Abstract: I burned a pair of audio CDs three days ago for listening to in my cars. Two (nearly) identical discs, one for each car. I have largely moved away from optical discs but am making an effort to re-embrace them.

Full text: So when I went to build my PC, I wanted a Fractal Meshify 2 Mini case. I built my cousin’s PC in one, I wanted one too, but they had apparently been discontinued. I wound up with a Pop Air Mini case instead, which in many ways isn’t as nice, but it does feature a pair of 5 1/4" bays hidden behind a magnetic panel at the front of the PSU basement.

One of my little projects was to install one of those multi-format card readers and an old optical drive there, and I got it done a few days ago. I have a USB optical drive, in fact a couple of them, but an internal one is just a nicer thing to deal with. It is my understanding that no one is actually manufacturing those external optical drives anymore; that the ones you see on Amazon with god knows what branding are old laptop drives of whatever spec stuffed into a new case with a USB controller. They’re flaky, janky, and flimsy. Plus there’s never anywhere to put them; they come with short little cables so they’re invariably hard to plug in. So instead I ganked a blu-ray reader/DVD writer drive out of an old Dell I have lying around and installed that, and man is it nicer.

My inaugural project was to make a couple of audio CDs for the car. This project involved little to no piracy; all of the audio came from legitimately purchased CDs that I bought as directly from the band as I could. I want to fund the artists, not the sniveling IP hoarders. So I’ve got discs now that have my favorite 25 out of ~120 tracks I bought from them in my cars. I ripped the discs to FLACs the second I had them and have been listening to them on my phone, my precious originals safely stored in a CD rack.

I also bought a new spindle of CD-Rs, which is also getting harder to do. The ones I bought have inkjet printable labels. And it just so happens my old inkjet printer has a disc printing feature that I’ve yet to use. So I tried it out. Getting this particular printer going in Linux for more than basic features is a no-go; CUPS+Gutenprint is available for at least a thousand makes and models of Epson printers including the models above and below mine in the range, but specifically not mine. I chose to take that personally, but in the meantime I have discs to print. Funnily enough the printer can do this without a PC at all; it has a feature specifically for printing JPGs onto discs, and another feature that I have to assume is designed specifically for piracy:

My Epson XP-830 Expression Premium “Small In One” printer has a built-in feature to copy a CD from the scanner bed to the disc tray. That is, put a CD label side down on the scanner glass, put a printable CD-R on the disc tray, and it will figure it out and copy it. I can think of no purpose for that other than to hand out copies of Now That’s What I Call Music 7 or Windows Vista Home Premium to all your high school friends. It’s useless for things like “File Archives 2011” or “Iron Butterfly Beach Party Mix” but it’s a very user friendly counterfeiting workflow.

So mostly I installed this optical drive for reading rather than writing. I can see a future where I replace this drive with an M-disc burner; I keep threatening to start a Youtube channel, and that might be how I archive video footage, but…I don’t know.

Mine was a live CD of Ubuntu about 3 years ago. It was an older computer and the front USB ports weren’t plugged in so no USB drive.

A game for PC engine.

made a beatles mixtape… all songs that didn’t get radio play.
tried to do gapless playback but it fucked up.
now i use usb drives or hard drives

I’m not sure, it was over a decade ago. I think it might have been some game I got as an iso that detected my virtual drive. Either that or a Linux image.

I burned a Blu-ray a few years back just to supplement some of our encrypted Google Drive backups with copies that would be more accessible in case of my demise, or physically grabbable in case of disaster. I know they won’t last forever, but if Drive shut down on the same day my local copies failed at least I have an option.

Otherwise, I haven’t used physical media in years. I got the 4K LOTR set when it came out and tried to use it, but it ended up being easier to just pirate the rips like anything else.

No idea, probably XP.
I use readers but don’t burn media anymore, although it’s good for long-term storage.

Copied few cd’s for my car stereo last spring. Mp3 player functionality is bit cruddy and I can’t be bothered with phoen and aux cable all the time.

Pretty sure the last one was a bootleg copy of the original Taken movie - a friend had a digital copy and easiest way to play it on the TV was with a DVD

Woulda been while it was still in theaters, circa 2008.

Install disk for Mint. Older computer and couldn’t figure out how else to do the install.

CT Scan imagery. Apparently medical clinics have finally graduated from faxes to optical media. This was in 2025.

I burned a custom johnny cash cd for my mom using some of her favorites. She played it for about 9 years before accidentally leaving it in the cd player when she sold her old car

Burned a handful of DVDs a couple years ago, as backup of photos I took. Not the most convenient, but I actually do like having an album of discs with the dates written on them. Reliving memories this way hits completely different than browsing a directory tree

I burn exactly one DVD every year.

The school where I teach wants us to deposit all tests done in digital format (I teach programming) at the end of the year on a DVD-RW.

I keep an old USB DVD drive around specifically for this, but I also have some old PCs that I could use. I use k3b to make these discs.

I still used CDs, I recently got out all my music CDs again since I setup a new hifi system. But I haven’t burned a cd or dvd in about 15 years. In fact as I came across copies of burned cds in my collection I have gone and bought cheap used copies to replace them.