manual I learned the AUX jack on the head unit in my car also takes composite video in if you use one of those TRRS to RCA cables that were commonly used with camcorders. I can connect a PlayStation to my car!
@@KarlBaronHow does it display video?
@@KarlBaronIt WHAT NOW? Not that I think my Cruze will...
ngl i am spoiled by modern fool proof engineering i probably would stuck a mp3 CD in anyway because it fits
This is twice now that he's had his mind blown by not reading it.
I love videos like this because it never occurred to me that slightly younger people *wouldn't* know about this, but of course...why would they! I actually still have some of my old MP3 CD's knocking about - hours spent ripping audio CD's and, ahem, acquiring MP3's through other means. As a 40 year old, it's crazy how quick we went from tape players in cars, to MP3 CD players
Same. It's kind of ironic he's poking fun at the zoomers for not being familiar with physical media but then didn't know about MP3s on burned CDs when it was a major selling point at that time period. It wasn't exactly a hidden feature. It was just too complicated for the average consumer to use.
@@ozmer People were also more sophisticated than he's giving credit to. For example, some car players were extremely restrictive like only playing 128 Kbit CBR MP3s. Car forums at the time were full of people posting verifications that X new car could or could not play media in certain formats and bitrates.
@ozmer Yep, and dodgy MP3 CDs with pirated tracks were being sold in the 90s between fairly normal people. A random guy on our street used to get them and he wasn't overly techy by any stretch
I dunno, this vid feels like it's vastly overstating how many people don't know this. Discs as a data storage format are still used commonly for video games, so it's not like the idea of storing data on a disc is something wildly unheard of, even to younger kids. I don't think they'd be that shocked to find out that older disc formats couldn't store as much as newer ones, or that not every device could play any type of disc. You can't pop an Xbox game into a Playstation and expect it to work for example.
They might not know about this particular use case, but in general I think people understand discs can store data in different ways and not all disc players would be able to read that data.
@@degande-d1wI get the impression that Alec is a nerd who grew up among less tech literate normies - online discussion forums of the time would inherently be populated by more tech literate people because online forums were just more obscure as a concept at the time and one of the main uses of the format was downloaded music so people using the internet more are naturally going to be more aware of these. I think it's also easy to forget that we as an audience are not a representative sample of the population at large, and I'd be willing to bet a majority of people in wealthier countries like the US did indeed go straight from audio CD to dedicated MP3 player without the intermediate step with price likely being a huge factor in areas where less tech literate people did take it up frequently (I was a long way from being poor growing up and yet I was nowhere near wealthy enough to go to a school where most people had MP3 players in that era for instance)
Fun trivia about the CDDB lookup that identifies CDs by track lengths: I put a Mandrake Linux install CD into my drive while my MP3 player (with automatic CDDB lookup) was open, and it identified it as an audiobook of Michael Ende's "Die unendliche Geschichte," known in English as "The Never-ending Story."
And now I realize Kids These Days don't know what Mandrake Linux, install CDs, and "The Never-ending Story" are.
I'm pretty sure the admonishment potential of complaining about the never ending story has kept the last one quite alive in cultural memory, lmao
OMG.. Mandrake Linux, my first Linux. I loved it so much so I used "kandalf" as my second nickname in several internet forum.
This makes me feel so old 😭 I used to make massive compilation CDs out of MP3 files and had a program that I could design jewel case inserts and a printed label for the CD lol.
Regarding the "why wasn't it advertised more prominently", at least for one case I know that there was quite a lot of internal pressure from Sony (the music publishing company) towards Sony (the electronics manufacturing company) to not advertise support for "that dreaded pirate format".. but they couldn't leave it out because it would cost them points in Hifi reviews.
Back then I remember the box that a CD player came in would be plastered with a dozen logos for various formats it supported. The less well known the brand of player, the more logos!
Again. Propably only in USA/rich countires. In poorer ones this was the feature. Thats why they use so in your face letters. No body would buy any player without MP3 support.
@@cyrkielnetwork also in rich countries it was a feature.
Putting the MP3 Logo on your car stereo, discman or ghettoblaster was a great way to pump sales.
This also revolutionized the market, as established Hifi-Brands were much too slow to innovate - their products were not only outdated, but also too expensive.
I bought a limited edition 2001 Mazda Protege MP3 brand new July 15, 2001 from Santa Monica Mazda and, AFAIK, it was the first cars sold in North America with a factory fitted stereo capable of playing MP3 CDs. I used the heck out of the feature and it was a great car to boot. Laser Mica Blue paint meant it stood out and Mazdaspeed suspension made it one really fun handling small sedan. Can confirm MP3 CD playback was something most people did not know about or understand.
Was that car Kl v6 powered from the factory?
my friend in high school had one of those, it was real fun to drive around. he kept it mint in a garage once he went off to college. finally sold the thing in 2021, under 25k miles i think.
Hi Adrian! I didn't know you watched this channel! LOL, everyone watches this channel!
@@pgtmr2713 I don't think there were any proteges out the factory with a V6. I could be wrong, I've never heard of any though.
@@chrisjpf33 The Venn Diagram of this channel probably looks more like a solar system given how connected it all is
Haha, love the tiptoeing around "informal sharing", which was by far the most common use case for MP3s. The combination of internet + MP3 compression + file sharing software (Napster, Kazaa, etc) was truly a revolution in the music industry. It probably would have happened even faster/earlier if people had better understood MP3 CDs. I remember using them in my stereo back then and it was amazing.
Napster+university+quad T1 internet+disconnected sessions
The real king was going to a Lan party - suddenly you went from dial-up speeds to 10/100 ethernet speeds.
@@MostlyPennyCat My roommate got an email from our college IT dept asking him why he was using so much bandwidth. After which he decided maybe he should add data limits and connection speed limits to his file share ftp.
Limewire was my go to. At one point I had 120gigs of music on a computer. Name a song and I had it. Had a few movies also.
yeah, only a handful of my MP3s were purchased back then. the rest were Napsterized
In EU every stereo had a mp3 label on it and everyone, and I mean everyone, was using it.
At least in Finland CDs, cassettes and even hard drives used to be more expensive because the price included a compensation for artists union as it was assumed you would use them to store copyrighted material.
@@Antipico In Italy we still pay this tax, on every storage media (even hard drives). It's just one of the annoying taxes that shall not exist these days (since everyone is streaming anyway).
Ohhh, we used them for audiobooks! Instead of lugging around a 12 CD box set of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, you could throw everything onto one single disc (with spoken word, bitrate really doesnt matter too much), and still have 6 CDs worth of space in the CD changer left over for Discworld and such!
Edit: Oh, he talks about that at the end of the video. Neat!
This video has it all!
bruh nice namedropping a terryprachet classic.
When you think about, audiobooks are like having a servant follow you around reading a book to you.
I definitely remember bit-crushing my collection down to 64k at one point so I could fit closer to 500 songs on a single CD. The result was audio tape quality (very hollow sounding) but was still good enough for me to have that many songs on one disc for my MP3-CD player... before I got my smartphone.
I used Pratchett Audio-Books as MP3s on CD as entertainment while producing artwork and animation.
Inevitable follow up - divx enabled dvd players to play our movie "backups"
Couple of mpg ones too
and also, play some .NES files
divx first but xvid later
Not to be confused with divx The attempt by the movie industry to make a single play DVDs...
Pirated movie "backups" 😆
I was looking for an explanatory video on how Air Purifiers work. I thought "Oh boy, I bet Technology Connections has a video on that!". I was disappointed that I couldn't find one. So I watched a few more of your recent videos instead. Still don't know how air purifiers work (do they work?), but did learn a few other things. Please make one on air purifiers!
Big Clive has a video or two (or 10) on air purifiers.
I'd watch pretty much any video on this channel. Can't explain it, I just enjoy them.
Air purifiers remove particles by filtering the air, and some gasses by catching the molecules in the porous cavities of the activated charcoal. The particle filter gets more effective as time passes, whereas the charcoal becomes saturated almost immediately. Air purifiers are effective at catching the particles suspended in the air that passes through them, but most of the particles you're interested in lands on the surfaces of your house before they travel to the purifier.
Air purifiers do indeed work, and you can even build them yourself; look up "Corsi-Rosenthal Boxes"😁
It’s essentially a vacuum cleaner that absorbs air very slowly
oh man as a kid who grew in the 2000's, I loved burning CD's , doing that really gave me the love of music I have today. I remember when I first got into music on my own I would make custom cds with different songs from different albums, over the years I have managed to salvage some mp3s . Burning Cds will always have a special place in my heart.
In USA Audio CDs and DVDs were very popular, but in many other countries they were often way to expensive, so MP3 CD and DivX CD become the most popular formats. This is why so many audio hardware supported MP3 CDs. People had only MP3 pirated music collection and DivX movies.
In my country DVD players sold poorly, but in mid 2000's multimedia DivX players become a thing. They could play MP3, AVI (with various Xvid, DivX etc. codecs) and they had also a Video CD and DVD playback on top. Though no one cared about DVD Video and the only use case was DVD-R that could store multiple DivX movies.
It was so popular, that magazines with a movie on a disc were sold in stores. Of course they were official releases. First they were Video CDs, since every disc player and most computers were capable to play them. Then some started releasing DivX CDs compatible with standalone DivX players and they also had EXE player with proper codec on CD.
Lastly normal DVDs were introduced, but rather late, before HD Blurays become available.
Fun fact: Movie piracy was so popular, that Blurays never got any popularity, since people simply started downloading HD movies in MKV format. Even early HD TVs supported USB storage and played AVI, MP4 (HD video) and MKV files.
This is the reason why Netflix and other streaming services were quickly adopted outside of the USA. At that point we had more than a decade of "streaming" audio and video content.
This is also a reason, why teenagers in early 2000's wanted a PC. It gave nearly unlimited access to music, movies and other content. Along with slow modem internet. For example a group of friends could coordinate their downloads to get as many MP3s with their limited hours on the internet each month.
All of this might be the reason why PC gaming dropped physical media 15 years ago, while consoles still have discs and cartridges. PC gaming was dominating in regions with heavy piracy and Steam got popular, because it become more convenient than piracy. Especially with huge sales it had many years ago. People were buying old games they once pirated.
Lastly iTunes and iPods were never a thing in many countries. WinAmp was something everyone used along with various ways to rip Audio CDs to MP3. I've seen way more portable CD players than MP3 players. Those got some popularity in 2006-2008, though people were often using phones with MP3 players starting with Siemens SL45i and then Sony Ericsson Walkman phones become really popular. Until finally Android phones dominated the market (I've had iPhone 3G and oh boy, like everyone had to ask me do I know it don't support MMS and multitasking).
This is why early rips were usually 700mb or later on 4.35gb.
I've been in a country with exactly that dynamic for sure, but don't know if it's the same you are talking about
Oh I remember when I watched unreleased movies, recorded with a camera by some insider, in an "empty" movie theater, downloaded from some torrent site.
@@danpedersen55 Oh yeah :D And also all the abbreviations in the file names... "MVCD", "RSVCD", etc. 😅
@@danpedersen55I detested camrips. One time I downloaded a movie from a dorm DC hub and it was unmarked cam rip. I figured out where the guy lived and went to yell at him to mark his files properly, in person.
Your side comment about ATRAC made me think that a video discussing Sony's long list of proprietary format successes and failures would be fun... Betamax, MemoryStick, UMD, MiniDisc, etc.
Yes! I’d watch the hell out of this.
One of my favorite electro artists did a (very limited) minidisc release of one of his albums about three years ago. When I say very limited I mean he made 20 and I bought one even though I don't have a player for it, but minidisc still lives!
It’s funny that they’re still doing that today, IIRC the PlayStation Portal doesn’t use bluetooth but instead uses some other thing Sony pulled out of their butt. Nobody complained though because nobody bought a PlayStation Portal.
Ah, MiniDisc. Pretty much everything has been said that there is to say about it, but it's one of those formats that if it had come out just a **few** years earlier, it might have had some decent success outside the professional realm. I used it for radio production, but for consumer uses, for various reasons, it never stood a chance.
MiniDisc did well in Japan, the UK and other markets but sold poorly in the US. That said, there are not many British people that have seen an 8 track cartridge and those that have heard of them are probably old tech nerds.
30:00 I believe the recording industry was a huge reason why you wouldn't see MP3 CDs being sold in stores. It basically would allow someone to instantly copy + paste the files in windows explorer and start sharing them. The industry hated file sharing with a passion, and they're the ones selling the CDs in the first place.
Then Windows added ripping CDs directly to mp3s directly to Windows Media Player for everyone that didn't know how to use the internet
Yes but also no - for the full price of a music album, I'd also expect full uncompressed audio, not MP3.
@@obliviouz As said in the video, this wasn't a big deal since the lossy compression was often unnoticeable with a walkman, a car equipment, a standard PC or even the mini combo in most house.
Only audiophiles with proper high end equipment could hear the difference during that time.
@@PainterVierax In addition, many of us were still used to listening to cassette tapes or FM radio, which were both objectively worse sounding than a compressed MP3.
@@PabloEdvardo you're right. I personally was still recording songs on cassette tapes from the FM broadcast during early 2000's.
I would like to add that as being a kid/teenager between 2000 and 2005, I can tell you that from my personal experience, MP3-CDs (and MP3-CD-Players) were very central to my existence!
I am from Western-Europe and these were definitely a big thing in the early 2000's. My last use of MP3 CD's was indeed in my car as a young adult driver (up to as late as 2013), but my first use of MP3-CD's was in fact in my Panasonic portable MP3-CD-Player from 2003 (already featuring a Lithium-Ion battery for an extremely thin form factor: it was no thicker than 5 CD's).
And whilst iTunes was a way of importing MP3 to your PC, at least in Europe (unless you had an unaffordable iPod), you would probably use other software to import CD's to MP3 (or simply get MP3 files from your friends ;-)
I have dozens of burned MP3 CD's back from the 2000's, including some with Audiobooks. Whilst it's true that stereo's was maybe less of a thing, as whilst at home I'd just happily play my musing from my desktop computer, on the go, they were definitely a thing. Also playing MP3-CD's on our DVD player that included a surround sound system was definitely also a thing, although the UI was usually so appalling that it made this use more sporadic than ritual!
0:59 This side-note/side-shot is a new and unfamiliar stylistic choice and it caught me so off guard that I jumped.
He definitely just set that up
Yeah, that was so fetch
A side shot? In this channel? What a time to be alive!
@@sanderaits Stop trying to make fetch happen. It's not gonna happen
side shot jumpscare
I had a 2006 Ford Focus with a 5 disc changer in dash (double DIN) and it would run MP3. Pretty handy!
My '05 Mustang has a six disc changer with mp3! And since there's no aux jack, you bet that's how i listen to music in it! Loading it up for the first time was fun, watching it eat the discs one by one and listening to them being placed in the magazine.
@@Frieza287 The Mach 460 system in my 2002 GT did it too, I was blown away when I figured it out. It was a big deal.
@@ZboeC5 WRONG THINK AGAIN BUD
Yep I had a 08 Focus with the stock stereo that played mp3 cd-rs
Like a lot of the commenters here, I already knew and understood every word you spoke, but I still watched the whole thing because it was just such a joy hearing you explain it. It takes a rare talent to be able to explain something to someone who already knows and to still make it compelling content, and you have it. Love your work.
This was my hack back in the day. I owned a couple cars that supported MP3 via CD, and they both had CD changers. And, I was a nerd. My friends were keeping their giant CD binders in their cars, but I had 7 CDs (6 in the changer and 1 in the head unit) filled with tons of albums worth of music. It was like endless music. My favorite second hack from the time was using the CDs you could burn graphics onto the front. I’d use that to list the artists and albums I had on each MP3 CD. I was living on the edge at the time and I was loving every minute of it!
17:20 who wants to see an AgingWheels crossover short about sun visors that drooped down slightly due to neoprene disc holders up there (with each pocket double or even triple stuffed) containing CD-Rs that rocked some of the best 3D block lettering in mult colored Sharpie? 💿📀💿📀💿📀💿📀😁
Truuuuuuuth
I do! And then you need to contribute some kind of decade relevant pentestesting or security info on cars or their stereos from that time.
I remember atleast one sunvisor that broke off due to the wear and tear the cd holder put on it.
I just looked this up on Google Images, and yeah... I don't remember seeing too many of these in real life but they did exist and people's sun visors did droop a tad with all of those CDs weighing the neoprene down. A real millennial "back in my day".
I pictured a sun visor, as in, one in a cap. Those, 80's translucent, often colorful thingies. Strange image, CD's stored in those.
‘big letters-number’ is one of my favourite lines of any video you’ve done.
33:03 good on you for warning people about degrading media. It makes me sad when I hear people loosing things that are important to them.
Wait, WHAT? Optical disk degrade if properly stored? *run to check and backup every CD around the house*
@@eliaugliono4098yeah, check them now. I had mine in climate-controlled storage and none lasted more than 10/15 years. Thankfully, there was nothing on them I didn't have on an actual hard disk somewhere.
So, if I need to save something to make it accessible 20-30 years from now, I wonder what the best option is? Even getting an optical drive by them may be a long shot.
The most recent place this came up was with regards to about 40 years worth of daily journaling that the author wants to make copies of for all the (great)grand-kids. The expectation that any maintenance will be done (beyond not tossing it in the trash) is "almost never" (in the mathematical sense).
@@GobrinDesuka Research I've done suggests that the stability of flash RAM beyond about 10-20 years is highly questionable. We just don't know. The stuff you can get new-off-the-shelf today we really only have a few years of empirical data about and the vast majority of that assume's it will be turned on at least ever few years. Stick it in a safe deposit box for 20-30 years?
Tape does seems the most likely to be stable, but the cost to find a drive to read it might make it "functionally unreadable" without a really good idea what data is there and a really good motivation for extracting it.
Frankly, micro film seems like a real contender. It looks like the "Datamatrix" 2D bar code format can store up to about 1 page of text so stuff those long one margin if you need the digital version back?
@@GobrinDesuka I was under the understanding that SSDs were not good for long term storage, especially off-line. Setting aside holding up on-line, I heard that the charge stored in the drive faded over time (a longer period of time than other mediums) unless it was connected to power and it could restore the charge.
This isn't talking complete data loss, but more like some bits becoming unreadable after years of off-line storage, resulting in having uncorrectable errors.
This may be off base though.
I just now realized why I liked cargo pants as a kid! They could fit my CD player and the CD carry case in them 😂
I assume it's just an age gap, because everyone I knew, including myself, had binders full of mp3 discs. Also, some cars still have CD players, so it's no that far in the past.
Yes some vehicles still have CD players, it is mainly by 2027 that experts think vehicles will not haver CD players in them but maybe they will, at least companies are being forced to have buttons on the vehicle again instead of a screen behind the drivers wheel and one on the dash, unless you are Elon Musks brand Tesla where he is having more and more flaws to the point his vehicles are not going to be passing safety laws in the USA mainly requiring buttons again for a few major market states like California, New Jersey, and a few other New England states with even worse some of his vehicles rusting out being unsafe or having bad setup for housing the airbags, being unsafe in a year or two.
An audio CD is not the same as a MP3 CD though. Most who grew up in that time didn't know about MP3 CDs.
I never had mp3 CDs, just audio CDs, thought there was some protection on the music preventing me to play mp3 CDs instead of audio ones.
Had binders full of CDs with games tho
@NuchiAsaki like TC,I grew up in the era and was/still am a huge PC nerd. I had many MP3 disks worth of music and my 2003 Ford Ranger Edge with Pioneer Audio could play them AND was a multi disk changer! What an era!
My brother's Ford Ranger required him to use the Tape to 3.5mm converters to listen to music since he is 6 years older than me.
Exactly!
Alec, your videos usually hold my interest for showing the depth behind something I encounter every day, or in showing me the wonders of technologies before my time. But this is one of your first videos that hit like a nostalgia sledgehammer. Great work!
I think a lot of people found this feature "accidentally" on their cars or stereo. When was just very kid i burned MP3 to discs the "wrong" way and created CD-ROM instead of CD Audio. And when i plopped it onto 2008 Vios ... It read and the playlist button switches folders! This is so cool and since then we made a LOT of these CD's.
I just want to mention you're the only channel I've ever subbed to on multiple YT accounts :))) Thanks for creating a nostalgia space for us.
Oh yeah, Nero, Nero Burning ROM...
As in Nero Burning Rome....
I CAN'T BELIEVE IT TOOK ME 20 YEARS TO GET THE FUCKING PUN
🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂
Wow... TIL.
So that's why the name of this program sounded so weird.
I can't believe it took you 20 years, either.
Thank you. It took me 20years and 1h
Many older gamers will relate: when you inserted a game CD-ROM into a CD player, game sound effects, background music, and even voice acting often played directly from the disc.
So many "this disc can not be played in an audio stereo" type messages from PS1 games.
Also achievable by starting a PS1 without a disc in it, loading the music player, and then putting a game disc in.
Lunar Silverstar Story here
AKA redbook audio. It was a common feature on cd-rom games.
@@georgesiv2082 My little mind got absolutely blown when I inserted the CD of Age of Empires into my mom's CD player on a whim and got to listen to the soundtrack.
So, I'm still driving a fairly old car with an optical drive, and a few months ago I bought a burner and a bunch of blank CDs hoping to put my collection of video game soundtracks in there. I was disappointed by the 80 minutes limitation and put the idea to rest for a while but I checked and sure enough, there's the little MP3 logo. You've just made my original idea possible by putting this video out, thank you!
Thanks!
It is very interesting to note that in developed countries, legitimate forms of audio distribution were widely used. In Brazil, for example, many people have never bought an original CD or DVD in their entire lives. Most of us started using CDs and DVDs when the popularization of piracy meant that basically everywhere you could buy a CD with MP3 songs updated with the hits of the same week. You would hardly see a child with any Apple or MP3 device, even if it was from a cheap brand, basically we all depended on these types of CDs to be able to listen to any type of music in the car. In the 2010s, easier access to USB drivers retired CDs.
Was quite common at least in some parts of Europe as well.
Same here in India. Almost all of the CD players could play MP3 and it was an expected feature. Most people didn't even know that there are multiple formats in CD.
The assumption was that if I have a CD player and if I put a CD having audio in, it did just play that audio.
So were you guys just stuck with cassettes throughout the 90s?
New releases stopped coming out on vinyl by like '95
@@matt5721 Yes! LOL Cds and CD players were so expensive that most people used Old Cassetts or just the radio XD When people started using cds here it was already a large sea of piracy. And DVDs too. Nobody here have original copies of anything.
Great video. I was one of the few people i knew that used MP3 CD's in the early 2000's. I ripped all my cd's at 192 bit rate and put every album I owned on MP3 CD's so it made it super easy to have all my music in the car. I also loved having the track and album titles displayed.
This was actually much bigger outside "the west". In eastern europe and asia you could buy mp3 cds in brick and mortar records shops.
it was at least popular enough for AUDIOBOOKS in german.
i rememberd having to very carefully look at the Audiobook case if it was regular CDs or MP3 CDs because we didnt have a MP3 CD player at home at the time
Right. Plus, everyone knew how to use Nero Burning ROM.
In asia video cds were quite popular as well.
I am amazed at how much good data you compressed into this video. You really are giving your camera a spin. Great video.
There's even a hybrid CD format that has audio as an actual CD and then a partition with MP3s. It would comply with the red book standard for audio CDs and then mount as MP3s on a computer
oh my
There were actually two hybrid CD formats that combined a filesystem and CD audio.
"CD Extra" placed the audio on the first, separate, session of the CD and the data on a later session. This was the most compatible with old-style players as they always tried to read the CD from the beginning, so they would find the audio first. However, it would break on players and old computer disc drives that couldn't handle multi-session discs, of which there were some.
"Mixed-mode CD" placed the data on the first track of the CD and the remaining tracks were all audio. This didn't require separate sessions, so it would be recognized by almost every player and drive, but really dumb audio players ones would try to play the data track as audio making a horrible noise.
Many games on CDs back in the day also used a hybrid format. Track 1 was data and further tracks were Red Book audio. I remember listening to the soundtrack of Civilization 2 straight from the game CD.
I've heard of similar things, but with a music video in Mpg format instead of MP3's.
@@Agent22817 don't forget about VCDs
There was one other common issue due to the lack of standardization: file and folder name length. Some players supported Joliet extensions while other early ones only used raw ISO 9660 which only does 8.3 file names. I had a 32mb flash MP3 player which also did this for some ungodly reason.
God I hated this!! I'd get issues with some of my MP3 CD players.. It would just say "ERROR" on the screen and skip to the next song.
Yeah, I remember this! I also remember suffering from small scratches on MP3 disks killing multiple musics...
excellent video, as always. just wanted to say that I really appreciate your somewhat interactive captions. it's a really nice touch to your videos and it feels like a secret extra way to interact with your content!
Thank you for making this video! I drive an older car with a 5 cd changer. You'd think 5 cds is a lot of music but I drive a lot and they get old. Changing them out is a bit slow and a hassle as well. I do have all these ads in my laptop via iTunes. Now I will make an mp3 cdr and fill up my cd changer with them. I'll have my whole playslist and more on the go! Wow!
i remember there being two options to burn music to a CD. one way could hold 20, the other could hold like 200. i remember discovering the 200 option and couldn't even think of what to put on it to fill it up lol
I do not want to hear what that 200 song option sounded like
@@MarcelAgvanyan 200 three-minute songs at 128kbps could easily fit onto one CD and the quality was more than good enough for car listening especially if you had been used to cassette tapes. Each one would be about 3MB.
@@shangerdanger yeah because CDs you burned as audio only had a time limit instead of actually using the 700~mbs of storage they offered
I always used to think that the 200 songs option was superior and why would one keep the 20 songs option.
@@Qmeister044 i had 1mb songs on some mp3's i downloaded so yeah i heard worse it just sounded so bad to be able to fit 200 songs in a cd
I want to argue with you that mp3 CDs weren't as esoteric of a "format" in the early 2000s as you're making them out to be - I had an entire CD wallet full of burned discs of mp3s, I took it to work everyday to listen to as I did my job... coding websites. Ok, I may have been one of those weird techie people.
Same. I still have my case of MP3 CDs around somewhere, but of course I have absolutely no practical use for them any longer.
I knew tons of people that had portable MP3 CD players. I had the Rio Volt and burned entire CD boxed sets on a single discs. Also I'm close to 50 and find it funny that I now have to explain things to the "youngin’s'. Didn't think that would happen for another 20 years.
yes, but you didn't buy any of them in a music store ;)
I had tons as well. A lot of friends did too. At the time it was cheaper to have discs over an mp3 player. Or if you had a car with an aftermarket stereo that had a USB port, the discs were cheaper than a $50 8gb flash drive. Give or take a few dollars
still using mine in my car today
Actually, you could burn iTunes purchased music onto a rewritable CD as audio and rip that audio back into iTunes as DRM-free MP3 ;)
The MP3 CD format was way more popular in Europe. I had the first MP3 discman available from a major manufacturer (Philips) - paid a fortune for it in 2001 and it still works. I had a Panasonic car unit in my Mazda that played MP3 CDs (and AAC). It was the greatest thing ever. But then iPods came.... but they were expensive so MP3 CDs had a good run for a couple of years.
The CD-Player-Navi-Multimedia Device in my 2010 Peugeot still had only a CD-Player (no usb and SD card only for Navi-Data /Firmware update) therefore the MP3-CD Function was heavily in use until 2020 when I sold the car. The replacement Pioneer CD-Radio for my 2000 Smart that I owned before also has had the mp3 feature.
My current Toyota can play mp3-CDs but also can play mp3 from USB-Sticks.
The old Citroen from my brother with a old Sony Radio still can only mp3-CDs additional to Audio-CDs. The only reason to burn a CD today (when he want a new mixed "Tape" aka mp3 CD for his car.
Sometimes maybe once every two years I burn a DVD with some important Data (MAils, scans from contracts) as Backup but mostly as last resort for the worst case scenarios I use Bluray for my digital photos (no encryption virus can encrypt allready burned data).
I was thinking this may be a regional thing, as usual with this channel. Where I'm from the iPod was a bit of a niche product and while digital MP3 players existed and were popular people had been trading MP3 mix CDs for ages, so by the time MP3 CD players came around I had a huge library of pre-burned ones ready to go. I'm pretty sure I have the exact portable player he shows here somewhere in the house, and I bought it very specifically to play that library.
32:20 This is actually a thing you can do with some modern blu-ray players. I haven't tested a ton, but I know that on modern sony players you can burn an 8GB mp4 video file onto a DVD, with aac surround sound and everything, and the sony player will play it back just fine (as long as you keep the maximum bitrate under control).
This was a trip, I'm 42 so I was recording songs off the radio on to tapes when CDs were becoming more common. I remember these kind of discs in the early 2000s. We called them the data CDs and the other just music CDs. Great vid
You mention the idea of having H264 DVDs with 1080p video and what a fascinating world that could have been...we actually had/have it, and I even used it for my demo reels when I was shopping around my portfolio to colleges.
There was another standard supported by Blu-ray players called AVCHD discs, and like the name suggests, are simply DVDs with AVCHD encoded video on them. It supports menus and everything, and while you definitely couldn't fit much video on there, it was more than enough to show a short demo reel without any loss in quality, but on way cheaper writable media.
It's funny because I kinda independently "invented" a similar thing, but using x265 instead. I can get like a 20:1 compression ratio before the quality is too bad for my tastes, definitely enough to get a movie's length of 1080p video with 5.1 audio (ac3 at 500 kbps is good enough) into under 2 GB. I used a Blu ray copy of Fantasia 2000 I ripped to my computer to test, the ripped file came out to 20 GB and I got it down to around 1.3 GB. I call it the S-DVD or the SVD (super video disc) since HD-DVD was at one time a thing. It's basically only useful for me as I can store my massive movie library on disc without sacrificing too much quality, freeing up HDD/SSD space for games. Downside is it takes my PC like 27 hours to reencode a feature length AVC into x265 lol
Next is to attempt HDR and eventually 4k support, perhaps using dual layer discs if necessary.
@@Aquatarkus96 aren't hdd's way cheaper per gigabyte at this point? also, if hardware acceleration is working properly encode shouldn't take longer than the length of the movie, especially at 1080p
@@game-tea Yes. Monumentally less expensive, especially when we're talking about relative oddities like burning multi-layer discs.
I can't speak to the encoding speed side, since HDDs _are_ so inexpensive, I just leave everything native. There's not a ton of reason to compress much of anything anymore that is being played locally. Even 90GB for a 4K UHD Blu-ray is tolerable. With only around 2000 titles in existence, you could back up the entire catalog for a couple grand.
Such a thing would be an interesting compromise. A 1080p movie compressed to fit on a dual layer DVD would still be vastly superior to streaming quality, and with DVDs being a format without licensing fees it would be significantly cheaper than blu rays.
@@game-tea yes but have you considered how cool it is to have your movies on separate digital disks? Also it's hard to argue with the price of an old stack of DVDs that you haven't used yet.
I can almost see every single viewer smirk, when he mentions rightfully owned audio CDs as the sole source for MP3 files. Man, did we „exchange“ them files with „friends“ ;-)
He really needs to dig into the history of Napster. Something tells me he doesn’t know about it…?
@@jimmypad5501he does, but monitization is more important
Cough Limewire cough cough
I wonder what fraction of CD's checked out of libraries were ever directly played?
@@brianbarker2551 Kazaa and Gnutella
MP3 CD's were a god-send for me. Great to re-visit this era, awesome video!
I made hundreds of MP3 CDs in the late '90s - early 2000s. I didn't know it was an obscure thing. Seems like everyone I knew was doing that before MP3 players got big.
And sharing with Kaazaa
LOL... I know right... CDs with MP3s were the the main format until High capacity memory cards and decent walkman phones were a thing... I never could afford an IPOD, nor did I want a flash MP3 walkman with stupid 128 Mb storage when a CD is much cheaper, faster and bigger
@@DaRush-The_Soviet_Gamer Yeah, I think that Alex was just late to the party.
It's made me want to get out my Philips EXP 401 MINI MP3 CD player again! :D
@@DaRush-The_Soviet_Gamer are you sure about mp3 CDs being "the main format?"
Can you elaborate? I feel like there's an important distinction between a CD ROM full of MP3s and an audio CD made _from_ MP3s.
I can't believe what im hearing. I didn't know a single person who wasn't aware of mp3 CDs and everyone used them all the time
SAME. and this was just intuitive to me I haven't really paid attention to this I just knew if it had the MP3 label that the random CD I'd burned with mp3's would work in it.
its true though, while my tech savvy friends knew about them even before I did, even in 2024 I will tell the "common folk" about them and their mind is blown
Yep. I had a $40 generic Walkman style MP3 CD player in 2001 that played burnt CDs full of MP3 files- the batteries lasted a long time. My roommate had a MiniDisc player, and I eventually got the Creative Nomad Jukebox 20GB.
Yeah, I was a dumb kid and just burned the MP3 files to the disk and it worked. Never really thought much of it until now, though
This shows the kind of disconnect between people who actually knew about this stuff and "normal" people....
Check out EAC, Exact Audio Copy, a windows tool to rip files from a CD. It's data base knows not only meta data but also how to detect less than 'exact' digital rips. I've let it loop on poor quality discs until it was finally able to announce it got a 'good' rip.
Yeah that's an excellent program, it's the one I use nowadays
Windows Media Player used to be perfectly able to rip CDs...
@@christianstorms3950 WMP has always been trash at ripping. It's extremely inaccurate.
@@christianstorms3950 It still can rip cds, but its not lossless or as accurate as exact audio copy
I remember finding an audio sharing site called UberNode (?) run by a guy named Chris Myden. He had a strict rule on using EAC and file naming schemes etc. I never joined, but really wanted to.
I had a 12 MP3 CD changer in the trunk of my car back in the day. Had thousands of songs to choose from, it was great!
"Agressively 2004" is one of my favorite aesthetics.
I miss when hardware and software had effort, character, depth, and identity.
And some level of "will continue to work." Around 2005 when mobile convergence started to happen and especially with things centered around internet services there are devices out there that will never work again. iPods are dying like flies, meanwhile my old Rio Volt CD player works like brand new.
We just loved that steady whinning sound of data being written onto a cd/dvd, after a quite dramatic buffering and lead-in writing with some disc motor spin ups. And pray the burning process completed successfully.
when burning cheapest blank disk on manually set 16x or even 8x speed😁
As a long time subscriber, I already knew that you are my kind of nerd. But I really started to grin when you showed your TMBGs MP3 CD. It pleasantly reminds me of my TMBG compliation on Minidisc.
The matrix display on his Discman is exactly the same as the matrix display on my minidisc player and I was immediately transported back to my walk home from school listening to Prodigy and RHCP and feeling like a boss for having all that music on this awesome device
Watching the initial CD player display going from TMBG to Sufjan Stevens excited me in a way that really isn’t appropriate for this kind of content.
I was a high school kid in Germany in the early 2000s and MP3 CDs were an extremely common music-format, for listening and "sharing" music with friends.
But it was clunky having a knock-off discman in your bag or pocket that'd skip if you didn't move carefully, along with CDs that were always in those brittle plastic cases that'd crack and break so easily, especially the part that holds the disc.
And I remember the earplugs or headphones wires were either so short that you couldn't turn your head in some directions or way too long.
I once had these great Sony headphones, but they had a 3m (ca. 9 foot) cable, that I wore like a belt while biking around, lol.
In the mid 2000s I moved on to various cheapo 512MB MP3-players and then iPods all throughout the early 2010s. I still have my old PC somewhere in the basement, with my massive and meticulously curated iTunes library, where every song even has the correct album cover image.
Love the TMBG name drop. Not surprising at all that you're into them. So good!
I'm a bit of an older They Might Be Giants nut, so I had a 10-disc CD changer in my car (the changer was in the trunk) which typically had 8-9 slots filled with TMBG CDs. When the "Then: The Early Years" compilation came out, I was really happy because it condensed 3 discs (Self-Titled, Lincoln, and Misc T) down to 2. I even ended up burning Long Tall Weekend to AudioCD to play on it. That "CD-R/RW" compatibility note on players was no joke, as early CD players could have problems with even CD-R discs, let alone CD-RW. I had some special "gold" CD-R discs that worked better than others to minimize skipping, if it played at all.
I also had MP3 CDs before there were any standalone CD players that could play them, because that's how I backed up my data. Ripping a CD took long enough I didn't want to do it again, so periodically burned a CD full of MP3s so I could restore from that if my HDD failed. I actually switched to a Creative Zen MP3 player before I owned a car that could play MP3 files. However, later when I would travel and rent a car, I'd stick an MP3 CD in my CD wallet just in case the car I rented could play them.
I always had a feeling he was TMBG fan. We fans are quite a unique bunch😊
They and Weird Al were pretty much all I listened to from the ages of 12-15 (so 1998-2001).
iirc he's got multiple TMBG-themed shirts, I know for certain one quotes I Should Be Allowed To Think
It's a brand new record for 1990, They Might Be Giants' brand new album: Flood
Can't believe this technology is old enough now that there's people who have no idea what it meant. I feel old.
not that old buddy everyone knows what CDs are
Mp3 CD players were a thing in car stereo, practically all aftermarket DIN radios from 2000 to 2015 had this.
My 2018 Nissan Versa has a CD player that will play MP3 CDs.
This was the biggest benefit of MP3 CDs for me. Being able to fit 10 hours or so of music on a single disc was a game changer for car audio. No more fiddling with disc swapping while driving or needing a fancy bulky multi-disc changer.
@@MrHugemoth s does my 2020 Toyota Corolla.
I'm more surprised that people *didn't* know about MP3 on CD
You're telling me DIN HiFi slots were a thing until 2015? I would have sworn by 2005 there were no cars anymore that had no weirdly convoluted integrated mandatory "infotainment system"...
Hell, some aftermarket head units still have it.
About those h.264 DVD players: yes, they exist. Not in the form of DVD players that will play them, but more importantly, Blu-Ray and/or HD-DVD players that would play h.264 MP4 files recorded on standard DVD-RW discs. I remember reading the owner's manual for a friend's Blu-Ray player, which said that it would play AVCHD-encoded DVDs, which were what some HD cameras recorded on. Mine didn't, but I found that 1) if I copied the SD cards that my camera recorded on over to a DVD-RW, this Blu-Ray player (don't remember the brand) would indeed play them. And also 2) if I edited movies recorded on that camera, and exported them as a single MP4 file, it also played those, not caring that the directory structure expected by AVCHD wasn't there. Which was great because at the point I was doing this sort of stuff, Blu-Ray recorders were still pretty expensive, and it meant that I could burn MP4 videos onto cheap DVD-RW discs that at least SOME other people could play, even in full HD.
I recently bought a USB BDXL drive, mainly for backing up data to 100 GB archival discs, and it seems to be backward-compatible all the way back to red-book CD, at least for playback, and while I haven't tried making MP3 CDs with it, it does claim to be able to write on CD-RW, DVD-RW, and several BD variants, so I have little doubt that I could put a freaking huge CD collection on a single disc. Which is really only meaningful for making backups, since every other device I have can already play audio or (where applicable) video from SD cards, even up to at least 512 GB.
But yes, as soon as I saw "MP3" on the front panels of CD players, I guessed what that meant, and quickly discovered just what you did. But by then, the compact form factor of MP3 players made more sense to me than actually using CDs for playing music. That, and I didn't have a car CD player anyway.
I remember MP3 compatibility was a must-have feature on all new CD players once they started coming out. That is why the CD-RW label came out. People wanted re-writable MP3 CDs.
I first discovered MP3 around 1996/1997. I was blown away that a 3 megabyte file could sound fairly close to a much larger uncompressed wav file. In those early days I had to run a DOS command line app to make the mp3 files.
The software that came with my first CD burner was from HP when I was probably 12. It only took wav files, so after Christmas morning trying to burn my mp3 collection to CDs was a nightmare. I ended up having a buddy come over and download some command line program that converted mp3 to wavs so we could burn CDs. Wasn't until later that I realized you can use any software to burn CDs and not the one that came with the CD burner. That one took mp3s and I was much happier.
Lon, I like your channel too!
@@mae2759 I think I had the same one! Hooked up to the parallel port?
And nowadays I run a command line app (ffmpeg) to compress videos to AV1
The nostalgia you bring with your videos makes me happy for a moment
I always love the random things I learn from your videos. I remember once when I was a kid we had a pirated DVD that did not have the standard video format on it. We stuck it in like 4 DVD players before finding one that would play the file format.
Right around 2000-2001, I was regularly driving from Silicon Valley to San Diego, about a 500 mile drive without a lot of radio coverage. I dropped a bundle of cash for a car stereo that had MP3 CD playback. I would make a "mix tape" disc, set it to shuffle, and just roll.
My car is from 2009, and I still use MP3 CDs. Once a year, I download all the new music from my playlist and burn it onto a CD, It works well, it also had USB port for Pendrives, but I burnt the USB port by charging my phone with it, back in the 2000 I used Emule and Ares to download MP3 music for my portable player, that was before mobile internet was a thing.
@@joakoc.6235 I bought a new car around that time. It had a MP3 CD player but what I really wanted was a USB drive in my car for larger audio storage capacity.
I asked the dealership if there was a way I could get a model with a USB drive and they looked at me like I had just spoken in Latin or something. They had no idea what I was talking about.
I actually love this idea! Burning all the new music from the past year would serve as a really cool archive to look back on in 5-10 years. I find specific songs bring me back to specific checkpoints in my life, so literally having a CD with all of those songs all in one place would be a really cool way to remember times past.
"Time wasn't the only issue" ...well yeah, but remember that time on a modem DID actually cost you money - since back in the days many of us had to pay some cents per minute online. So, yeah, download one CD over the course of one day and say goodbye to your allowance 😂
And that's assuming someone in the house didn't pick up the phone for any reason ;)
I used to DL and listen to old timey radio show broadcasts on dial up speeds. Never mind this UA-cam stuff. That was almost impossible.
Then a few years later there were so many free AOL CDs being produced that we used them as frisbees
I remember the NetZero days when I could only watch UA-cam videos at school or the library because our home dial-up was too slow.
@@CorndogNinjaOh man, I had net zero for awhile! It was rough lol
..as always loved your perfection for content quality!