zyzzle

Sad to say, I doubt very much that will happen. Judging by the commodization of blanks during the past 10 years, there would simply be not enough people interested, and not enough people who really care. *Our type*, namely those of us who posted in this thread, is at a distinct minority, sadly.

jjcool

I completely agree. Back when I was burning a lot of CDs people would look at me funny when I would ask for Taiyo Yuden blanks. Like I had two heads or something. They couldn't understand that there was a difference between those and the maxells they were selling.

fumanstan

I remember this too, I remember buying specific Fujifilm CD-R's to get Taiyo Yuden made discs way back in the day but haven't burned any media in awhile now though. These days it seems easier to buy a few hard drives and cloud storage for massive backups then to still use optical media.

MooMooMooMoo

Agree. The last decent non TY blank I know of was FTI/Falcon; & they started producing junk in less than 2 years.

MooMooMooMoo

When I first started burning I had a full 100 disc cake of Maxell branded RICOHJPN-R01-002's go bad in less then 6 months. On EVERY disc the dye faded on the outer half.

MooMooMooMoo

I've gone to hard drives & Flash drives 100% for lossless music.

I'm also making the same switch for NON dvd films (MKV, H264, etc; I used to author them to dvd+r's). I can't do this with real dvd's becuse my Oppo sees each vob on any drive other then a disc as a separate film, so with dvd it's not an option. I also don't have a pc based blu-ray player, & even if i did, storage is still too pricy unless one compresses the heck out of the blu-ray (defeating the entire purpose), and I so far don;t have a br burner anyway.

morriscroy

Similar sentiments here too.

I primarily listen to music from lossless *.wav files ripped from my audio cds. These days I don't even bother compressing them anymore. (Over the past decade or so, I use to compress my *.wav rips to oggvorbis files or occasionally to mp3).

In regard to bluray, I still watch my blurays on a standalone bluray player. At this point, I still consider blurays to be a waste of hard drive space. I only extract the undecrypted bluray isos to the hard drive when I first purchase them, largely to check whether there are any random bad sectors due to manufacturing defects and lousy quality control. I don't watch them from the hard drive.

For my dvds, I only watch them from the computer hard drive if the original dvd discs are from movie companies with shoddy disc quality control, such as: Universal double-sided flipper discs, VEI, Mill Creek, Echo Bridge, etc ... and other bottom feeder companies. Primarily basketcase dvd discs which have too many playback problems on my standalone players (ie. skipping, freezing, pixelation, etc ...). Otherwise I still largely watch my non-basketcase dvd discs on a standalone dvd/bluray player.

MooMooMooMoo

I don't hear much if any difference between .flac & .wav; & .flac takes up much less space.

I suspect there is a small difference, though the audiophile community says there isn't.

Chrisedge

There is zero difference between flac and wav files. Think of it like a zip file.

A wav checksum will be identical to a wav>flac>wav file.

DVD Polizei

Thanks for info. I've been holding off buying some discs for music archiving.

I better not see the following username, however:

MaoMaoMaoMao

If I do. I will assume you've been taken over.

jjcool

I am curious what everyone uses so many blanks for. I was using them for legal, live concert recordings, and would trade through the actual mail with people. We then switched over to torrents and flac files. I dont think I have burned a cd in at least 5 years at this point. I think the last time I burned one is because I couldn't find a flash drive and I was in a rush and needed to take a small file with me.

morriscroy

Over the past decade or so, I was primarily using blanks for backing up the computer operating system and various important documents.

I recently picked up a new desktop computer, which mostly uses flash drives for backing up the operating system now. (They don't use burned dvdrs anymore for operating system backups).

In the category of "important documents", it is mostly a lot of digital photos which I was archiving using TY blank discs, with a Plextor dvdr drive back in the day. (Later I was using a LiteOn dvdr drive, burning at slower speeds).

I rarely ever burned music cds, and never got into burning movie dvds.

morriscroy

For that matter, I never got into burning bluray discs at all.

Ever since I purchased a computer bluray drive a few years ago, I didn't really trust any of the blank bluray discs available on the market. Most of the ones I've seen on the computer store shelves, had a "Made in Taiwan" tag. (I don't know if I had ever seen one with a "Made In Japan" tag).

morriscroy

Today I dropped by the nearby computer store during lunch, and picked up the last JVC/TY 50-disc set I found on the shelves. Hopefully it will last the next 5+ years, for occasional archival purposes.

PhantomStranger

My primary stereo system is still centered around a very high-end CD player. While I do have alternate equipment for digital files, it's nowhere in the same quality.

hanshotfirst1138

What kind of player?

morriscroy

Back in the day I initially encoded my audio cd rips to flac files. Though for most of the music I was listening to at the time, the flac files were not much smaller than the uncompressed wav files they came from. (ie. At most around 20-30% smaller).

At the time (circa early 2000s), I was originally planning on ripping my entire music cd collection to the hard drive. Flac files were still too big for the size of the hard drives I was using at the time (ie. less than 60 gigs). I ended up encoding most of my stuff in oggvorbis, which were around 10-11 times smaller than their original respective wav files, and sounded adequate for the music I was listening to at the time.

With the large terabyte sized hard drives available nowadays, I just couldn't be bothered with compressing wav files anymore (whether to ogg, mp3, flac, etc ...).

jjcool

Gotcha. I guess I never considered that use since I don't generally back up my computer. Plextor is a name that I remember from way back in the day as THE burner to get. I actually had one in my old P5-166 machine.

I see. I can't tell you the last time I actually played a cd in the house. Just as easy to play music off the computer. But, I don't have a nice high end cd setup so I don't notice a difference. I used to occasionally burn a cd to play in the car, but now it is just as easy to throw stuff on a thumb drive and play it that way.

jjcool

I've seriously considered ripping my cd collection several times, but each time I just can't justify the hard drive space. I've got the files on cd already, why should I also use space on my hard drive that I could use for other music I dont already have on CD?

morriscroy

For that matter around 5+ years ago, I looked into using mkv for my audio cd rips, where the cue sheet information from an audio cd (ie. track times/positions, gaps, etc ...) could also be stored along with the wav/ogg/mp3 stream of the entire corresponding cd. The mkv container with the cue sheet + wav basically mimicked the functionality of an ordinary cd player.

After doing this for a few weeks, I found it was too time consuming to do for over a hundred audio cds. Easier to just rip the individual wav tracks from a cd into a directory, and just drag-and-drop the entire directory to media player classic or videolan, which plays almost identically to a mkv container with cue + wav.

morriscroy

I'm of two minds about this.

If I want to listen to loud music on my stereo system, I'll play it on my old standalone audio cd player.

If I want to listen to something while I'm on the computer, I'll listen to the wav rips on the computer. At the present time, I have around a dozen or so cds I listen to semi-regularly while I'm on the computer. (Mostly stuff like the Bee Gees, Iron Maiden, Duran Duran, old Metallica, The Who, Madonna, etc ...).

For example, recently I've relegated to listening to the last several Iron Maiden studio albums on my standalone stereo system. Apparently they all sound awful on the computer, but sound decent enough on my stereo.

morriscroy

These days I'm also very lazy when it comes to music.

Apparently if I want to listen to something, I just look it up on youtube and listen to it on there. Especially if I'm really lazy and don't want to go searching for the cd disc in my collection.

morriscroy

(I know this question wasn't directed towards me, but I'll add in my two eurocents).

Presently I'm using a Harman Kardon HD7325 cd player.

I don't know how "high end" (or "low end") it is. I got it in a trade with a local friend.


Apparently back around 2007-2008, this particular friend wanted one of my old electric guitars which I rarely ever played, and we did a large trade. I got the HK cd player, a junky old dvd player, and a bunch of tv show season sets (Knight Rider, The A-Team, etc ...).

In the end, I think my friend got a better deal out of it than I did.

morriscroy

Definitely. Very reliable in those days.

(As an aside).

Back around 2009 or so, I had an "itch" and a lot of "idle fantasies" about ripping/burning tons of movie dvds. At the time I had just purchased a new desktop computer, which had a then-newer SATA interface for the dvdr drive. (My previous desktop died from a hard drive failure, where I figured it would be easier to just buy a new computer than trying to fix the old hunk of junk).

My priority was finding a Plextor dvd drive, but at the time I had come to the realization that genuine Plextor drives were not being manufactured anymore. Then-newer manufactured "Plextor" drives turned out to be LiteOn rebadges, where the "Plextor" name was just pasted on the front of a LiteOn manufactured dvd drive. (The dvd drive which came with my then-new desktop, was already a LiteOn). The only older "genuine" Plextor drives I could easily find at the time, were mostly old leftover inventory with the older IDE interface.

This very much abruptly ended any and all "idle fantasies" I had about ripping/burning tons of movie dvd discs. Even using TY blank discs, I didn't trust non-genuine Plextor dvd drives for burning a lot of discs.

MooMooMooMoo

CD's: I have a 6 disc changer in the car. It scratches every cd it touches. The only cd's I burn these days are fair use copies of real cd's I own for car play.

DVD: There are still a TON of out of copyright collectable films out there. I made a choice years ago to stay with the dvd format, rather than mkv, h264, etc. I also sell out of copyright films.