I was happy to find my first one last night (I thought I had lost it somewhere). I think it was made in the fall of 1996, and it was made entirely of CDs that I owned. Were MP3s even available for burning at that time? The CD was made at a friend's house on his dad's computer. I think his 2X CD-Recorder was freaking expensive at the time. It took forever to burn the CD! I think the CD-R itself cost around $10. Crazy how things have changed in 5 years.

Here is my tracklist:

01 Korn - No Place to Hide
02 Republica - Drop Dead Gorgeous
03 White Zombie - Phantasmo and the Chicken-Run Blast-O-Rama (Wine, Women & Song Mix)
04 Prodigy - Firestarter
05 Cake - The Distance
06 Rage Against the Machine - Vietnow
07 Gravity Kills - Enough
08 Garbage - Stupid Girl
09 Imperial Drag - Boy or a Girl
10 Tool - Aenima
11 Spot - Moon June Spoon
12 Lords of Acid - Voodoo-U
13 4 Non Blondes - What's Going On (DJ Miko remix)
14 Metallica - Hero of the Day
15 Metallica - Until it Sleeps

I have no idea what prompted me to put two Metallica songs on there. I now see my track selection as kind of weird and mostly mainstream. This was made during a time when my musical tastes were in development. Interesting to see that many of the bands listed are either broken-up or haven't released anything since.

Found my first a few weeks ago. I looked at it.. then threw it out

Yep, it was a bunch of Madonna songs I burned from my sister's cd's

I don't remember what was on first one I made in early '99, but I'm sure I gave it away. Most of the CD's I make are compilations I give to friends. 3 years after first making CD's I'm still happy that we are able to make them at home (and SO stinkin' cheap).

I don't have a lot of my early cd-rs because I used to download the songs and burn them until I could get the cd or afford it, then I would throw it away. My first CD-R, not containing music though, was just a bunch of crappy fonts and shareware hehe. I got my first burner in december of 97 I guess, it was a 2x HP that set me back all my Xmas money hehe, about 450 dollars I think. That was when 50 cd's were more than 50 bucks as I recall.

Wow I babble a lot.

Yep, I remember my first CD-R like it was made about a week ago.

Wait a second, it was made about a week ago .

OK, so I'm a little late in to the game, I would just buy CDs of everything I wanted. Now I am learning the joys of CD-Rs with my Plextor 24/10/40 and Nero 5.5, though I haven't played around yet with MP3s and CD-RWs.

Yeah. It also happened to be my first music CD ever

RATM Renegades

I still have it in my stack of cds, and I still use it every once in a while, although I can't find it right now. It was from about 96, and was indeed mp3s. Back then the only way to get mp3s was to trade logins for FTP sites. As I recall, there was a search engine that spidered public FTP sites that you could search for music on.

I remember going to an Egghead B&M and buying a single Traxdata CDR. Didn't even have a drive yet, but figured it'd be nice to have discs when I did get a drive. It was about 5 dollars after a MIR. Funny now to think that I bought 7 spindles of Tayo Yudens for just $10/50 CDs last week.

Does it still play?

Just wondering, because I've been using CD-Rs to make back-ups of my hard-drive, and other archival purposes for the last year or so. I've heard quite a few questions about the durability of the media.

Yes. But, there are some things that I noticed when listening to the CD that I am not sure I noticed before (a few clicks in a few songs, but nothing major). Also, the back surface of the disc shows a lot of wear, and there is a definite radius scratch that didn't give me any problems with the older model Discman that I used to listen to the CD.

I remember mine. Got it as a birthday present 10-9-2000. The track listing was something like this:

1-4 Styles of Beyond songs
5-6 Jurassic 5
7-8 Mos Def
9 Don't Remember
10 Swamburger
11-13 Kool Keith

vaguely...it was made sometime in '98...

My first CD-R was my own Tom Waits Greatest Hits CD. Just took my favorite songs from the CDs I had. That was about 5 years ago.

I can also remember my first mp3..... I don't need to be flamed for naming it...

With the cost of cd-rs does anyone actually make full use of the cd-rw? I found my first cd-rw that I definitely don't want, but my first inclination is to throw it out, not reuse it.

Never used a CD-RW before. CD-Rs are so cheap that there's really no point in using a re-recordable CD. Also, it's my understanding that CD-RW discs are more trouble than they're worth -- compatability problems and such.

come on you can name it. Was it New Kids on the Block?

No it was Natalie Imbruglia's "Torn" when the song first came out. Must've been March '98.

The first CD-R I saw was in college, around 1994. The blanks were actually more expensive than a store bought music CD, and the burner was something like $1000, 1x, and horribly flaky, making more coasters than good burns. The college was using to make archival backups, because at that time a 650MB hard drive was a fairly expensive proposition (several hundred dollars, IIRC).

I did not have "real" access to one until the middle part of 1996. I do not recall what the first thing I burned was. The place I was working at had purchased a 3x SCSI burner for doing backups and whatnot, but it was used very infrequently, and the IT staff was allowed to use it for their own purposes when it was not being used for work. That burner burned at least 12 hours a day, five or six days a week. We basically set up a production line. You'd set your CD to be copied at the end of the line, and put a sticky note with the number of copies and your blanks under the original CD. If anyone else wanted a copy, they added to your list and put another CD in the stack. When the burner finished burning, whoever was in the room pulled the CD out, labeled it, put it in the "done" stack, and started the next CD in line. I also remember work putting the CD-Rs under lock and key because of the rate we were going through them.

I bought my first 2x burner about six months after that, and for the longest time, I was the only person I knew that had one. That burner also burned pretty much around the clock, as my friends would come by just to use it.

My first MP3 was Madonna's Nothing Really Matters.

The first mp3 I heard was Alice in Chain's "Man in the Box" on a beta version of winamp. I totally did not understand the impact it was going to have on the world. At the time I heard it, a 486 was a common computer, and it required almost all it's resources to play back a 128kps stereo mp3. Four or five megs was a ton of space back when a big hard drive was 500MB. On top of that, broadband was not something people had at their homes or dorm rooms, and 56k modems were just starting to appear -- it took forever to download a song.

However, it wasn't long before I was trading mp3s all over, and running one of the largest mp3 sites I'd seen at that time (2+ GB). I remember scour, and mp3.box.sk, and a few other mp3 ftp search engines. I also remember being able to type "mp3" on Altavista and get back a good selection of sites. I remember trading over IRC and trading ftp accesses, and I was a hard core Napster user, sharing over 8,000 unique files.

I heard my first mp3 in August '96. I remember getting in an argument with my friend (who introduced me to them) about how worthless the whole idea was. I think I was mainly turned off by the low sound quality: 112kbs was standard encoding of l3enc.exe and people often used 96kbs. By Christmas of '96 I was ripping my own mp3s and encoding them... which took around 45-60 mins per 4 minute song. It was awful.

In March '97 I burned my first mp3 CD and by the next fall I was running one of the larger hard rock/metal sites around. I think I transfered 150 gigs (which at the time was a good deal) in about 9 months time.

My first CD-R was actually a CD I burned at single speed on an Apple at school around April '96. It was 450megs of applications so I couldn't exactly listen to it

Mordred

I remember buying a box of 10 CD-Rs for $30 at Best Buy sometime in late 1997. The first CD-R I burned was named "Warez 1." Don't ask me what was on it.

I think my recorder screwed up one of the blank CD-Rs and I freaked out. My buddy says "Save it. It's you're first official coaster."

The first music CD I burned was a bunch of songs I liked at the time. It was more of an experiment than anything.

On my peak day, oubliette.ml.org/oubliette.org pulled out 8GB of traffic and over 10,000 unique hits. It was quite a day ... and it also managed to get my server banned from it's ISP.

Ah the good 'ole days... how I miss them. I think my max was 6 gigs in a day, at which point I noticed that people living on my floor were complaining of poor bandwidth for some mysterious reason I figured that if people started complaining I was done for so I started seriously curtailing usage of my site.

True story this: I went away for Christmas Vacation for a month and of course the site was down. I came back turned on the computer, booted up war-ftp and 3 people connected within the first 10 seconds. Now that'll make you feel cool haha

Of course when I tried serving off of RoadRunner a year later I did about a gig my first day and two days later had received an actual form letter that my account would be terminated if I didn't cease all FTP-serving. Bastards.

Mordred