Remember when you had to burn a new CD for every road trip?
By @jaredkk · Nostalgia
My kid asked why we don't just use Bluetooth and I had to explain the art of picking 20 perfect songs, timing them to fit 80 minutes, and the agony of a scratched CD skipping on your favorite track.
The full story
We were getting ready for a little family road trip and I was thinking about what music to play. My daughter (16) said, 'Just connect your phone,' like it was the most obvious thing in the world. It sent me down a memory lane spiral. I tried to explain to her the high-stakes game of creating a road trip mix CD in the early 2000s. You had a limited number of slots, maybe 20 songs if you were lucky. You had to make sure the total runtime didn't exceed the disc's capacity. You'd spend hours on LimeWire, hoping you were downloading the actual song and not a virus or a weird cover. Then you'd carefully arrange the tracklist, trying to create the perfect vibe. There was a real art to it. And the pain when you'd hit a bump and the CD would skip right on the best part of a song... kids today with their infinite skips and endless playlists will never know the struggle. Or the satisfaction of a perfectly burned disc.
How people voted
- Facts — 31% (35 votes)
- Depends — 35% (40 votes)
- No Way — 34% (38 votes)
Readers are split: “Depends” leads with 35% — 113 votes and 5 comments so far.
What people are saying
@ava — I don’t miss it at all. It was tedious and half the songs were low quality rips. I’ll take my Spotify playlist any day.
@tara — Absolutely agree. My kids will never understand the anxiety of choosing the perfect away message on AIM either.
@jakobok — And the other 60 minutes of the 80 minute CD was just static and the dial up tone.
@ivyish — My brother had a whole binder of burned CDs that was like his most prized possession. I think my mom finally threw it out a few years ago and he was genuinely sad lol
@vincemm — The real art was getting the Sharpie handwriting just right on the CD.
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