The MP3 file format was always encumbered with patents, but as of 2017, the last patent finally expired. Although the format became synonymous with the digital music revolution that started in the …
Not to mention, even if you still had those CDs, they’d probably be dead by now.
Here’s the little story of my most precious MP3s:
Back in the 70s when I was a kid, I used to go to my grandparents’ house fairly regularly. I loved my grandpa and I used to spend hours with him. And he loved me too. So much so that he usually left a small cassette tape recorder going on his desk while we spent quality time together in his office.
He made hundreds of tapes containing nothing else but the sound of our voices while we were together, and sometimes my grandmother’s who would pop in the office to check on us from time to time. Hundreds of hours of ordinary life with my grandpa that he used to play back for his own enjoyment when he was alone.
I found the tapes in his attic after he died in 1995. Turns out, I had one of the very first CD burners on the market at that time - a huge, phenomenally expensive, VCR-sized SCSI 1x burner affair - and I also had a pretty solid PC for its time, all bought by black market money I made as a student on the new cellphone craze. I digitized all the tapes as WAV files, kept the best bits, made them into CD tracks and burned 2 audio CDs, one for my mom and one for me. I stored the tapes somewhere but I lost them. Probably in a move again.
Years later, I tried to play my CD. Sure enough, it didn’t play. I asked my mom to lend me hers, and… it didn’t play either. The tapes were gone, the CDs were gone… my grandpa was gone.
I had nothing to lose, so I tried reading both CDs using all the CDROM drives I had lying around. One finally managed to perilously latch on to something vaguely readable on my CD - skipping and grinding and pulling byte after byte very slowly. I left it running for 2 days and it finally managed to extract all the audio unscathed. The CD came back out totally scratched up and the CDROM drive never worked again, but I had saved the memory of my grandfather’s voice.
I encoded the audio tracks as 128 kpbs MP3s, and that’s my most precious set of MP3s: the voice of my grandfather talking to me from half a century ago.
Some of my CDs are from the 80’s and they still play fine. Pressed discs are much more reliable than burned discs.
The early CD-Rs were particularly unreliable. The burners were not great back then either.
Not to mention, even if you still had those CDs, they’d probably be dead by now.
Here’s the little story of my most precious MP3s:
Back in the 70s when I was a kid, I used to go to my grandparents’ house fairly regularly. I loved my grandpa and I used to spend hours with him. And he loved me too. So much so that he usually left a small cassette tape recorder going on his desk while we spent quality time together in his office.
He made hundreds of tapes containing nothing else but the sound of our voices while we were together, and sometimes my grandmother’s who would pop in the office to check on us from time to time. Hundreds of hours of ordinary life with my grandpa that he used to play back for his own enjoyment when he was alone.
I found the tapes in his attic after he died in 1995. Turns out, I had one of the very first CD burners on the market at that time - a huge, phenomenally expensive, VCR-sized SCSI 1x burner affair - and I also had a pretty solid PC for its time, all bought by black market money I made as a student on the new cellphone craze. I digitized all the tapes as WAV files, kept the best bits, made them into CD tracks and burned 2 audio CDs, one for my mom and one for me. I stored the tapes somewhere but I lost them. Probably in a move again.
Years later, I tried to play my CD. Sure enough, it didn’t play. I asked my mom to lend me hers, and… it didn’t play either. The tapes were gone, the CDs were gone… my grandpa was gone.
I had nothing to lose, so I tried reading both CDs using all the CDROM drives I had lying around. One finally managed to perilously latch on to something vaguely readable on my CD - skipping and grinding and pulling byte after byte very slowly. I left it running for 2 days and it finally managed to extract all the audio unscathed. The CD came back out totally scratched up and the CDROM drive never worked again, but I had saved the memory of my grandfather’s voice.
I encoded the audio tracks as 128 kpbs MP3s, and that’s my most precious set of MP3s: the voice of my grandfather talking to me from half a century ago.
Ouch, that’s my heartstrings you’re pulling at!
Some of my CDs are from the 80’s and they still play fine. Pressed discs are much more reliable than burned discs.
The early CD-Rs were particularly unreliable. The burners were not great back then either.