I Killed Our Need for CDs

Recently we had to replace the CD player in our van. Little did I know that by doing this, I would have killed out need for CDs.

Back in May of our last year teh CD player in our van died. For the kids it seemed to be the end of the world. They had to listen to the radio. Because we still had a tape player in the car, I started to take out my old college Mix Tapes. This is surprising because:

• We had a tape deck, our van year was the last year included tape decks
• My mix tapes still worked.

Somehow the kids survived this dark age. At Christmas we went and purchased a replcaement CD player. We made sure that it could read our MP3 CDs. So we kept an eye for the packaging saying reads MP3. We found one that looked good, it was also on sale, and proceeded to buy it.

Now I set someone aside over time for us to have it installed. Yesterday was the installation. Everything went by fine, it took less than an hour to install. We looked at it, saw it was working, looking good, except for one thing. No CD Player.

When we focused on looknig for a CD Player that would play MP3s, we focused on the MP3 part, not the CD part. So now we had a JVC Media Center in our van. It would stram Pandora from the phone, but what else? There was a USB slot.

Simply solution, take our MP3s, place them on a USB stick and there we go. All I had to do was burn our CDs to MP3 format. But wait, I could do that with our existing CDs, but what about new CDs?

This is where is I killed our Need for CDs. We have never been Apple people, so I have been using Amazon to buy our music. They offer them in DRM free MP3 files. From this point onwards, I would not need to buy a CD if I can get it from Amazon.

We were planning on buying the Frozen soundtrack for the kids. But when I started to think about this, I just walked out with a mini USB stick and bought only the songs we wanted from Amazon. Since then I have been working on adding to the USB Stick.

Looking back on this simple mistake, I have now seen three different media formats killed. Firs there was the short lived 8-Track player in my mom's old Mustang. Then cassettes were the rule for years. Slowly, in the 90's CDs starting to becom the de-facto with making mix tapes from the CDs. Now we hit where MP3s are the defacto, with CDs being the back up.

I have the equivlant of 30 CDs on the USB stick and have not even hit 25% of used space yet on it. It will be interesting to see what the final 'CD' count is on the USB stick.

Granted, chances are we will still purchase CDs, some of them might not be available on Amazon. Like the Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure Soundtrack. 

But now we have made a change in our habits. In one simple mistake, we have removed our need for CDs, thus another media format has bitten the dust.