My son sed,What?

I have a bank of burned cd's by my fav DJ. but I recorded them on CD-R,so I couldnt start over and correct some mistakes.I went ahead and re-recorded on fresh CD's.I asked my son if any of his friends wanted the CD's,he laughed! He sed " nobody listens to CD's anymore" WTF!
what does he mean?

Welcome to the iPod age my friend.

ipod? what does anyone over the age of 30 do with their massive collection of CD's? and why is everybody gnashing their teeth to buy the latest CD car stereo? I am just so confused??

Make your kids put your cd's on your ipod.
And I got a bluetooth enabled car stereo, so I can stream the music from my ipod(iphone)

robotennis61 wrote:

ipod? what does anyone over the age of 30 do with their massive collection of CD's?

Rip them to mp3 and stick them on a hard drive, iPod, etc.

Now you've got digital files you can take anywhere, and a stack of useless plastic occupying space in your home.

What do we do with our fancy car stereos? Just chuck em and play our ipod?

Might want to think of the CDs as 'masters'

I usually burn 'car copies' of CDs anyway, to avoid scratching the bought ones to bits in the car

so the switch from car cd to car mp3, with memory sticks as cheap for a given capacity as they are now, is not such a big deal IMHO; what to do with the car stereo? leave it.... there used to be available from I think Crutchfield, an interface between our radios and iPods. Might want to contact them if it's an issue for you, it's not for me. The Riv's radio is already set up to run a CD changer, there is a CD changer interface on back of the radio. I have not tried it yet though, no need ATM.

Albertj

No. im jus sayin,why buy all kinds of fancy cd players for our car if the trend is moving away from cds? I might invest in a nice set of speakers and subs,and save my money for other....

robotennis61 wrote:

No. im jus sayin,why buy all kinds of fancy cd players for our car if the trend is moving away from cds? I might invest in a nice set of speakers and subs,and save my money for other....

I kind of agree - on the one hand why buy fancy CD player or any replacement when you can plug something in?

On the other hand, with the car in top shape, why not put in enjoyable audio to current standards?

I'll cross that bridge, I guess, when I reach it.

Next car (new car) would be a different decision.

. I still listen to cd's but most of the decks that people are buying have direct hookups now for ipods or other mp3 players. With older ones like in our cars you need special hookups to listen to your ipod and the quality is usually cheap.

I hear ya.My sons disgust @ my lack of advancment in things high tech,makes me wanna buy a nice system. I wont spend alot.just enough to update the Rivs syste,.Ill get rid of everything,and instal a better system for around $450 or so.I feel it will still be better than whats on there now.

http://www.crutchfield.com/g_300/Car-Receivers.html?tp=5684

That link is to all the car receivers Crutchfield has basically.
If you scroll down a little bit and look at the left column, find the one that says, "Type". That breaks it down pretty well.

Right now they have:
CD receivers - 109 models
Digital Media receivers - 19 models

Five years ago, there was no such thing as digital media receivers. There were all kinds of mp3 devices and some receivers with interfaces to control them but I think it was fairly recently that they brought out the receivers that are strictly digital media - doesn't even have a cd player. In five more years, the bias is going to move towards those DM receivers.

I still buy CD's but basically, they come out of the case once to get copied into my itunes library so I can have it on my computer and my ipod (mostly for the car) and then get put on a shelf and look pretty.

My stereo has a CD player and an IPOD hookup in the glovebox. I like the IPOD feature cause I can scroll and sort by Artist/Genre/Album etc through the radio. I hardly use it though, as all of my music is on CD's. One day I'll get around to putting it all on my IPOD

whats next? cerebral implants.!?

robotennis61 wrote:

whats next? cerebral implants.!?

Did I forget to post on cerebral implant developments in the science section?

The short answer is "yes." It involves bioluminescent neurons and tiny tiny leds.

Part of the reason CD players are still hanging on is because most - if not all - new CD head units will play data-recorded CD's, or disks burned full of MP3 tracks. So, instead of a music CD with 12-15 tracks, you can hold 100-200 songs on a single disk. This means your average CD player is actually a digital media player, because MP3 files are digital media on disk. It also means a lot more customized CD burns instead of the traditional music CDs sold at retail. The presence of CD players in the car audio market does not indicate strong sales for music CDs at all. CD heads are not really much different than computers in the sense that they both have CD drives - the disk is just a vehicle for importing the data.

Mostly the switch to MP3 is due to convenience and low cost associated with downloading MP3 tracks vs. purchasing or ordering physical music CDs. A music CD still costs $10-15 because of costs of manufacturing, packaging, shipping, and the final mark-up. Digital media is only recorded and processed, there is no cost for manufacture, no packaging, and no shipping cost. There is no retail mark-up, you are ordering direct-sale in a sense. This means you can often buy MP3s for a lower price, and its more convenient than going to the store to buy. It also means you can buy the individual tracks you want instead of the entire album. Playing MP3s is also easier; there's no CD to insert.

Movies are headed the same direction. Digital media like Netflicks, Hulu, Apple TV, and to some extent YouTube are replacing the hard media (DVDs, blue ray). I think blue ray is doomed within 5 years, so I'm not buying a player. I've already converted a portion of my DVD collection into digital media files (MP4) that can be played using future technology, which will be a little box w/ remote that contains your music/movie collection on a hard disk, or some other means.

Eventually, I think all media, digital or physical, will just go away. No more CDs, DVDs, MP3s, or MP4s in our possession. Instead, all the media will be stored in a "cloud", with customers subscribing to access the data. We can already see it happening with satellite radio, Netflicks, the internet, and especially music subscription services like Rhapsody. One day, we will not own our music and movies in the sense we do now. Instead we will pay for the opportunity to access an infinite library of media, on tap anywhere we go. This day is fast approaching, probably in the next 3-5 years.

AA wrote:

Digital media is only recorded and processed, there is no cost for manufacture, no packaging, and no shipping cost. There is no mark-up, you are ordering direct sale in a sense.

If your digital track off iTunes cost 99 cents, a cd cost $12-15, and there's 12-15 tracks on the cd - the cost to you is about the same and the profit to the middle man is greater.

Here's a couple things I found about Apple's piece of the pie -

Link

Link

With digital music we've traded the expense of manufacturing and distributing cds with the expense of Apple (or other electronic middle man). Digital is usually more convenient, but you don't get any physical product, which may or may not be an advantage depending on your point of view.

When CD's came out, the music cartel said the price would come down vs tapes because a cd is a simpler product to manufacture. Instead they decided to make it a premium product above tapes with a higher price. It looks like they're doing it again, why wouldn't they?

I want no part of "the cloud." Have you seen what Amazon is doing with the Kindle? If they decide a book is objectionable, they remotely delete it off everyones Kindles. Are you going to subscribe to cloud services knowing you don't actually own or control anything? A movie you like today might be gone tomorrow. You'll wake up and suddenly Greedo will be shooting first in all your Star Wars. You'll never be able to recover any of the investment you made in media by selling it. A system that puts a corporation in a position of centralized control is a bad, bad idea.

AA wrote:

I've already converted a portion of my DVD collection into digital media files (MP4) that can be played using future technology, which will be a little box w/ remote that contains your music/movie collection on a hard disk, or some other means.

haha, whats this "future" technology you are talking about?

I'm kinda with Jack the R there. Maybe it's partly pride, but I like having my own stuff. The cloud is convenient but it's not mine and not under my control so I'm not ready to put all my weight on it. If, god forbid, you don't have network access, you have nothing at all. Even when you download songs on itunes (which would be the cloud sending you data that you keep), all songs have restrictions which, again, reminisce to how they are only mostly yours. When I got my first ipod, I got like $20 in free downloads through the itunes store. I bought a couple albums and I was happy (even though they are compressed versions of the original format costing about the same money) until my hard drive crashed and that music I bought was history. There was no way to recover the music because I bought nothing but 40mb or so of data.

But unfortunately, you and AA are probably right. Fully functioning computers as we see them now will be specialized to single purposes and everyone's gonna have ipad-like interfaces that stream 24/7 from the cloud and what you own is nothing but a tiny thread of globally available broadband and the very few files we have will be stored in a gigantic hard drive in the middle of China... Or something like that.

Jack - I understand there is profit being made on digital media. I'm saying there are fewer middlemen and less expense now, and so less mark-up in the classic sense. There are also some savings passed on to the consumer in the way tracks are sold - individually, not as entire albums. We aren't forced to buy songs we don't want. What's a single CD go for nowadays? More than $.99 I'd guess? If the consumer wants to buy an entire album, it's typically 9.99 or less to download it from the web. There are plenty of .69 songs and <$8 albums on iTunes. There is also free digital media available.

Karma - it's already here if you count Apple TV. I think we'll see more of it in the future. I've used my iPod and/or Laptop for this purpose.

Turtle - I agree. I like having media, especially digital. I don't like the cloud. But I can see it shifting this way. It's no different than the idea of pay-per-view vs. VHS/DVD industry. Some people want to buy the media, others are fine renting to watch. NetFlicks is actually a lot like a cloud. It's a cloud I don't subscribe to, but millions of people do. Web-based email is a kind of cloud for communication. In the future, we'll see software accessible from the cloud, too. In the end, people don't pay for drill bits, they pay for holes. That's the way I think of it, anyway.

There's been some articles written about this very subject about video games and the direction they're heading. Originally, everything was tangible. Upgrades and new maps were able to be purchased via a store or as DLC. Now it's only DLC for the new add-ons (some still produce discs for those who can't download) but there's talk of 20 years or so, strictly all download. As a video game collector, that disappoints me.

There's also talk of Microsoft coming out with there own PPV television channel service which would eliminate alot of these garbage channels that I pay for regardless of whether I want them or not.

Good points. Also, I notice Apple's new Macbook Air has no CD/DVD slot. Software is downloaded, or an external CD drive is available. I can see other manufacturers eliminating the drives as connectivity becomes more and more available.

AA wrote:

Karma - it's already here if you count Apple TV. I think we'll see more of it in the future. I've used my iPod and/or Laptop for this purpose.

Microsoft has had Windows Media Center out for ages. Even bundled it with many laptops with the media center remote though any other will do. Just hook to your TV and away you go. With a TV tuner card it records, stores, and playbacks. Or just use it to point to a network share of converted media. Old old news. Simple TV like interface. Will accept any media center remote or your own. Or for an open source version use MythTV. Seriously, this is already mainstream. Its been around for ages. The world hasn't been waiting for Apple to make a product to do it. Lots of people also used to modify Xboxes and boot Windows Media Center on it. Makes a nice little Media box.

I know there have been several attempts, but I don't think it's mainstream yet, at least not with non-techie folks. Some of these products have failed because either the interface wasn't perfected, or the buying public wasn't ready for it. I think in a way the world has been waiting for the Apple products. Compare Rio MP3 player to iPod.

Windows media player has been a disaster on every computer I've dared to open it on. Takes forever to open, doesn't play most files, doesn't play videos(audio only for most of my files), doesn't connect with other computers or my Zune or Xbox, freezes after opening, and slows the rest of the computer down to about 40% of its normal speed while it's open.