Mmm commoditization

[hyuga]

My DVD-RW drive died the other day, probably as a result of a power surge we had while I was watching a DVD on it. I got that drive almost three years ago. It cost about $150 and was one of the first affordable drives to support burning of dual-layer media.

So I just ordered a new one off newegg for $35 that has virtually the same specs, if not

Comments

[loopers]

I'm actually looking to buy a new optical drive myself... it's the only part of my new computer I haven't ordered yet. I'm waiting for a SATA drive that's confirmed to be good for ripping to lossless. It turns out not all drives are created equal for audio ripping...

[hyuga]

Interesting...I wonder why that would be. Does it have something to do with error correction?

I still just rip to mp3. Why? Best player support. There are starting to be some good hand held players that support things like ogg and even flac, but my car stereo only supports mp3 *sigh*

[loopers]

Turns out there are a bunch of little issues... this page documents some of them.

Lately I've come into the possession of quite some hard drive space, so I've switched to downloading/ripping FLAC when I can. I don't have a portable at the moment, but if I ever have time I kinda want to build a car computer that syncs over my wireless network when I pull into the driveway.

Even if your player only supports MP3s, there's a FUSE filesystem that automatically transcodes your FLAC files into MP3 that could be kinda handy.

[hyuga]

Mmm... a car computer. That's yet another one of those "one day..." projects. Though I don't think I could get wireless syncing working in my situation, at least not without some large antennas.