Tag Archives: CDR

September and the inner demons of detritus

My desktop machine had died overnight. Just like that. No warning. This was not the downtime I had in mind for my holiday. Whilst we took our three furry monsters to the beach, another demon waited for me at home. This was as good a time as any to upgrade my 8-year-old machine. Has it really been that long? Continue reading

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The eighteen-year scratch

Every once in a while you happen across an item that launches an entire avalanche of thoughts and memories. One such artefact is the CD above. This is its story. Continue reading

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The death of recordable compact discs, part 4

Once upon a time there was a co-worker. He complained bitterly about how much he hated adhesive labels applied onto CD-Rs. This was over a decade ago. The vast majority of my self-burnt music CD-Rs have become near unplayable. And here follows my most recent adventure: ripping those bastards. Continue reading

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What is Cyberia?

“Cyberia” was the name of a long-running series of music mix compilation CDs conjured up in South Africa between DJ friend Rufus Blairgowrie and I. We even created an entire web page dedicated to the series. Continue reading

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About recordable disc inlay cards

As someone who created a substantial number of CD-R items over the years and spent inordinate amounts of time designing elaborate inserts for his personal audio collection, one trick I learnt is to add inlay cards to act as stiffeners behind ordinary 80g paper. Inlay cards became as regular material components of my CD production line as would colourful cases, and this collected stash of inlays turned up again a few weeks ago. Continue reading

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Death of a recordable compact disc

Accelerated-aging tests hadn’t gotten to the point that any printed reviews could be trusted, and so we all went and splashed out obscene sums of cash for a 2X burner (a whopping 300KB/s writing speed) and copied all our precious data over onto CD-Rs — media where only one thing was guaranteed: one blank disc out of a box of ten will become a coaster, regardless of brand or cost. Continue reading

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Cyberia 18: Dementia

“From ‘the ashes of primitive and crude prototypes obtained and sourced through outright extortion; in the midst of a near-lycanthropic lifestyle dominated by personal and professional chaos, social hecticism, emotional upheaval, and insomnia tending towards self-destruction and professional burnout, the … Continue reading

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Cyberia 16: Terra

Cyberia 16 gathered together what had not been gathered together and collected into a collection. It assembled rough and loose debris and spiced it up with new material as provided by our partner-in-crime and sometime collaborator and his connections on … Continue reading

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