I had a portable CD player that could decode MP3s as well as read CD-RW discs. It had a 120 second anti-skip for regular CDs which it could load a whole MP3 file into with room to spare. Once it buffered the full MP3, it would spin down the disc which saved a TON of battery. Using it with a CD-RW, it was very much a poor man’s MiniDisc. Absolutely loved that thing.
Yeah, same. Also (and Alec touched on this too) … In a world of 128MB media players, having access to 700MB was freaking amazing.
Hell yes. Mine lived in my big hoodie pocket, hole poked through so I could run my headphone cable invisibly. Headphones lived in the hood when I wasn’t wearing them (basically never). I was the coolest 🤣
I had something similar except it had a DVD drive. Unfortunately it was not able to read dual-layer disks, which I only discovered when I was able to play just half the songs I had burned to a disk.
I found that the most impractical thing with these was that the user interface for selecting songs was typically “you have 200 songs and I’m gonna play them in sequence, if you want a particular song you must skip ahead until you hear it”. It worked for a 12-track audio CD, but felt like an underdeveloped toy feature when used with MP3:s.
That all depended on the player though. I had a car stereo that played MP3 CDs that was able to see folder and navigate folder structure on the CDs. It was great, if your music was already organized in folders, by album for example.
My desktop stereo system, however, only saw the individual .mp3 files and did like you described. It was much more of a pain, but I usually just played from a computer in winamp (rip).
I didn’t think this was that obscure. I made heaps of MP3 CDs full of video game music for my long drives to/from college. It was all both intuitive and easy for me - like the video shows you just copy the files on the disc and burn it.
What was really nice about these (and wasn’t mentioned by Alec) is that the smaller song size meant most or all of a song could be stored in the anti skip buffer.
deleted by creator
