WEBVTT Kind: captions Language: en 00:00:00.120 --> 00:00:02.585 There was a time, about 20 years ago, 00:00:02.585 --> 00:00:09.585 when a pretty widespread trend took hold in the world of stereo equipment which I don’t think many people noticed or took advantage of. 00:00:09.585 --> 00:00:18.880 This aggressively 2004 bookshelf system from  Panasonic features a five-disc CD changer, 00:00:18.880 --> 00:00:22.780 a couple of cassette decks, an auxiliary  input and of course a radio tuner - 00:00:22.780 --> 00:00:24.927 all typical stuff of the time. 00:00:24.927 --> 00:00:29.960 But it also proudly displays MP3 in quite big letters number. 00:00:30.509 --> 00:00:31.565 Why? 00:00:31.565 --> 00:00:37.167 And why is it just the text MP3  without any specific branding or context? 00:00:37.167 --> 00:00:44.263 Well, that MP3 mark looks weird and non-official  because it’s signifying a weird, non-official thing. 00:00:44.263 --> 00:00:49.300 It’s telling you this machine can play MP3 CDs. 00:00:49.300 --> 00:00:51.778 And this is by no means unique. 00:00:51.778 --> 00:00:56.773 Here's a CD Walkman which also has MP3 written on it without context 00:00:56.773 --> 00:00:59.773 (in addition to Atrac3Plus. Sidenote: 00:00:59.773 --> 00:01:02.771 Sony. Stop trying to make Atrac happen. 00:01:02.771 --> 00:01:04.383 It’s not going to happen!). 00:01:05.234 --> 00:01:15.469 And aside from personal stereos, lots of cars made from the mid-2000’s  up until they stopped putting CD players in them can also play MP3 CDs. 00:01:15.469 --> 00:01:21.572 Now, while I’m sure some of you know what I mean by MP3 CDs, I imagine a lot of you don’t. 00:01:21.572 --> 00:01:24.340 So… what is that? 00:01:24.340 --> 00:01:31.405 Well, and here’s why the whole concept is a little strange, despite being fairly widely supported for quite a while, 00:01:31.405 --> 00:01:38.549 MP3 CDs were closer to a hack than anything else,  and they weren’t actually a legitimate format. 00:01:38.549 --> 00:01:40.358 What do I mean by that? 00:01:40.358 --> 00:01:47.192 Well, I’ll get there but thanks to the relentless passage of time, I’m gonna have to explain some stuff for the youngin’s out there. 00:01:47.192 --> 00:01:52.069 Not that long ago, we used a thing called physical media. 00:01:52.069 --> 00:01:55.037 It was wild, when you wanted to play the latest hits 00:01:55.037 --> 00:01:58.000 you had to go to a store 00:01:58.000 --> 00:02:03.124 and buy music on cassette tapes or CDs! 00:02:03.124 --> 00:02:08.187 And then of course you had to use cassette players or CD players to listen to the music you’d just bought. 00:02:08.187 --> 00:02:10.776 It was a trying time, I don’t know how we made it. 00:02:10.776 --> 00:02:13.443 But then came the Internet. 00:02:13.443 --> 00:02:18.655 Suddenly there was a distribution system for music which didn’t require going to a store. 00:02:18.655 --> 00:02:24.211 Or potentially other things which normally need to happen to get access to music but I’ll just ignore that. 00:02:24.211 --> 00:02:26.197 There was a problem, though. 00:02:26.197 --> 00:02:32.425 High-fidelity digital audio burns through what was at the time an absurd amount of data. 00:02:32.425 --> 00:02:37.205 The Compact Disc, the standard digital audio format which hit the scene in 1982, 00:02:37.506 --> 00:02:44.764 stores two channels of raw 16 bit audio samples taken 44,100 times every second, 00:02:44.840 --> 00:02:51.018 which means the datastream coming from one of  these is about 1.5 million bits per second.   00:02:51.560 --> 00:02:58.279 These days that’s child’s play, but back when the internet involved modems shrieking at each other over a telephone line, 00:02:58.279 --> 00:03:03.294 downloading a whole CD’s worth of data took more than an entire day. 00:03:03.294 --> 00:03:05.475 Time wasn’t the only issue, though. 00:03:05.475 --> 00:03:08.757 There was also where to put all that data. 00:03:08.757 --> 00:03:12.666 It’s easy to forget because now CDs are almost useless - 00:03:12.666 --> 00:03:17.732 my camera’s created dozens of CDs worth of data since I started recording! 00:03:17.732 --> 00:03:23.456 But back in the mid-’90s, compact discs were still the king of data storage. 00:03:23.456 --> 00:03:29.554 The CD-ROM, the data equivalent to the compact disc digital audio format created for computers, 00:03:29.554 --> 00:03:35.496 could hold 650 megabytes of data, with later revisions pushing that to 700. 00:03:35.496 --> 00:03:42.472 And personal computers back then often had hard drives with smaller capacities than a single one of these. 00:03:42.472 --> 00:03:47.581 So it just wasn’t reasonable to download and store music from the internet. 00:03:47.581 --> 00:03:51.799 It would take way too long and eat up all your storage space. 00:03:51.799 --> 00:03:57.199 That was, of course, until compressed audio formats hit the scene. 00:03:57.199 --> 00:03:59.246 Much to the chagrin of audiophiles, 00:03:59.246 --> 00:04:09.011 some very smart engineers figured out that we don’t actually need a stream of raw audio samples to recreate music with decent fidelity. 00:04:09.011 --> 00:04:15.454 With quite a few tricks involving quite a lot of math and also insights into how we perceive sound, 00:04:15.454 --> 00:04:23.651 we found we could toss out a large majority of the data and still end up with more or less the same sounds as before. 00:04:23.651 --> 00:04:28.027 Now there’s a whole host of people who were involved in research to this end, 00:04:28.027 --> 00:04:35.085 and rather than try to go over even a fraction of who they were and what they discovered and when, I’m just going to quickly do this: 00:04:35.085 --> 00:04:35.585 [drum kick] 00:04:35.585 --> 00:04:36.975 [mouth noises] 00:04:37.276 --> 00:04:41.906 OK, now that you’ve absorbed all that, let’s talk about MP3s. 00:04:41.906 --> 00:04:46.142 Officially known by the mouthfuls MPEG-1 Audio Layer III 00:04:46.142 --> 00:04:48.644 (and also MPEG-2 Audio Layer III), 00:04:48.644 --> 00:04:57.561 MP3 first hit the scene in 1992 as a way to  efficiently encode audio alongside compressed digital video. 00:04:57.561 --> 00:05:07.366 While made with video in mind, since it was so data-frugal by the late ‘90s it had become the de facto standard format for compressed audio. 00:05:07.366 --> 00:05:11.438 And at the time, I imagine it felt like a miracle. 00:05:11.438 --> 00:05:19.172 MP3 could compress the datastream from audio CDs by a factor of 10 and still sound pretty good. 00:05:19.172 --> 00:05:22.755 Not as good as a CD, no, but pretty good. 00:05:22.755 --> 00:05:31.978 That massive compression ratio reduced the download times for a CD’s worth of music on dial-up internet from a day to a few hours 00:05:31.978 --> 00:05:33.844 (with a fast enough modem, anyway) 00:05:33.844 --> 00:05:38.826 and meant you could store at least a few albums on your PC without too much worry. 00:05:38.826 --> 00:05:43.017 But nobody really wanted to listen to their music on their desktop computers. 00:05:43.017 --> 00:05:49.009 They wanted something more portable, so just as we had portable cassette players and portable CD players, 00:05:49.009 --> 00:05:52.692 portable MP3 players started hitting the scene. 00:05:52.692 --> 00:05:58.730 These were devices with rewritable data storage onboard which you’d load up with MP3 files from your computer, 00:05:58.730 --> 00:06:04.989 and then they’d play those files from their onboard storage through a headphone jack so you could listen to them. 00:06:04.989 --> 00:06:12.204 The first MP3 players were clunky and difficult to sync with a PC, and they hardly had any storage capacity 00:06:12.204 --> 00:06:19.982 (early ones might only have 32 megabytes of flash storage onboard, enough for one highly-compressed album). 00:06:19.982 --> 00:06:27.548 But it was a pretty compelling idea to get music from the internet, load it onto a small little device, and take it with you. 00:06:27.548 --> 00:06:35.460 And as you probably already know, that idea was kicked into high gear by Apple with the release of the iPod in 2001. 00:06:35.960 --> 00:06:39.647 Now, the iPod (and, yes, this isn’t a first-gen iPod)... 00:06:39.647 --> 00:06:41.733 it’s not really relevant to this video, 00:06:41.733 --> 00:06:49.849 and much of its innovation wasn’t in the device itself but in iTunes and how Apple legitimized online music sales. 00:06:49.849 --> 00:06:57.304 But because of its success, the popularity of iTunes as a piece of music library management software was pretty huge, 00:06:57.304 --> 00:06:59.622 even among PC users. 00:06:59.622 --> 00:07:04.124 There were plenty of competing programs out there, some of which I used. 00:07:04.124 --> 00:07:07.987 I was rocking one of these Rio MP3 players for a while. 00:07:07.987 --> 00:07:13.701 But I did eventually get an iPod, and for the purposes of this video I’m gonna use iTunes. 00:07:13.701 --> 00:07:19.558 So now, let’s fire up a PC you might have been  using in 2004 and poke around in iTunes for a bit. 00:07:19.558 --> 00:07:22.355 [Windows XP startup music] 00:07:22.355 --> 00:07:28.463 While of course you could buy and download music through iTunes, personally I hardly ever did that. 00:07:28.463 --> 00:07:34.481 We had a ton of CDs in my family (plus new CDs were still widely available back then) 00:07:34.481 --> 00:07:42.499 and iTunes could rather quickly rip those CDs onto your hard drive and convert them into MP3s in the process. 00:07:42.499 --> 00:07:46.849 That is, if you went into the settings and changed it from AAC. 00:07:46.849 --> 00:07:54.117 Apple just loves being Apple and they decided to make that more obscure compressed audio format the default for iPods, 00:07:54.117 --> 00:08:03.613 though iPods could absolutely play MP3s and luckily I was smart enough back then to realize what a headache it would be to have my library encoded all appley. 00:08:04.636 --> 00:08:13.075 It’s not technically Apple-exclusive and it was slightly better than MP3 but it was nowhere near as widely supported so I just said no. 00:08:13.075 --> 00:08:18.219 Anyway, once set up you’d just load an audio CD in your computer's CD-ROM drive 00:08:18.219 --> 00:08:25.455 and iTunes would almost always correctly identify it and auto-populate all of the album, artist, and track information for you. 00:08:26.598 --> 00:08:32.000 This computer’s not doing that right now because it’s not connected to the internet as that would be a disaster. 00:08:32.000 --> 00:08:41.646 It needs the internet to populate that info because, fun fact, almost all audio CDs don’t actually have any sort of metadata on them 00:08:41.646 --> 00:08:46.551 so the way that auto-identification worked was by checking the disc’s table of contents 00:08:46.551 --> 00:08:52.848 to see how many tracks are on it as well as how long each of those tracks are against a database. 00:08:52.848 --> 00:09:01.696 Astonishingly few commercially-made CDs have the exact same combination of track lengths so that worked as a functional fingerprint, 00:09:01.696 --> 00:09:04.079 and on the rare case there were duplicates, 00:09:04.079 --> 00:09:09.156 iTunes (or whatever other software you were using) would just ask you to pick which one it was. 00:09:09.156 --> 00:09:10.254 Pretty neat. 00:09:10.254 --> 00:09:16.382 And once the import process was complete, well you had a copy of that music in your library. 00:09:16.382 --> 00:09:21.780 And this old version of iTunes really shows  just how remarkable MP3 compression was. 00:09:21.780 --> 00:09:27.405 This single audio CD had just shy of 500 megabytes of data on there, 00:09:27.405 --> 00:09:34.581 and since this PC only has a 20 gigabyte hard drive, if we had simply imported this as uncompressed WAV files 00:09:34.581 --> 00:09:39.824 we’d be committing quite a chunk of the hard drive space to just one CD. 00:09:39.824 --> 00:09:49.749 But the compressed MP3s that iTunes created from that CD audio data are taking up just 68 megabytes, roughly 1/7th the original amount 00:09:49.749 --> 00:09:56.086 and that is with the files encoded at a slightly better than average 192 kilobits per second. 00:09:56.086 --> 00:10:04.944 Now of course the next step for many people was to connect an iPod to the PC and have iTunes synchronize the data in your library with your iPod 00:10:04.944 --> 00:10:07.502 that way you had all this music with you on the go. 00:10:08.495 --> 00:10:11.588 But that wasn’t the only thing you could do. 00:10:11.829 --> 00:10:20.196 iTunes is just a piece of library software, and the actual MP3 files it creates are stored in folders on your PC. 00:10:20.196 --> 00:10:27.079 And if your PC had a CD burner, well now we’ve got some interesting possibilities. 00:10:27.079 --> 00:10:35.087 Because a blank CD-R could become an audio CD which would work in any CD player going back to 1982. 00:10:35.087 --> 00:10:39.374 But an audio CD can only hold 80 minutes of music. 00:10:39.374 --> 00:10:47.117 A CD-ROM, on the other hand, can hold 700 megabytes of data, and you can put whatever data you like on it. 00:10:47.117 --> 00:10:48.888 See where this is going? 00:10:48.888 --> 00:10:51.371 Let’s pop in a blank CD-R. 00:10:51.371 --> 00:10:55.567 The computer recognizes it as a blank disc and asks me what I want to do with it. 00:10:55.567 --> 00:10:59.240 I’ll say open an explorer window so I can copy files to it. 00:11:00.360 --> 00:11:05.029 And why don’t I copy some of those folders full of MP3s? 00:11:05.029 --> 00:11:13.150 Each one is around 60 or 70 megabytes so I could fit, gosh, 10 full albums of music on one CD. 00:11:13.150 --> 00:11:14.559 So let’s do it! 00:11:14.559 --> 00:11:15.860 And - woah. 00:11:15.860 --> 00:11:18.318 I forgot how clunky this was in XP. 00:11:18.318 --> 00:11:22.301 It doesn’t even show you how much data you’ve used up! You have to check that manually. 00:11:22.752 --> 00:11:25.147 Shoulda gotten a copy of Nero. 00:11:25.147 --> 00:11:33.416 Oh, that’s right, these files are full of higher-quality MP3s at higher bitrates so we can’t quite fit so many on one disc but anyway, 00:11:33.416 --> 00:11:36.307 once I’ve filled it up, we can burn it to the disc. 00:11:36.307 --> 00:11:40.719 After the computer generates the disc image we get this old goodness. 00:11:41.531 --> 00:11:45.308 [CD-ROM drive spinning up with quite the drone] 00:11:46.091 --> 00:11:48.829 [ope, it dipped in speed a bit] 00:11:50.000 --> 00:11:52.521 [it did it again!] 00:11:55.019 --> 00:11:56.630 [now it's settled into a steady speed] 00:11:56.630 --> 00:11:58.972 Ahh, I miss that. 00:11:58.972 --> 00:11:59.991 Kind of. 00:11:59.991 --> 00:12:05.615 Once it’s finished burning those files to the disc, we have a CD-ROM. 00:12:05.615 --> 00:12:12.207 A CD-ROM which just happens to contain a bunch of folders filled with MP3 files. 00:12:12.207 --> 00:12:16.240 Which means… we’ve just created an MP3 CD. 00:12:16.240 --> 00:12:19.731 Now, remember how I said this wasn’t a legit format? 00:12:19.731 --> 00:12:22.816 That’s because it’s not! 00:12:22.816 --> 00:12:27.264 This is just a CD which we asked the computer to write files to! 00:12:27.264 --> 00:12:38.029 It was written in a format: the disc follows the Yellow Book standard for CD-ROM as well as ISOs 9660 and/or 13490 for its file system. 00:12:38.029 --> 00:12:42.665 But the actual files we burned to it could have been anything at all! 00:12:42.665 --> 00:12:49.095 We could have put photos on here,  or text documents, executable programs, even video files. 00:12:49.095 --> 00:12:56.739 The only reason this is an MP3 CD is that we decided to fill it up with a bunch of MP3 files. 00:12:56.739 --> 00:13:03.763 Now, if I popped this disc into another computer, it would be able to see those files and copy them off the disc. 00:13:03.763 --> 00:13:07.891 But if I put this disc into a CD player, it won’t work. 00:13:07.960 --> 00:13:17.307 An ordinary CD player only plays discs that conform to the Red Book standard which defines the Compact Disc Digital Audio format. 00:13:17.307 --> 00:13:19.194 That’s what this logo is, 00:13:19.194 --> 00:13:29.608 it’s a compatibility mark for compact discs and the Digital Audio below indicates compatibility with the original audio CD format circa 1982. 00:13:29.608 --> 00:13:34.985 A computer can burn audio CDs, and iTunes offered an easy way to do that. 00:13:34.985 --> 00:13:38.969 But those only hold 80 minutes of music. 00:13:38.969 --> 00:13:45.918 This disc contains much more than that, but as far as what the disc actually is... 00:13:45.918 --> 00:13:48.456 well it’s just a bucket of random files. 00:13:48.456 --> 00:13:51.691 And CD players don’t know what to do with that. 00:13:51.691 --> 00:13:56.617 Some might try to play the disc, but it will either produce no sound at all or, 00:13:56.617 --> 00:13:59.521 if it’s old enough that it predates the CD-ROM, 00:13:59.760 --> 00:14:09.167 the onboard DAC might try and decode the bits it's reading, but their structure is nonsense and so it will just produce very unpleasant noises. 00:14:09.860 --> 00:14:16.803 [very unpleasant noises] 00:14:17.534 --> 00:14:22.191 But this stereo system doesn’t have an ordinary CD player. 00:14:22.191 --> 00:14:29.040 Yes, it features the Compact Disc Digital Audio compatibility mark  and it will play standard audio CDs just fine. 00:14:29.960 --> 00:14:33.872 But when we put in the disc we burned with those MP3 files… 00:14:33.872 --> 00:14:37.265 it can actually read it and see what’s on there! 00:14:37.265 --> 00:14:42.893 It takes a little while, but it understands the file system, shows the folder names on the display, 00:14:42.893 --> 00:14:47.744 lets me navigate between folders using the remote (though it refers to them as “albums”), 00:14:47.744 --> 00:14:52.261 and of course it can play the music while also displaying the track titles. 00:14:52.863 --> 00:14:58.397 That means that, in a way, this thing is actually an MP3 player - 00:14:58.397 --> 00:15:05.457 but rather than use a bit of flash storage or a tiny hard drive,  its data storage media is CD-ROM. 00:15:05.457 --> 00:15:11.468 And unless you’re the kind of nerd to read the manual, you very well might not have known it could do that! 00:15:11.468 --> 00:15:20.899 I had no idea this was a thing despite having this very stereo system in my bedroom until I got my first car. 00:15:20.899 --> 00:15:29.290 Its stereo also had MP3 inexplicably written on it which I would have just passed off as it bragging about having an auxiliary input jack. 00:15:29.651 --> 00:15:33.676 That was a big deal back when cassette adapters were the norm. 00:15:33.676 --> 00:15:38.812 But it didn’t just say MP3, it also said WMA. 00:15:38.812 --> 00:15:46.113 That stood for Windows Media Audio, another compressed audio format that Microsoft was trying desperately to make happen 00:15:46.113 --> 00:15:53.902 and once I realized it must be talking about some ability to play those file formats, I was confused. 00:15:53.902 --> 00:15:57.302 That car’s stereo didn't have a USB input or anything like that 00:15:57.302 --> 00:16:02.907 so I opened its owner’s manual to the section on the stereo to see what the heck it was talking about 00:16:02.907 --> 00:16:08.424 and that’s when and how I learned what MP3 CDs are. 00:16:08.424 --> 00:16:15.697 It had a nice explanation of how many folders could be on the disc, which bitrates the stereo supported, and how to navigate them 00:16:15.697 --> 00:16:18.067 and my mind was frickin blown! 00:16:18.067 --> 00:16:24.962 I had all this music on my computer for my iPod and it was all stored as MP3s in nice, neat little folders, 00:16:24.962 --> 00:16:32.151 and you’re telling me that if I just burned some of those files to a CD my car could read the disc and play them? 00:16:32.151 --> 00:16:33.808 That was wild! 00:16:33.808 --> 00:16:36.210 I mean, consider the iPod Shuffle. 00:16:36.210 --> 00:16:45.045 That thing hit the scene in 2005 with only 512 megabytes of storage, and a single CD-R could hold more data than that. 00:16:45.045 --> 00:16:50.060 So just burning one MP3 CD and keeping it in my car’s stereo 00:16:50.060 --> 00:16:56.228 would be like having a permanent iPod shuffle just for my car which I only spent $0.50 on. 00:16:56.228 --> 00:17:01.858 And then, I could make a whole new iPod’s worth of playlists with another $0.50 blank CD. 00:17:01.858 --> 00:17:04.359 I made a lot of these discs. 00:17:04.359 --> 00:17:11.069 I soon figured out that you could add numbers to the beginning of the folder names which would enforce playback in a particular order. 00:17:11.069 --> 00:17:16.028 This one here has 10 different They Might Be Giants albums arranged chronologically. 00:17:16.028 --> 00:17:18.853 And I mean, this was awesome! 00:17:18.853 --> 00:17:25.498 I loved being able to keep just a few CDs in the car which stored hours and hours of my music, 00:17:25.498 --> 00:17:31.895 especially since I could use the car’s controls  and not mess with my tiny iPod while driving. 00:17:31.895 --> 00:17:35.567 Remember when physical controls in cars were considered a good thing? 00:17:35.567 --> 00:17:37.018 I remember. 00:17:37.018 --> 00:17:40.726 And, uh, for those concerned audiophiles out there? 00:17:40.726 --> 00:17:46.174 Since it was for playing in a Honda Civic it’s not like the audio fidelity was that critical anyway. 00:17:46.174 --> 00:17:53.721 I honestly had no idea that this was such a widely-supported feature - I thought it was just a neat thing my car could do. 00:17:53.721 --> 00:18:00.891 It was at least a year into having that car that I finally noticed the MP3 mark on my bedroom stereo. 00:18:00.891 --> 00:18:04.469 Intrigued, I popped in one of the discs I made for the car, 00:18:04.469 --> 00:18:08.665 watched the alphanumeric display come to life and start scrolling the track info, 00:18:08.665 --> 00:18:13.890 and let out the most flabbergasted “would ya look at that” I could muster. 00:18:13.890 --> 00:18:19.803 Just the fact that it could do this is impressive enough, but this isn’t just a single-disc CD player, remember, 00:18:19.803 --> 00:18:22.136 it’s a 5-disc changer. 00:18:22.136 --> 00:18:30.475 It’s got a slightly terrifying design where there’s a single disc tray and adding another disc involves a little dance where it holds each disc in an internal stack 00:18:30.475 --> 00:18:35.138 and then spits the empty tray back out so it looks like it keeps eating your CDs but anyway 00:18:35.138 --> 00:18:42.090 with 5 CDs at its disposal this thing kinda sorta has 3.5 gigabytes of storage capacity. 00:18:42.090 --> 00:18:47.920 That’s within spitting distance of the iPod Mini which came out the same year as this stereo. 00:18:47.920 --> 00:18:55.777 So I mean if you wanted to you could mirror almost your entire iPod library with just a few dollars worth of blank CDs. 00:18:55.777 --> 00:19:03.857 Obviously the interface here is less than ideal and things  like shuffling your entire library doesn’t work when it’s across five discs but I mean… 00:19:03.857 --> 00:19:05.435 it’s still impressive. 00:19:05.435 --> 00:19:08.577 And this will shuffle through a single disc if you like. 00:19:08.577 --> 00:19:11.610 It even does a little animation when it picks the next track. 00:19:11.610 --> 00:19:14.587 Which brings me back to this CD Walkman. 00:19:14.587 --> 00:19:21.901 It, too, can read MP3 CDs and it features dedicated folder buttons for navigating around the disc. 00:19:21.901 --> 00:19:30.963 It takes it a while to figure out what exactly it’s reading when you first pop in a disc, but once it’s got its head on straight you can quite easily move from folder to folder, 00:19:30.963 --> 00:19:36.266 and so long as you don’t open it up between play sessions it will resume quickly from sleep. 00:19:36.266 --> 00:19:40.438 And as a bonus, because MP3 files are so small, 00:19:40.438 --> 00:19:47.403 it only has to spin the disc for a few seconds at a time roughly once a minute to fill up its internal data buffer, 00:19:47.403 --> 00:19:49.870 which helps its battery life a lot. 00:19:49.870 --> 00:19:57.749 Honestly, if I knew about MP3 CDs when I first got my MP3 player... I might have been tempted by one of these instead. 00:19:57.840 --> 00:20:02.546 But on that note - it’s time to step back in time a little farther. 00:20:02.546 --> 00:20:09.305 So far I've been talking about this as a mid-2000’s phenomenon - and I think that’s broadly correct. 00:20:09.305 --> 00:20:14.570 But MP3 CD players started showing up in the late ‘90s. 00:20:14.570 --> 00:20:17.247 Well, the very late ‘90s - 00:20:17.247 --> 00:20:26.066 this Wired article from September 1999 talks about what is claimed to be the first portable CD player which can read MP3 files. 00:20:26.066 --> 00:20:31.656 In fact it even says it’s “the first MP3 hardware device that requires no computer or Internet connection” 00:20:31.656 --> 00:20:35.031 though… that’s something of a stretch. 00:20:35.031 --> 00:20:41.030 Anyway, I would argue that those early devices just… didn’t get noticed. 00:20:41.030 --> 00:20:48.842 Only turbo-nerd tech enthusiasts who knew what MP3s were would have their eyes on a product like this. 00:20:48.842 --> 00:20:58.310 Portable CD players were quite common by 1999 but having a CD burner in your PC was still fairly exotic. 00:20:58.310 --> 00:21:06.488 And if you had one you were most likely using it to make data backups, perhaps copies of… stuff for your friends, 00:21:06.488 --> 00:21:11.774 or standard audio CDs to play in the car or the Discman you already owned. 00:21:11.774 --> 00:21:22.756 Seeking out a standalone CD player capable of reading MP3 files was solidly in tech enthusiast, early adopter territory back in 1999. 00:21:22.756 --> 00:21:28.113 And then, well, the idea quickly became yesterday’s jam. 00:21:28.113 --> 00:21:37.012 By the time MP3s started hitting the mainstream, dedicated MP3 players you synced with your PC were the hot item. 00:21:37.012 --> 00:21:43.124 They seemed like the natural progression of things,  and portable CD players were old hat. 00:21:43.124 --> 00:21:49.608 I was a kid back then and yeah I definitely felt like the uncool kid rocking my black and neon green CD Walkman - 00:21:49.608 --> 00:21:50.760 that one - 00:21:50.760 --> 00:21:54.429 when everybody else had MP3 players or iPods. 00:21:54.429 --> 00:21:57.245 That was until I pestered my parents into getting me this. 00:21:57.245 --> 00:22:02.639 Peer pressure’s a nasty thing, uh, so let me just walk back what I said a little while ago 00:22:02.639 --> 00:22:09.791 because even if I had known about MP3 CDs I probably would have felt a little awkward using them. 00:22:09.791 --> 00:22:15.373 And I probably would have gotten into weird arguments defending them so thank god I dodged that bullet. 00:22:15.373 --> 00:22:19.101 But now I’m an adult, at least according to my driver’s license, 00:22:19.101 --> 00:22:22.763 so I don’t get into weird arguments defending my tech choices anymore. 00:22:22.763 --> 00:22:23.561 Nope. 00:22:23.561 --> 00:22:24.703 Definitely not. 00:22:24.703 --> 00:22:26.698 Anyway, as time went on, 00:22:26.698 --> 00:22:31.033 MP3s as well as CD burning became quite common. 00:22:31.033 --> 00:22:36.604 And before long, the chipsets required to decode MP3 files for playback 00:22:36.604 --> 00:22:43.622 got cheap enough that it was fairly trivial for manufacturers to include that functionality in a CD player. 00:22:43.622 --> 00:22:49.340 If it’s gonna play audio CDs, it’s gonna have all the hardware necessary to read a CD-ROM, 00:22:49.340 --> 00:22:56.357 so to play MP3 CDs required little more than a few tweaks to the firmware and an extra chip or two. 00:22:56.357 --> 00:23:01.642 But that added functionality got, as far as I can tell, very little fanfare. 00:23:01.642 --> 00:23:06.113 So unless you knew to look for it, it largely flew under the radar. 00:23:06.113 --> 00:23:13.022 My personal theory is that most manufacturers were a little afraid of touting a feature which could make record labels angry. 00:23:13.022 --> 00:23:15.362 But that’s just speculation. 00:23:15.362 --> 00:23:24.190 And to be honest, I really have no idea how common  support for MP3 CD playback actually was in the grand scheme. 00:23:24.190 --> 00:23:32.869 DVD players were extremely likely to be able to play them - as a rule they have MP3 decoding hardware since they play MPEG2 video, 00:23:32.869 --> 00:23:38.074 so all they needed was some sort of UI to manage navigating the disc. 00:23:38.074 --> 00:23:44.058 As a matter of fact if you didn’t know this already, DVD players will read all sorts of files. 00:23:44.058 --> 00:23:52.597 I remember popping in a CD with the JPEGs written to it from a vacation and the DVD player produced an instant slideshow on the TV. 00:23:52.597 --> 00:23:59.973 Oh, and if you burn a bunch of MP3 files to a blank DVD-R, well then you’ve made an MP3 DVD! 00:23:59.973 --> 00:24:08.102 And a fair number of cars have DVD-ROM drives for updating navigation maps and some of them will also play back MP3s so 00:24:08.102 --> 00:24:12.902 you might be able to make a nearly 5 gigabyte store of music for your car. 00:24:12.902 --> 00:24:15.498 If you still have an optical drive hanging around. 00:24:15.498 --> 00:24:22.926 But as far as how common this feature was in plain ol’  stereo systems… it’s almost impossible to know. 00:24:23.000 --> 00:24:28.000 If you go looking for stereo systems on  eBay from around this time period or later,   00:24:28.000 --> 00:24:32.538 you’ll find a lot of confusing and conflicting things. 00:24:32.538 --> 00:24:43.702 Once CD burning had gone mainstream, a lot of manufacturers started putting CD-R/RW compatible marks on their stuff but that can be misleading. 00:24:43.702 --> 00:24:46.863 Mainly that was important for rewritable discs: 00:24:46.863 --> 00:24:54.135 the signal the laser gets back from a CD-RW is very weak compared to a standard CD or CD-R, 00:24:54.135 --> 00:25:01.237 so most CD players can’t read a CD-RW disc, even if what’s on there is standard audio data. 00:25:01.237 --> 00:25:11.342 If a machine says it’s CD-RW compatible, that just means its  laser can read those discs without an issue, but it doesn't mean it will play MP3 files. 00:25:11.342 --> 00:25:16.592 And it took me almost no time at all to find a Sony unit for sale, new in box, 00:25:16.592 --> 00:25:22.097 which makes no mention of the fact that it can play back MP3 files written to a disc. 00:25:22.097 --> 00:25:25.153 I had to look in its manual to find out that it could. 00:25:25.153 --> 00:25:30.718 And that’s honestly what I find so weird  and fascinating about this whole thing. 00:25:30.718 --> 00:25:34.371 To the designers and engineers of stereo equipment back then, 00:25:34.371 --> 00:25:41.279 adding MP3 playback functionality was a pretty big no-brainer if you’re gonna have a CD drive at your disposal. 00:25:41.279 --> 00:25:47.549 But as far as I can tell, not a lot of people knew about that functionality. 00:25:47.549 --> 00:25:50.453 In hindsight I don’t think that’s all that surprising: 00:25:50.453 --> 00:25:57.036 we tend to compartmentalize things in our minds and CDs and CD players are one thing, 00:25:57.036 --> 00:26:00.418 MP3s and MP3 players are another, 00:26:00.418 --> 00:26:08.723 and a CD-ROM full of MP3s is in a weird grey area between them which doesn’t parse as anything useful, 00:26:08.723 --> 00:26:11.903 unless you wanted to share some MP3 files around. 00:26:11.903 --> 00:26:18.863 And that’s definitely where my brain was until my car forced my curiosity to finally kick in and I read the freaking manual. 00:26:18.863 --> 00:26:28.385 Now, those of you who burned CDs using iTunes back in the day might remember that MP3 CDs were an option it gave you in the settings. 00:26:28.385 --> 00:26:33.755 I definitely didn’t notice that! Or if I did I didn’t know what it was trying to say. 00:26:34.236 --> 00:26:42.223 However, quite unfortunately when I tested this function the discs it created didn’t have any folder structure. 00:26:42.223 --> 00:26:51.043 It would just take the playlist and burn it to the disc in a single folder with each individual song given a number prefix to enforce playback order, 00:26:51.043 --> 00:26:57.769 so the folder buttons here (as well as on the stereo and in the car) would be completely useless. 00:26:57.769 --> 00:27:01.520 The “data CD” option does the same thing. 00:27:01.520 --> 00:27:04.860 That might have changed in later versions of iTunes, 00:27:04.860 --> 00:27:12.380 I’m honestly not sure and also am honestly not willing to find out because sifting through iTunes version history is a pain. 00:27:12.380 --> 00:27:20.833 Additionally, if the files weren’t already MP3s, iTunes would not convert them on the fly and as far as I can tell that never changed 00:27:20.833 --> 00:27:26.600 (which, given the whole DRM situation with stuff  you could buy on iTunes makes sense). 00:27:26.600 --> 00:27:31.959 Regardless if you knew your way around Windows it  was much easier to just create these manually 00:27:31.959 --> 00:27:35.369 and that would give you more control on the player end. 00:27:35.369 --> 00:27:38.933 I imagine it was the same situation for Mac OS and Linux, too. 00:27:38.933 --> 00:27:43.399 And as a treat, I will spare you the joke I wrote about audio drivers. 00:27:43.399 --> 00:27:45.528 See? I’m learning! 00:27:45.528 --> 00:27:51.864 But that’s an excellent segue into some of the problems with MP3 CDs. 00:27:51.864 --> 00:27:58.511 Because it was never a real format, there was never a standard way to structure the data on the disc. 00:27:59.280 --> 00:28:06.000 It seems as though folders as an analog to albums  was generally the most widely-supported structure,   00:28:06.000 --> 00:28:13.961 but compatibility issues with certain hardware devices could occur if the data wasn’t arranged on the disc in a compatible way. 00:28:13.961 --> 00:28:18.853 So a theoretical machine might be able to read the files, but it might play in the wrong order. 00:28:18.853 --> 00:28:24.520 Or there could be files in subfolders which some  particular players won’t be able to see. 00:28:24.520 --> 00:28:30.365 To be honest though… I think that’s the only major flaw with the quasi-format. 00:28:30.365 --> 00:28:36.609 One smaller flaw was that on the player end, gapless playback was unfortunately quite rare 00:28:36.609 --> 00:28:45.040 (this stereo produces a full two seconds of blank between every  song which on some albums is very annoying)   00:28:45.040 --> 00:28:48.728 but that’s more of an implementation issue than anything else. 00:28:48.728 --> 00:28:56.711 I’ve also noticed that the Walkman, on occasion, waits just a fraction of a second too long to spin the disc up between reads 00:28:56.711 --> 00:29:00.414 so there are sometimes tiny little blips of audio dropouts. 00:29:00.414 --> 00:29:06.800 Though that could very well be an issue with this thing’s age or could even be something as simple as weak batteries. 00:29:06.800 --> 00:29:11.480 You might wonder, were there ever any commercially-made MP3 CDs? 00:29:11.480 --> 00:29:14.385 And the answer to that is yes, actually! 00:29:14.385 --> 00:29:20.828 Audiobooks took up the mantle pretty quickly because, well to be honest, they were a perfect fit. 00:29:20.828 --> 00:29:27.838 If a book needed 10 hours of spoken words, then it would need at least 8 audio CDs. 00:29:27.838 --> 00:29:32.451 But you could easily cram all that onto a single MP3 CD, 00:29:32.451 --> 00:29:38.033 especially because it would be in mono and it’s not like you need a ton and bandwidth for speech. 00:29:38.033 --> 00:29:42.357 [audio quality degrades slightly] Here’s what 64 kpbs mono MP3 sounds like, 00:29:42.357 --> 00:29:47.820 and while you can definitely tell there’s some compression going on, it’s perfectly fine for speech. 00:29:47.820 --> 00:29:53.240 Plus a single CD will hold just over 24 hours of this quality audio. 00:29:53.240 --> 00:29:57.723 So even very lengthy titles could fit on a single disc. 00:29:57.723 --> 00:30:03.816 While many people would just pop those CDs  into their computer and then copy the files onto an MP3 player, 00:30:03.816 --> 00:30:08.471 if you had a CD player like this or that - it could just play them. 00:30:08.471 --> 00:30:14.640 And there were also music compilations  that were sold from time to time on MP3 CDs. 00:30:14.640 --> 00:30:20.288 My perusal of eBay suggests that this was  much more common in markets outside the US, 00:30:20.288 --> 00:30:24.470 and also some of them don’t seem that… legit. 00:30:24.470 --> 00:30:34.090 Uh, but that Wired article about the first portable MP3-compatible CD player suggests that there were a few MP3 CDs being sold at the time. 00:30:34.090 --> 00:30:38.828 Though to be honest I am also a bit skeptical of the legitimacy of those. 00:30:38.828 --> 00:30:44.965 I’m pretty sure that aside from audiobooks, commercially-sold MP3 CDs were quite rare. 00:30:45.296 --> 00:30:49.715 Because, well, unless you know what that is, it’s going to be confusing 00:30:49.715 --> 00:30:55.697 and potentially require a computer to play those files or move them onto an MP3 player. 00:30:56.028 --> 00:30:58.251 Not the most user-friendly experience. 00:30:58.920 --> 00:31:08.475 In a way, the MP3 CD exists in something of a liminal space which uncovers some of our quirks in how we imagine media. 00:31:08.475 --> 00:31:12.776 A standard CD is really just a music-delivery mechanism. 00:31:12.776 --> 00:31:16.853 It’s less of an object in itself and more of a vessel. 00:31:16.853 --> 00:31:27.161 So using an already tweaked version of the same vessel to  deliver music but in a new way is both obvious and yet confusing. 00:31:27.161 --> 00:31:36.019 It blurs the line between CD-ROM and CD-audio because, well, it’s both and yet also neither! 00:31:36.019 --> 00:31:38.663 And I find that fascinating. 00:31:38.663 --> 00:31:41.052 I know I’m a weird nerd, but still! 00:31:41.052 --> 00:31:47.272 I find myself wondering what the world might have  looked like if this idea had gotten more traction. 00:31:47.272 --> 00:31:55.906 Perhaps those tiny portable CD players meant to  play the 8cm mini-CDs might have reappeared and come into vogue. 00:31:55.906 --> 00:32:02.328 The 210 megabytes you can squeeze on one of those little guys would actually be quite useful for MP3s. 00:32:02.328 --> 00:32:09.468 And if those theoretical devices could read DVD media, you’d have 1.4 gigabyte discs at your disposal. 00:32:09.468 --> 00:32:11.730 You could even make them double-sided. 00:32:11.730 --> 00:32:16.653 And speaking of DVDs, dual-layer discs held some 8.5 gigabytes - 00:32:16.653 --> 00:32:20.698 with modern video compression, that’s actually quite a lot of space. 00:32:20.698 --> 00:32:27.775 Makes me wonder if we could have had an h.264 DVD format holding 1080P video. 00:32:27.775 --> 00:32:30.200 It’d make the cinephiles pretty mad, though. 00:32:30.200 --> 00:32:34.725 Oh, and to close out this video - if you haven’t already been made aware of this, 00:32:34.725 --> 00:32:40.884 you should know that writable optical media  can degrade a lot faster than you might have thought. 00:32:40.884 --> 00:32:49.171 So if you have a bunch of burned discs lying around and any of them are important to you you should back them up as soon as possible. 00:32:49.171 --> 00:32:53.234 Some may have already degraded to the point of not being readable. 00:32:53.234 --> 00:32:59.505 A lot of that depends on the storage conditions, so they might be fine but they won’t last forever. 00:32:59.505 --> 00:33:05.627 So if you’ve got a PC with a working optical drive, you might want to set aside some time for a project day. 00:33:06.560 --> 00:33:08.715 I’m overdue for that myself. 00:33:09.467 --> 00:33:11.773 Alrighty, well, that’s all, folks! 00:33:12.616 --> 00:33:15.289 ♫ compressedly smooth jazz ♫ 00:33:16.072 --> 00:33:19.576 Here’s a CD walkman from… what? 00:33:19.576 --> 00:33:23.622 As a way to enficiently - Eniciently… ecode! 00:33:23.622 --> 00:33:28.385 ...and to realize what a headache it would be to  have my library encolded all… ahh, 00:33:28.385 --> 00:33:30.134 encoded! 00:33:30.134 --> 00:33:32.362 …should probably open iTunes, huh? 00:33:33.656 --> 00:33:35.769 Ah this is not, this is- 00:33:40.584 --> 00:33:41.587 Take your time. 00:33:41.587 --> 00:33:44.133 Uh, once it’s finished burning the disc to the files... 00:33:44.133 --> 00:33:45.249 Ahhh haha! 00:33:45.249 --> 00:33:48.729 Now if I popped this disc into another comPUTer. 00:33:49.873 --> 00:33:51.167 What the heck hapened there? 00:33:51.167 --> 00:33:55.730 I’ve also noticed that on the walkman, on occasion it wai - eh. 00:33:56.723 --> 00:33:59.811 So, using an already twhweaked --- 00:33:59.811 --> 00:34:00.756 [whistles] 00:34:01.715 --> 00:34:04.068 So, how many of you knew about this already? 00:34:04.068 --> 00:34:08.434 I think the people who regularly watch this channel are far more likely than average to have run across this before, 00:34:08.434 --> 00:34:12.309 but back when I was a youngin' the people I knew who were burning mix CDs were making standard audio CDs. 00:34:12.309 --> 00:34:16.853 I really never ran across this until the end of high school, maybe college! 00:34:16.853 --> 00:34:18.694 Anyway, beep boop.