I have an old car so I burn CDs all the time. After streaming music on shuffle for awhile, I find it refreshing to listen to an album all the way through.

The last CD I burned happened to be legally obtained music off of Bandcamp (a mix of some Trocadero songs).

Though of course a lot of the time, the songs I burn come from other sources.

I maintain a collection of PCs stretching back to the late 90’s, so I still regularly burn CDs and DVDs of install media for the ones that can’t boot from USB. I should try to get PXE working on my network, but using physical media is fast and convenient for me. I also occasionally burn extra backups to BD-R media.

One of my professors in college demanded the class turn in a video production assignment as DVDs.

… This was in 2018

I was the only one in the class who even had a DVD burner (… Because I’d used it some years prior for PS2 games piracy and it was still in my storage box)

So the class bought a spindle of DVDs and I spent an afternoon burning everyone’s assignments to DVDs.

No idea what would have happened if they didn’t have a pet ultranerd like me. Like, did teach expect 'em to go and buy a USB DVD burner just for that?

Pretty sure it was MacOS install media. Probably a decade ago or so.

About a year ago, burned my family photo collection as yet another backup. Took a stack of DVD-R’s to write, but now I also have it in one more format!

It has been so long that recently I borrowed a portable DVD drive to extract auto diagnostic software, completely forgetting I have a laptop with a DVD drive.

I burnt a Windows 7 install disc about a month ago. A guy I work with found his old PC and wanted a fresh install so he could give it to someone.

I discovered Ventoy about a week ago…

Dvd (+/-)r for an Xbox 360. I don’t personally use the media often, but I do like blessing friends if they ask.

Probably some Linux iso before booting from USB became the default. I still remember the drama about the Ubuntu ISO outgrowing the 700MB of a CD.

About 6-7 years ago. I had a friend who still had some files on a 5-1/4 floppy. I kept an old Win95 PC specifically with a bunch of old drive types and a DVD burner, so I could rescue old files & move them to DVD. Sadly, that PC stopped booting about 2 years ago. I did consider trying to resurrect it, but neither of my current PCs even have a built-in DVD drive, so I think it’s safe to say that moving files to DVD isn’t moving the files forward enough anymore.

Last year a friend of mine was feeling romantic and wanted to give a physical audio disc to a crush. It’s not a mixtape but still …

It was in like 2006. A dvd rw full of mp3s to play on my portable dvd player that could decode all the useful codecs.

I was doing a bit of cleaning recently and came across a binder/collection of burned DVDs and PS2 games. The kids were young and did a lot of travel by car, which had DVD players strapped to the front head rests. I had a bunch of stuff ready like anime like Inuyasha, Ghibli, Avatar TLA, home videos, VCDs, etc. I even found my old bare bones SATA DVD player that was stripped out of the PC, and a new pack of blank DVDs too. I bought a USB enclosure and the darned thing still works perfectly on my current Linux machine.

Probably me trying to find the right Dreamcast game file a few weeks ago to burn to CD because I saw on a forum that you can supposedly play it without needing the maraca controllers. The burn worked, but the game didn’t, not even using the utopia disc I burned about a month ago. So, I probably messed up.

Haha I talked to my kids about burning CDs in the way of talking about old tech they’ve never encountered. They wanted a CD burner after that to try it out, so I found an external USB burner and a cheapo little boom box. They ended up downloading songs from our media server and some stuff from NewGrounds and burning a bunch of mix CDs. It was fun!