MP3 CDs - powering secret MP3 players that were all over the place
Added 2024-10-14 22:27:48 +0000 UTCThankfully the second unit arrived in one piece and worked!
So - this one went a bit overboard, didn't it? I mean I didn't think i could get this topic past the 30 minute mark but somehow I did. For those that didn't see the video update on this project's delay, I have a feeling a lot more of you here know about this than the general public. I might be quite wrong about that, though, so honestly I have no idea how this video will be received!
The story I tell here about my own discovery of this "format" is absolutely true, but I'm also just a bit too young to have really known what the heck was going on in 1999. But I do absolutely remember getting our first PC with a CD burner (it's the one you see here!) and thinking we had unlocked some magic new superpower. Lots of music was, uh, shared but it was all just copies of audio CDs. The iPod was barely a thing when we got that computer.
Anyway, this is really something of an indulgent blast from the past! It startles me to say this out loud but I do think we're to the point that optical media in the context of the PC is retro.
I know! It burns!
But I think that's the truth. And given how MP3 players were imagined by many people (I'd argue most people) as the replacement to the CD as a portable music format, I have a hunch this video may surprise many people.
Captions will probably take me longer than usual, but I'll get the script pasted in shortly.
Comments
I remember this being nearly ubiquitous. The only CD players that I can remember having access to that didn't support MP3s were an early media center CD changer and a cheap aftermarket car CD changer. What's really confusing to me are the non-CD-DA, non-CD-ROM discs that most music has been printed on in the last ten years if it does get released physically. I don't actually know what it is or exactly how common it is because I stopped buying CDs when I bought three in a row that wouldn't play on any CD player that I had. ... I'm not bitter.
Killianti
2024-11-02 21:48:59 +0000 UTCI still make mp3 discs, just in a limited way. I make a series of 3" mp3 CDs of Christmas music, 25 in the series at this point, with a nice Christmas graphic on the top, called the Ornament Series. You can carefully hang them on the tree or play them in almost any disc player for 2 hours of music. I would've thought the specific mp3 disc format would keep the folder hierarchy but also include a hidden file containing a playlist of the tracks for the intended order as specified by the authoring software. Otherwise what good is such a format vs. a regular CD-ROM? On the subject of RW discs, I never bothered until a year ago and found exactly how problematic they are. I had no idea how few players could play them. Even those that say they can often can't. If these were that popular then, and must be still now as they are still available, who uses them for anything let alone music on which so few players play them? I thought they would be a great money-saving idea seeing as I still master and burn audio CDs and thought I could audition my work on the road or in a personal player and then decide if it was all good. If it wasn't I could tweak things, erase the disc and burn it again until I was satisfied. Then I found out that most units couldn't play the damned things.
Arthur Robillard
2024-10-25 03:55:02 +0000 UTCYou didn't, did you? Rofl! 11:36 you called this CD "burnadette" *cracking up*
Daniel Steinmann
2024-10-24 19:58:15 +0000 UTCI feel like this was common knowledge and pretty majnstream for my generation. I turn 43 this month.
Justin
2024-10-23 02:15:13 +0000 UTCBack before the turn of the century... Back around 1994... Back before my first iPod... I purposefully bought a Sony CD Walkman that could play MP3 CDs. I burned several collected works type mp3 CDs. For example: All the albums that were scoured for a Moody Blues greatest hits album called "This is... the Moody Blues" ending it with that greatest hits double album. I also made mp3 CD of older Jethro Tull albums and of older U2 albums. That was only used for a few years... until I got my first iPod.
Dean Lovett
2024-10-20 20:59:28 +0000 UTC*laughs in FreeBSD*
darkwater4213
2024-10-19 22:06:57 +0000 UTCProbably something along the lines of PulseAudio on Linux mimicking pulsing laser reading audio
VoxelPrismatic
2024-10-19 00:09:50 +0000 UTCC'mon Alec! You missed out on the perfect opportunity to create a joke about PulseAudio on Linux!
VoxelPrismatic
2024-10-19 00:09:20 +0000 UTCplay 1080p h264 files from a dvd? i'm sure there are dvd players that can do that :)
adcurtin
2024-10-17 02:30:42 +0000 UTCI wanna hear the joke about audio drivers!!
christie
2024-10-17 01:42:31 +0000 UTCI remember buying a portable cd player specifically for its mp3 cd function in around 2001. I velcro’ed it to the dashboard of my cutlass supreme and connected it to the stereo with a cassette adapter. I mostly used a single cd-rw with it that I would just re-burn with a new mix when I got bored.
Jennifer Holz
2024-10-16 20:35:52 +0000 UTCThe saddest part is that someone at Sony would let tears of laughter out of presented to the suggestion, even today
Raul Ramos
2024-10-16 20:28:59 +0000 UTCOf course I know what you mean by "MP3 CDs". It's the stuff that you burn to listen to in the car, because every car has an MP3-CD-capable radio. Well, unless it's too old to know about MP3 CDs or too young to even have a CD player. But most cars do! This, to me, is absolute mainline stuff. I take the ability to play MP3 CDs for granted in any car radio that has a CD slot. Duh!
Martin Ibert
2024-10-16 18:06:54 +0000 UTCYeah maybe if Attack was open format from the beginning it could have a chance.
Radek Věchet
2024-10-16 17:25:38 +0000 UTCA parallel to this tale is the DivX and DVD. I remember my parents buying their first DVD player and my uncle insisting they get one that support DivX so that he could give us entire seasons of TV shows in dreadfully compressed formats on a single disc. This along with my own discovery of MP3 discs were foundational milestone to my 12 year old mind.
Declan
2024-10-16 17:06:23 +0000 UTCFortunately we got streaming now and music execs don't need to go hungry
Raul Ramos
2024-10-16 16:43:37 +0000 UTCThe Nero days
Raul Ramos
2024-10-16 16:41:53 +0000 UTCI was much cheaper, having the casette adapter on the disc man. I never upgraded to mp3 disc man but skip directly to high capacity mp3
Raul Ramos
2024-10-16 16:39:58 +0000 UTCI actually liked atrac a lot, early on was much better than mp3. Then the software and everything else around it was...well crap
Raul Ramos
2024-10-16 16:33:47 +0000 UTCI even bought a portable MP3 CD player back "in the day" (read: 2002, I think?). It was an iRiver SlimX iMP-350, and I loved that thing. It had a remote control that I attached to my watch (as was the style at the time) and my headphones or earbuds plugged into the remote. The remote gave me the "now player" information that you'd expect from a PC MP3 player and it could easily traverse folders or use playlists. I eventually upgraded a couple of years later to a hard drive based MP3 player (which I still have, although it is broken) on account of the rapid battery life loss I had and the remote breaking, but I still loved the thing! I had so many MP3 CDs burnt, so I had "walkabout" music playing while I was going between buildings on my college campus, then video game battle music whenever I needed to exercise, and Beethoven when I needed to clean. Each CD was supposed to be a different theme, but I frequently ended up just throwing in whatever by the end because I had more space.
aetherspoon
2024-10-16 16:33:28 +0000 UTCThis I actually a huge issue for late 90s early 2000s official CDs that would put “trap” tracks at the end to fuck with downloaders. If you play Working Man’s Dead printed around that time it has an absolute car wreck of a mashed up shreaks and discordant sounds at the end in an MP3 file. No doubt aimed at copiers of the floppy who were high off their gourd and listening to the whole album off frostwire or whatever. But then they made car stereos happily play MP3 files and you get blasted with that shit at the end of the legally bought in store CD if you don’t remember to hit stop at the end of album.
Ryan Butler
2024-10-16 16:07:08 +0000 UTCMy 2020 Toyota came from the factory with a CD player that happily does MP3-CD. I don't remember encountering any CD device made in the last 10-15 years *didn't* support MP3
PileOfStuff
2024-10-16 15:21:07 +0000 UTCI can't imagine what the origin of that prohibition might be. Someone heard that they contain a laser and got scared?
PileOfStuff
2024-10-16 15:17:26 +0000 UTCHehe, I still use an mp3 player. I never did the mp3 disc though. My CD player was too old, a CD player with mp3 was too expensive and thus I just took the plunge and went for a dedicate mp3 with 30 GB of space
Raul Ramos
2024-10-16 15:15:38 +0000 UTCAre you referring to M-Discs or standard R/RW dye discs?
C.J. Malm
2024-10-16 14:25:59 +0000 UTCWow! Who knew? Thanks!
Markintosh
2024-10-16 11:10:44 +0000 UTCAh yes, the days when you had to either defrag your hard disk before burning a CD, or create a separate partition as a staging area for the data that would be burned to a CD. Those are NOT fond memories.
Michael Dunn
2024-10-16 03:30:17 +0000 UTCAs for a player, my idea is a smartphone connected to a USB c dock with a DVD drive connected. I'm unsure if that will work but I don't see why it couldn't in theory
Nicole Crawford
2024-10-15 21:12:48 +0000 UTCOne issue I ran into with my MP3 CD player back in 2002 was being unable to use it on flights. I remember getting it ready with plenty of AA batteries for a 7 hour flight to visit relatives in the USA. As I was getting ready to play, a flight attendant told me I'm not allowed to play CDs onboard, pointing to the inflight card mentioning that the use of CD players including laptop CD-ROM drives are prohibited. It was one distinct bad memory I had with flying with Aer Lingus, although I remember other aerlines having this restriction also.
Seán Byrne
2024-10-15 21:01:51 +0000 UTCThat's an idea I get when I see a modern DVD player. A DVD can hold about 90 minutes of video in really watchable 6 Mbit bitrate. The only thing need to be done is to implement H.265 decoding into a DVD player. It could be nice to have Full HD movies on a regular DVD. It will also be playable on a computer without needing to buy expensive Blu-ray drive.
Jan Miksa
2024-10-15 20:48:16 +0000 UTCI once bought a new stereo for my moms Corsa which I drove at the time. I choose one that was able to play - wait for it - MP3-DVDs! Tons of space, virtually unlimited music! I threw it out shortly after because the decompression chip was very cheap crap. It produced so bad (de)compression artifacts that it was terrible to listen to - even at high driving speeds.
David Sallge
2024-10-15 20:45:59 +0000 UTCI am one of the users who had absolutely no idea about this format until around 2020, when I noticed this logo on my new boombox. But it seems hard to use for larger collections because my music collection grows and a CD-R is a WORM media. How do I add a new album if I already purchase a new album from an artist from who I already have two albums? Multisession looks like a solution, but loading times are slow on some CD players. My modern boombox needs almost 2 minutes to load a multisession disc If I simply fill all discs to their maximum capacity and then put the new album onto another disc, the collection will become messy because one disc will contain albums from multiple artists and albums from one artist will be split onto multiple discs. But on the other hand, it should work perfectly with CD-RW discs. I would need at least 5 of them for my around 3.5 GB of MP3s and I could rewrite them when adding new albums. Unfortunately, some MP3 CD players can't read them
Jan Miksa
2024-10-15 20:34:46 +0000 UTCYour tangent on DVD Players reminded me of when tabletop dvd players added "DivX" support.
SignalEleven
2024-10-15 17:47:21 +0000 UTCI think MP3 CD Players were most popular in car stereo, where space is more of a concern than audio quality. Otherwise, I mainly know it from DVD players, and as they also play normal audio CDs, I never had any urge to buy a CD player anymore when DVD players were around. MP3s I first heard about around mid 1999, when I started my study electronics engineering, and we all got laptops (333 MHz Celeron, with "yeah" 128 MB memory!!!) and the possibility to plug them into the roaring fast 10 MBit ethernet connection and get those MP3s from the internet using Napster ;-). Then I also figured out what the use was of that little program I had on my Amiga for "playing and converting "mpeg-1 layer III"-files. Of course, my old 28 MHz 68EC020 Amiga 1200 was not fast enough to play those files in real-time, but yeah, I could convert them and them burn them to an audio-CD. I had the burner, 2x, was very expensive and the Amiga 1200 was slightly too slow to create an ISO 9660 file system on-the-fly, I had to premaster my CDs before burning them... Good old times, no money, using too old stuff to do too modern things :-P. Somebody once offered me a 68030 turbo board for free if I could get my 68EC020 turbo board working in his machine, I should have done more effort of figuring out how to change the memory addresses so it could co-exist with his Picasso board...
MrHammond
2024-10-15 16:41:49 +0000 UTCThanks Apple.
Minecraft Chest1
2024-10-15 16:10:45 +0000 UTCI believe my aftermarket pioneer unit supports usb drives, but I was unable to get that working in under 5 minutes the only time I tried. I just use that USB port for charging my phone (in addition to the factory 12v power socket).
Minecraft Chest1
2024-10-15 16:09:36 +0000 UTCI would add my two cents.. as mentioned in the video, this was not a standart. So any combination of deep folder structures and or weird characters in file naming or MP3 meta data could break various players in various different ways. And I also hate Sony for their custom audio formats... and memory cards. My friend had similar CD-ROM portable player like in the video, but it was by Sony and it played only their custom format ATRAC not MP3 (apart from normal audio CD) and it was real hassle to convert it. I was late in to the game so I jumped right into a phone with mp3 playback function: Sony Ericsson W800 (walkman series). And yes Sony Ericsson had custom earpiece with custom audio connector. You could only charge the device or listen. Unless you had special third party pass-through charger. https://www.phonearena.com/phones/Sony-Ericsson-W800_id1147
Radek Věchet
2024-10-15 15:33:43 +0000 UTCI think even a lay person could tell the difference when it came to cymbals. Yeah my experience was only with whatever encoders are/were built into iTunes.
Benjamin Kier
2024-10-15 14:12:11 +0000 UTCAh, the changes that came with Napster and a brand-new CD burner!
Michael Steeves
2024-10-15 14:06:12 +0000 UTCLove the little atrac mention - "fun" fact, Sony are still trying to make atrac be a thing. The little bits of music that play on the dashboard for the PS4 or PS5? These have to be atrac encoded.
Andrew Chappell
2024-10-15 13:59:28 +0000 UTCEspecially back then though the encoder made a huge difference. The "demo" encoder that LAME was based on at first was really crappy, anyone could tell something was different about the sound of a favorite song, especially with cymbals. The Fraunhofer encoder was definitely much better but wasn't free of course. Then LAME's patches started to really get better and equal it, and yeah at that point, I'd say most people couldn't tell the difference. But for a good while there the encoder was very important.
The Great Quux
2024-10-15 13:49:22 +0000 UTCI agree the ipod is the only piece of apple engineering that I actually like.
Minecraftchest2
2024-10-15 12:53:59 +0000 UTCI have tried in both places and if WMP ever pulls the index twin I can just use Itunes for that rip.
Minecraftchest2
2024-10-15 12:51:53 +0000 UTCIn the UK here, and a wee bit older than your good self. I had no idea this wasn't universal knowledge! I had a ton of CD-Rs with MP3s on them, mainly for the car. My 2006 Saab even had a boot mounted 6 CD changer which supported MP3 files. I found some discs dated 2003, so I was definitely burning them that far back. Being less Apple indoctrinated, I would have used Windows Media Player and/or Niro to rip and burn... I'm told it was alledgedly also apparently possible to acquire mp3 files from certain torrent services back then.
Brian Farrington
2024-10-15 10:12:30 +0000 UTCMy Subaru from 2016 has a CD player with mp3 support. Too bad it doesn't do gapless playback, but I chalk that up to pure laziness.
Nicole Crawford
2024-10-15 05:37:05 +0000 UTCNow I haven't yet watched the video, just commenting based on the description... I would say these are not quite as dead as you imagine. Because of one reason - cars. In the early 2000s pretty much every car that came out supported MP3 CDs, but not all had AUX IN or Bluetooth Audio - those two were often optional extra that most people did not buy. At least here in Europe. A lot of those cars are still around today, and a lot of people that I know still get their music onto those radios by just burning mp3 CDs.
roli
2024-10-15 05:23:15 +0000 UTCI do have to emphasize the discs die a lot quicker than anyone thinks. I would have lost several irreplaceable Space Shuttle videos due to the discs no longer playing, if I didn't adhere to "if it's not stored in at least 3 places, it's gone" - Lots of people considered writable CDs/DVDs as archive media and are now in a world of hurt.
Crash Cash
2024-10-15 04:41:06 +0000 UTCI hate Apple with an absolute burning passion, but you have to give them props for the iPod. There were a hundred different "music file players" and somehow each one had a different idiosyncratic fiddly way of loading, selecting, and playing music. "Can it do shuffle? Yes? No? How do you skip to the next song? What semi-broken software does it use to load the songs? How can you make playing music so difficult?" The iPod won because it had a ton of storage and was simple and obvious to use.
Crash Cash
2024-10-15 03:45:32 +0000 UTCYou can change the settings in iTunes (or your OS) so it doesn’t open every time you load a disc. Also, if you’re relying on WMP to assume which CDDB data to pull, you’re inevitably going to get — pardon the pun — burned when it picks the index twin of the disc you’re ripping.
C.J. Malm
2024-10-15 03:37:42 +0000 UTCAs Patrons this is the information we expect to be privy to, daggummit! 😃
C.J. Malm
2024-10-15 03:30:07 +0000 UTCTo well trained ears on good gear, yes. To people who were hard of hearing… or listening with stock computer speakers or dollar store headphones… or were simply coming from the days of vinyl crackles and tape hiss… it was clear enough to either not notice or not care. Certainly not enough for a casual listener to think, “Something’s wrong with this, I’d better screw around with the settings of this new, unintuitive, borderline volatile technology, and hope I don’t bork something.”
C.J. Malm
2024-10-15 03:28:39 +0000 UTCTo touch on the last idea of a modern x265 encoded file on a DVD, that's actually something I have messed around with. I managed to get a 20gb Blu Ray rip of Fantasia 2000 down to a 1.7 gb h265 before the quality loss was unbearable. With some tweaks to my compression settings, it would be easy peasy to get acceptable quality out of a x265 file in only 4.7 gb
Nicole Crawford
2024-10-15 03:26:26 +0000 UTCRe: backing up discs due to deterioration… I’d be curious to see you cover M-Discs. They claim to be able to safely store data for 100 years, and while I’m not sure how you might be able to test that, I think the difference between their structure and that of a standard dye-based writable disc is exactly the kind of thing that would do well for your channel! Especially considering the valid rhetoric of… even if these discs can last a century… will there even be a way to read them in half that time? I work for a local TV station and we can’t even play DVCPro tapes that were recorded 15 years ago, because it’s impractical to source the parts to keep up maintenance on the players. What good will a DVD be when optical drives go the way of the VCR?
C.J. Malm
2024-10-15 03:18:18 +0000 UTCI think they removed it at least it isn't showing up in the version I'm running.
Minecraftchest2
2024-10-15 02:45:22 +0000 UTCThat and the MPEG consortium and Fraunhofer were very upset that groups and software like Winamp had ripped the MPEG layer 3 audio shared libraries without paying for a license. I have to imagine the early devices that supported it weren't shouting it from the rooftops for fear of getting in the cross hairs of the RIAA and MPEG.
Will G.
2024-10-15 02:14:26 +0000 UTCOne thing I would add about the 1999-2001 CD burning was expensive to buy a burner, slow to burn (1x), and very prone to buffer under run making burns fail, if you were using an operating system that didn't support true multitasking i.e. Windows 98/ME and Max OS 9 and earlier. That probably doomed those early early MP3 CD players. The first CD burner I ever used was in high school in the year 2000. A burner connected over a parallel port to a Dell laptop running Windows 2000. Start a burn of your Linux ISO and come back a couple periods later after lunch and hope it succeeded.
Will G.
2024-10-15 02:06:04 +0000 UTCMy 2011 Toyota RAV4 has the ability to play MP3 CDs in the dash CD player!
Coreen Montagna
2024-10-15 01:59:32 +0000 UTCHearing about this video, I realized my old aftermarket car stereo had both an mp3 CD player and a USB thumb drive mp3 player, so I dug up an old thumb drive, loaded it full of the oldest mp3s on my NAS and have been jamming to old favorites for the last two weeks. This comment brought to you by Duvet by bôa.
neuracnu
2024-10-15 01:22:40 +0000 UTCThat is a setting in iTunes
Alex Taylor
2024-10-15 01:07:02 +0000 UTCOne of the big benefits of acc was Apple encouraged artists to audio tune them and not just rip them from the master. A tuned 256acc I almost can’t differentiate from lossless.
Alex Taylor
2024-10-15 01:05:58 +0000 UTCI had the same happen. I thought my music was backed up. It wasn’t. I lost the drive of 100 cds that I had ripped and didn’t bother doing it again. I had ripped everything in losses Apple format.
Alex Taylor
2024-10-15 01:01:28 +0000 UTCI left a comment about this on YT, but I figure this is the best place for a longer comment. In the early '00s, the RIAA was very litigious and had a *lot* of impact on the hardware and software related to playing music. Some of the decisions that seem strange now were made at the time just to appease the RIAA. Such as, music players that could play DRM'd files had no digital audio output, only a headphone jack, because the RIAA wouldn't license music for use with those players if there were a digital output that could be used to make a perfect copy of a song. That's also why ripping a CD defaulted to something other than MP3. I didn't use iTunes, only Napster, but Napster's default was to rip to WMA. The software would then apply DRM to the ripped files so they would only play on that computer. Sure, it was easy to get around that, but again at the time, DRM was just The Way It Was with music files. It wasn't until Apple basically strong-armed the RIAA into letting them sell MP3s that DRM stopped being used for audio.
Michael Dunn
2024-10-15 00:45:48 +0000 UTCin 1999 I imported one of those pinetech portable mp3 CD players fr9m the US to France. my colleagues didn't catch why I spent so much money (250USD if I recall correctly, shipping, tax... ) on such a device. And the shuffle play with really flawed. it was always the same order, and in plus it just catched about a quarter of all tracks and restarted from the beginning again, same order off course.
adorfer
2024-10-15 00:39:55 +0000 UTCI bought a portable MP3 CD player right before MP3 players with internal storage drives became popular. I got it through some obscure mail order catalog. Then Napster went under and it became more difficult to get MP3s without viruses and I had a hard drive crash and I lost a lot of my ripped mp3s and I didn't feel like re-ripping them and so then I wound up not getting a lot of use out of that device.
WildMartin
2024-10-15 00:34:57 +0000 UTCWe need to more clearly see the headphones so we can judge you for your technology choices. Would have guessed Sony MDR, but they seem a little thicker.
Jimmy Dorff
2024-10-15 00:27:40 +0000 UTCThe early 2000s were the peak of ugly stereo design. Like so ugly that it almost rolls the score over into being cool again, but not quite. Seriously, look up the JVC HXD77J. Your black and red Panasonic is positively tasteful in comparison.
Dawn Anthes
2024-10-15 00:08:55 +0000 UTCIf you think a 128kb/s MP3 is anywhere near as high quality as a 128kb/s ACC file (aka MPEG4 audio, a complete standard audio format) , you’re high. Acc was roughly 3x higher quality at a given bit rate! Go and try it for yourself with iTunes. 128k ACC is more like 320kb MP3!
Benjamin Kier
2024-10-14 23:29:21 +0000 UTCStill have mine!
The Pixel Polygon
2024-10-14 23:18:59 +0000 UTCWhat was the joke about audio drivers?
Minecraftchest2
2024-10-14 23:01:27 +0000 UTCI still have a cd burner on my pc.
Minecraftchest2
2024-10-14 23:00:29 +0000 UTC"I will spare you the joke I wrote about audio drivers!" Me: *laughs in FreeBSD*
darkwater4213
2024-10-14 22:54:59 +0000 UTCItunes is nice but it is annoying that it wants to open every time I try to rip a disk. I use windows media player because it doesn't need to confirm what disk I am trying to rip.
Minecraftchest2
2024-10-14 22:41:31 +0000 UTCOmg I had the same stereo boom box setup!
Drew Moncada
2024-10-14 22:36:20 +0000 UTCIt's uncanny, but sometimes I feel lucky about living in a universe that a channel like this exists. I mean, seems like it was made for me. Technology connections is helping me fight depression and whenever a new video came out, it's sheer happiness for me! Sorry for being emotional.
Matheus Bitencourt
2024-10-14 22:33:46 +0000 UTC
