Y'all remember Nero?

Only us nerds were doing it. Most people at the time I'm pretty sure had zero clue where bootlegs came from.

why didn't they just type that into a search engine and get the answer? ...or prompt it to an AI? or deliberately claim something wrong so someone would correct them?

Don’t forget to hold the CD and candle close to the speaker that’s playing the song. The closer you get, the higher the volume.

In high-school I used MagicISO to rip DVDs I rented, burned them, and sold them to classmates for $5.

It was a nuisance, with a high failure rate. Recording to tape was kind of fun. Optical not as much.

Remember when Netflix mailed DVDs? We would rip and make copies as soon as the mail was delivered, to try to get them back to the post office before 3pm. I think you could rent 3 or 4 disks at a time?

CD's? HA! When I was young we copied music with hammer and chisel on a stone disc. And that WAS the actual music!

CDs? I remember tapes.

Oh, that was an era.

One of the things I remember most is that cheap, defective or old drives can just fuck up the burning process and now you have a useless disk of plastic you can use as a bad freesbee. I never used the fastest burn option for that reason and still had like 1\40 failed burns 'cause my drive was all cheap, defective and old. With how rarely used they are rn, the price of such failure can grow pretty quick. Some of my relatives in the 00s used them as holiday decorations, wall-mounted them on a string as they are shiny and reflective. Although cringe, it's a little better than just throwing them in a dumpster, I guess.

Me explaining minidisc to a 20 something cashier at the pawn brokers.

I have no idea what these "CDs" folks are talking about are.

Excuse me while I pop in my 8-track

If you ever tried to burn way too many songs to a CD and got frustrated that it didn't work... it's time to stretch your back.

Yeah I'm not gonna lie this is me. I've burned iso's to CDs before but I really not get it. The cds I had could only be burned once and then got write protected and I didn't know how to undo to. I'm just gonna stick with my flash drives