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.
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 🤣
Yeah, same. Also (and Alec touched on this too) … In a world of 128MB media players, having access to 700MB was freaking amazing.
Interchangeable 700MB, and dirt cheap too.
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).
My car still has one of these, and I just happened to use it yesterday when the battery on my Bluetooth adapter died. Yes, my car is old. Given the state of new cars today, I think I’m gonna keep it as long as I can.
My car is old enough to have a tape deck. Also old enough that I can fix pretty much anything that goes wrong, and unless I crash it, I fully intend to own it until I die. New cars are for chumps.
Same boat with you. I like tinkering and fixing my own stuff. I love a free weekend where I can spend some time replacing something on the car. Being locked out of my own car and forced to pay someone to do it for me seems ludicrous.
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.
My Civic played the same MP3-CDs I’d been using since high school.
The most blissful surprise of it all was that AAs lasted much longer on the portable CD player, when it was decoding MP3s. Any why not? The drive speed was a fraction of 1x and the antiskip lasted a lot longer.
Come to think of it I probably had compatible CDs ready-to-go when I bought that portable CD player, since I realized CD backups were so cheap I could just hand out data to all my friends. I became their hookup for Invader Zim and Stargate SG-1 episodes.
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