Mysterious CD-R Disc
One of the jetpacks we were promised was the easy availability of CD-R drives during my college years. As the ability to cheaply preserve massive amounts dovetailed with the growing popularity of other consumer-friendly technology such as digital photography & music, it became beyond easy to accumulate a rich media collection.
The downside of CD-R discs is their impermanence. Even if preserved in textbook conditions, there was no guarantee they wouldn’t degrade beyond repair. So when I found a single CD-R disc inside my time capsule, I immediately began to worry.
It turns out reading the disc wasn’t an issue. However, the bigger challenge was finding something to play it on!
Over the decades, cloud storage became the best way to preserve ones digital assets, so much so that disc drives became extinct. Our household has eight different computing devices amongst four people, and luckily one of them — my long-since-retired MacBook Pro 2011 laptop — had a drive which could read the disc.
If you want to take a spin yourself, check out this Spotify playlist of what matched the CD-R:
I never said I had good taste in music, but this stuff makes me happy to hear once again.
The disc turned out to contain a handful of songs created by artists with UNT connections. And because they’re too cool for Spotify, these songs performed by by friends were never heard beyond college. So here they are below for your pleasure:
