Comment by rhinoceraptor
1 year ago
I've been buying CDs as well as burning FLAC albums I have on blanks for basically this same reason, the limited choices and slightly higher switching costs is more enjoyable to me. And CDs still cost about as much as they ever did, which means they're much cheaper now with inflation.
I found vinyl CD labels [1] that I can print on my color laser printer that look pretty decent, it only takes a few minutes to burn the CD, find an image of a retail disc and put it in the label's Canva template.
My car is a 2017 and it still has a CD player, and I also found a fairly inexpensive portable player [2] that charges with USB-C, the anti-skip is pretty impressive now. I can put it in my pocket and walk around or clean the house and I've never had it skip, it will actually spin down the disc when it's read far enough ahead.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0C2V9D3FD
[2] https://klimtechs.com/products/klim-nomad-portable-cd-player...
If you want a really impressive portable optical disc format, consider looking into MiniDisc!
The players are even more impressive (I have one that plays something like 20 hours on a single AA battery), you can re-record the disks via USB using a WebUSB based webapp [1] these days for NetMD recorders, and the disks actually are almost infinitely re-recordable and much more stable than CD-Rs (which are write-once and only last a couple of years).
[1] https://stefano.brilli.me/webminidisc/