Few things are as satisfying as cracking open a CD jewel case with a home-burned CD, complete with graphics and an insert. While I enjoy repairing old CD jewel boxes, re-printing materials, and fixing labels - making your own CD is just as, if not more, fun. Materials are very simple - my trusty printer, as mentioned in other projects on this site (from making your own manuals to printing books to making custom T-shirt transfers), is a workhorse; you'll definitely need one.
Blank CDs, of course, are essential. I try to buy new whenever possible, to encourage manufacturers to produce more. Without demand, the future for blank CDs will be like that of floppy disks, and the dodo. Jewel cases can be obtained, with slight difficulty, in bulk. In a worst-case scenario, visit your local thrift store, and find empty cases, and offer to buy them at a steep discount.
As always, I do enjoy making CDs from brand new materials, but I certainly never scoff at reusing or recycling older pieces. Keeping those out of the landfill is a hobby in itself. I try to produce little waste whenever possible, and consider this hobby to be relatively neutral, environment-wise.
The way I see it, the amount of electricity necessary to stream music, as well as the hardware and e-waste produced over the course of years has a worse effect than a single plastic CD and jewel case, which I will be sure to recycle.
CDs are great for a multitude of reasons, not the least being the ability to actually hold your data in your hand. I find them indispensible for archiving and preserving my writings, keeping important photo backups, and keeping an offline copy of this here site. Frankly, they're, in my opinion, the best form of portable data storage on earth.
A big disadvantage of hard drives, is their unreliable nature. SSDs, in spite of what anyone might say, are incredibly unstable compared to optical media - both are highly vulnerable to electromagnetic fields, and corruption. If preserved properly, in a dry and clean environment, CDs can easily last half a century or more - theoretically, with some of the more reliable disks, up to a millennium.
M-Disks for example, are an essential tool for any archivist.
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