Did I hit my head and wake up in 2002?

In 2008? CD-R, they're cheap and you aren't going to change the songs on the disc rather than just burn a new disc entirely.

In 2024? micro SDXC card in my phone.

CD-R has a much wider range of compatibility than CD-RW, so if you're looking to play music you'll probably want to go with CD-R.
And as for data, I wouldn't use a CD at all. Optical Media is absolute shit for data preservation and those early claims of lasting thousands of years are highly exaggerated, the backing on the CDs (and DVDs) lasts for a few decades at most.
If you insist on optical data backups you'll want archival grade discs that are made of glass instead of plastic and don't use glue on foil for the backing but even those are projected to last hundreds of years at most, and they're not cheap.

Won't lie, for a short period I had a Sony mini disk set up and I don't think I can ever appreciate other modern physical mediums of music as much.

And I can't explain why other than personal biast reasons, either.

I hate being GenZ I don't even know yet there's more than one type of CD

CD-RW is superior. It's more expensive but you could use it as many times as you need. So if you were for example a 13 year old who loved to distro hop Linux distributions.. it's very useful to be able to rewrite whatever you were doing.

The price difference is quickly made up for with the re-usability factor.

Although I don't understand why anyone would burn a CD anymore. You can buy flash drives with a ton of storage for really cheap these days. You have all sorts of cloud options. You can even rent your own VPS for less than $5 a month.

CD-R is written in an organic-dye, which deteriorates ( I've read the AZO chemistry is more enduring )

CD-RW is written in the crystallization of a metal layer.

CD-RW is permanent record, unless you heat them, or blank them, or overwrite/rewrite them: chemical-deterioration isn't a problem.

I learned this with backups, many many years ago.

I've no idea if DVD-RW discs also are recorded in a eutectic metal layer, but they've multiple record-layers ( 2? ), and I'm don't know how you can make a eutectic-metal layer that is transparent-enough to get through/past it to write the next layer,

so I've no idea how permanent DVD-RW's are.

I've lost data on the -R technology.

I've never lost data on the CD-RW technology.

In the thick of the cd era I tried to use RW and there wasn’t much rewritable about them. Any attempt to change the data, even to just add a new track, turned the disk into a coaster. Better to stick to CD-R and just burn a whole new disk each update.

How old is this post?

I always preferred R, the RW disks seemed less reliable.

I used CD-RW and re-wrote them a bit 25 years ago when the price of a CD-R was high, and a CD-RW cost like 2-3x of a CD-R, when the prices dropped it stopped making sense.

Last time I burned a CD/DVD was 10-15 years ago.

Burning CDs back in the day was a sort of art. You had to choose a write speed slow enough that your single-CPU computer could keep the buffer fed, but fast enough that you could get through the whole thing without dying of boredom or needing to use the bathroom, because walking across the room was enough to make the head skip and corrupt the data.

A failed burn with a CD-R turned a disc into a coaster. A CD-RW gave you several chances to get a good burn.

Whats up with the 2000s tech being so hot on Lemmy right now?

just curious why anyone would bother using a CD—its a digital medium so playing a CD vs just playing a .wav file off your computer or phone is literally the exact same audio quality (unless the cd is damaged and you get skipping which is not optimal…). You can connect speakers to a computer. it is literally the exact same thing. I understand people liking ANALOG media (vinyl or [for some unknown reason] tape cassette) but what is the point of using an out dated, flimsy and easily destructible DIGITAL storage?

Eh, overall R for the same reason most peeps have said, it was pretty much guaranteed compatibility.

But truth is, RW worked in anything I ever tried it in, and it was nice for having a couple of car discs full of mp3s that I could shift around some. Since I have a small case of those in the car that still work, I ain't mad at RW at all. It's been eight years for some of those, and over a decade for two.

I should probably order some and make a few new ones lol.

CD-R, rewriting has a higher chance to corrupt. And if you like your music you won’t need to overwrite it

I like CD-R, not for regular use but it occured to me that it's one of the only consumer accessable media formats that are actually write once. It's kind of neat to make a custom disk that is forever unchanged, pop it on years later and go through what was your sound X years back without having to worry about whatever service having pulled licences or modified lists.

CD-RW, of course. But only if the player supports it. I can update the music, that's why.

CD-R since it’s better for compatibility and I actually had issues with RW in the past where I could only burn a CD once and not be able to rewrite on it. I was burning them as audio CDs for car use at the time.

Nowadays? Rip ‘em and slap them onto an external drive (maybe even onto the cloud if you wanna go that far), then toss out or donate the CD so you don’t have to lug that shit around. I’d rather buy the vinyl if it’s an album I really like.

Back when I actually used CDs for music, I had a CD MP3 player made by Rio. I also had a copy of Roxio that could basically use a CD-RW almost like a thumb drive, you didn't have to worry about writing sessions or whatever, you could just add and remove files, so that's how I managed my MP3 player. I think I only used that one CD-RW.

For regular redbook audio discs I would just use CD-Rs.

CD-RW isn’t compatible on many basic CD players like CD-Rs are so unless you have a player that you know supports RW, it’s usually best to go with R.

I prefer Ogg/Vorbis for music.