The CD, 40 today, is almost dead
NewsThe first compact discs went into production at the Polygram factory on Emil-Berliner-Strasse in Hanover on August 17, 1982.
The first to roll off the production line was an Abba album.
For quarter of a century, CDs were the main carrier of recorded music.
Then the internet took over and consumers took to streaming their music from websites.
Motor manufacturers brought out new cars without a dashboard player. Record stores shut.
Today, the CD is on its last legs.
They started to talk about the decline of CDs already back in 1997, 1998… Considering all that, the format persisted for quite long.
I didn’t care that much about the cars. For me it was a shocker when computers, laptops and Mac suddenly no longer had a CD station.
(Still waiting for that moment when Ikea stops producing CD shelves…)
I still have some 8 inch floppy discs.
I actually looked in IKEA last week for CD shelves. Only one model now, a tall thin bookshelf, not particularly capacious and would require a dozen thereof for a half-decent CD collection.
Cds have actually lasted a very long time in recording history. Effectively, acoustic records only 20+ years before electrical recording. Stereo records came in about 30 years later, LPs a few years after that. Cassette tapes were very popular for a time in the 70s and 80s but happily lived alongside the Long Playing Record, the latter generally sounding better and was easier to find favourite tracks than cassettes which needed to be rewound or fast forwarded blindly. The emergence of the cd in the 80s quickly spelt doom for the record as its sound was arguably superior and incredibly easy to programme and find tracks. It could also be played in a car and in a portable capacity, condemning the cassette to oblivion. Despite streaming emerging in the 90s, cds size, sound and versatility kept them relevant. It was the smartphone that allowed streaming to be taken up enmasse with great sound possible too. Cds began to decline then but unexpectedly have held on longer than any other single recording format. As the cd users age (the elderly being most resistant to streaming services) and pass on, the cd will likely become extinct, if not before. It is a shame because I love cds. I love the booklet they often have and their physical existence compared to the ethereal streaming. Long Live the cd!
I love cd’s too. I play them a lot in my car. I specifically asked for a CD player in my car. Great speakers in my car so they sound good, much better than my phone or iPod. Long live the cd.
About half of all CD purchases were as a gift for someone else.
It seems impossible all the smart minds with business and law degrees in the industry would want to kill a format that is irreplaceable, necessarily physical, since a meaningful gift must be physical for most.
Yet… here we are.
Were they all really that… stupid?
(except Apple of course. they never had the physical market…)
You have one thing backward. The mono LP came first (in 1948), then the stereo LP (in 1957). RCA engineers experimented with stereo recording tapes in the early ’50s. There’s a famous rehearsal recorded on a bootleg stereo tape in which Toscanini screams in Italian at the NBC orchestra and a complete Tchaik 6th.
German engineers experimented with stereo recordings already in war years 1944 ish. There are experimental stereo recordings from the “Haus des Rundfunks” with young Karajan conducting and air defense cannons going off in the background outside.
They used two separate tape machines, synchronized by pilot tone.
I believe there is also a recording of the pianist Walter Gieseking from the 1930s, playing a Beethoven concerto with one of the Berlin orchestras, that was experimentally recorded in stereo (using two separate disc recorders). This recording can be located on YouTube.
” Effectively, acoustic records only 20+ years before electrical recording….”
“Effectively acoustic” is not a format. The 78rpm disc persisted on the market for 60 years, beginning in the acoustic recording era and remaining in place upon the arrival of electrical recording, into the 1960s
Greeting genius. Yes, got Bernstein’s N Y Beethoven cycle in 2017 mastering for $6. Spotify still does not always match CD dynamic range.
The size of the CD is based on the length of Beethoven’s 9th under Karajan, and the hole in the middle is the size of an Austrian Schilling – so the legend.
Long live the CD!
Long live sound quality!
Long live specialist labels!
Long live the private record collection!
Down with random play-lists!
Especially SACD and japanese quality enhanced CDs as shmcd, HQ, Blu spec. I feel sorry for the new generation who are happy with mp3, quality of sound matters, Cd is not the best provider, but still pretty good…
Not sure about the hole, but the story goes that it was the head of Sony who wanted a format that would play the 9th uninterrupted*
*Allegedly, Beethoven’s 9th is to the Japanese what Vaughan Williams’sThe Lark Ascending is to the Brits.
…and what Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport is to us fair dinkum Aussies.
That story is true. The head of Sony, Norio Ohga, was also a baritone.
It was actually Furtwangler’s Beethoven Ninth that served as the time limit for the CD, plus a few minutes. It was the longest recording of the piece available.
The CD served its purpose wonderfully. A great improvement over vinyl. My remote location comes with a lousy internet service, but my CD collection will keep me going for my remaining years.
So am I. That’s why I continue to buy CDs in bargain boxes – there are some great ones.
And what a tragic loss it has been for many of us. These ears here a difference between a .flac file and an .mp3 file. And yes, I know one can get playback systems that work digitally where we can play our .flac files.
But at the end of the day, are we really better off with this “progress”?
I should end here…my horse and buggy beckons.
Oops…my ears HEAR a difference.
(My eyes however did not initially see one. 🙂
Dinosaur that I am, I still buy quite a few. I like the ease of use, especially not having to find my tablet to control my streamer and not having to worry about messy metadata. I suspect that when I’m in my eighties I will find it easier to take a c.d. out of a case than deal with whatever the alternative is for digital music. And there is the fact that too many digital versions of albums have no liner notes. I buy a lot fewer than I used to, but I don’t think I’ll ever stop.
What you will probably find in your 80s when you open the CD case is that there’s no disc inside.
CD sales actually rose last year, by over 20% in the U.S. alone. They will never again hold the central position they once did, but it is far from being a dead format.
Do an online search for “compact disc sales” and you will find multiple search results saying that CDs, like vinyl, are in a period of recovery, and that CD sales in 2022 are the highest since 2004.
I like the “physicality” of discs, for both music and films. I like having a “library” of discs, as I do for books.
I don’t want to be left stranded if some streaming service decides to cease carrying a piece of music I enjoy hearing.
I still have CDs bought in the 1980s, carefully handled and maintained in good storage conditions, and they have suffered no detectable “bit deterioration.”
In any case, I remain completely unpersuaded that the sound quality of streaming matches the sound quality of a well-recorded disc on a high-quality player. And Internet connections are prone to sudden and unpredictable interruptions.
Others may, of course, do as they wish. I’ll stay with CDs.
You should compare CDs with digital downloads, which often are higher audio quality than CDs. They can contain PDF copies of the booklets.
Most streaming services allow you to download thousands of tracks, for those Internet intermittent periods.
Just like the LP 35 years ago…
The hi-fi press like to frequently peddle this story but it fails to explain why the classical music industry is still issuing CDs at quite a large rate and why artists in the popular field still like to record whole albums. The problem with downloading/streaming is that the public picks and chooses the tracks for listening to, often ignoring the rest of the album tracks. Any artist who has spent time recording an album will be aware of this. Vinyl albums in particular and, to some extent, cd albums, tend to encourage whole album listening. Vinyl is enjoying a revival and the cd?… well it ain’t quite dead yet, Norman!
It is a pity because CD’s are very useful – you get attached and enjoy the physical presence of your own collection.
I chose and bought selectively, but I have over 100 cd’s and they are important to me.
A great shame. You owned records and CDs. Now you just rent access to music at the whim of the provider. It’s all very redolent of the WEF video, below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKwENH-m4oU
Long live property.
You wouldn’t know it from my collection. Approximately 10,000 CDs and still growing. Of course, many of them are now obtained secondhand, but I’m still buying new limited edition soundtrack reissues, irresistible rarities from independent labels, and even the odd item from the majors. The back-catalogues, of course, are vast, and many of the reissues are a steal, though not all of them lovingly packaged. What’s most surprising to me is that I’ve actually purchased multiple new releases from DG within the past year (including Time for Three’s concerto recording with the Philadelphia Orchestra, John Williams’ Violin Concerto No. 2 with Mutter and the Boston Symphony, and Florence Price’s symphonies with the Philadelphia Orchestra). It’s been a long time since I’ve been tempted by any new releases on the majors. At middle age, my growing concern (not as rapidly as my growing collection) is who I am going to leave it all to.
Strange, I remember they were saying the same thing more than 20 years ago. And I believe they will certainly be producing them for at least another 20 years.
Thank goodness Abba is still going strong!
Huh? There were nearly 47 Million sold in 2021. I don’t know what’s going on in the pop/rock world, but the classical cd business seems to be thriving. Every month several hundred new cds are released. Every day there are reviews of new discs on Musicweb-International. Every month Records International advertises several dozen new cds of rare and obscure material. CD players are still being made, albeit most of them are now audiophile (translation: expensive) items. I do miss record stores very much and my last visit to London just wasn’t the same without being able to browse Harold Moore’s. Even if the cd goes the way of dinosaurs, recent purchases of huge boxed sets featuring Ormandy, Szell, Walter, Previn, Muti, Mehta, and others will keep me happily listening for many years. (Now, if they’d only make a Sir Malcolm Sargent box.)
Malcolm Sargent box was available on the EMI Icons label, now owned by Warner Classics. You might still be able to get a copy.
This would be happening even if the CD had made good on its “perfect sound, forever” claim, which it did not, on either the sound (although that improved), or the forever parts of the boast).
Still there are so many things I have on CD, particularly historic reissues such as Biddulph and Testament, and some privately issued and boutique label stuff, that I have looked for in vain elsewhere.
And when the first “bargain priced” CDs were introduced, some of the record labels reached into odd corners of their back catalogs for some intriguing stuff — they wanted recent sound so not historic, but were still reluctant to sell their A list artists at reduced prices, so suddenly some hard to find LPs had an unexpected CD revival. Again, apart from some YouTube borrowings of doubtful legality (for which I am nonetheless grateful), some of these artists and performances are not to be seen in the successors to the CD. Choices may be good, but they are narrowed, and interest in some great artists of the past seems snuffed out as a consequence.
The upshot of all this is that I at least am still playing my CDs.
Once a cd is deleted. It is sold on eBay and becomes very expensive.but it must be in good condition or mint
Condition. Especially jazz CDs. And box sets.
I very much regret the demise of the CD, which ought to have the market durability of the printed book. Searching through USB drives to put together what used to be a straightforward multi-CD program of my choice is an exercise in frustration, as is the need to access the internet to read what used to be convenient booklet notes. Streaming and downloading have their uses, but so does one’s personal library on the shelf.
Physical is still going strong in many countries. In Germany it’s still about half of the market? Certainly declining though.
There is also Bluray now, the high definition version for audio (and video).
And the new 3D immersive audio format Dolby Atmos really only works if delivered on Bluray. The Dolby Atmos online streams are simply so bad in quality, it can’t be taken seriously for music recordings.
It was announced as the Definitive Format, the end of searches.
I bougth my first CD reader only in 1988 (before that, it was unaffordable for a student taking care of his budget). Before, when I told friend I still listen to Vinyl, they laught: “WHAAAAAT ? Hey Fred Flinstone, Prehistory is over ! It is the final way to have records. There will be nothing else.”
Peoples threw their complete collections of vinyls to the garbage after hearing one or 2 cds and renew everything, making a point that the record must absolutely be “D-D-D” (digital at each step: record, mixing, print). I remember a couple shopping cds; they saw a box with Chopin played by Horowitz and finally reject it: “Oh no, it is A-A-D”. They don’t know what they missed.
And what is “In” now ? The vinyl ! When I tell young colleague that I saw a time where people threw vinyl at garbage, they just don’t believe me !
How can music be given as a gift in 2022?
Rights ! Music is completely virtual; book is starting to be virtual and it will continue. Books and CD: the 2 things that peoples gave me as gift.
When friends and family ask me what I would like for my Birthday or Christmas, I reply “Oh, just a bottle of good Wine will be Ok”. This will never be virtual
There are statistics, stating about half of the physical music recording sales were for the purpose as a gift for someone else. In times when the recordings were 100% physical.
Based on that, the record majors must be major idiots, to abandon the physical market, aka as by definition being twice as big in target audience than virtual/online (which doesn’t work as a gift)
Exactly! How can you request your favourite artist signs a download?!
Swop the word cd for vinyl and its the same headlines I read in the 1990’s
Swop the word vinyl for CD and it’s the same headlines I read about the demise if records in the 1990’s
I will not give up CDs, although it appears as though there won’t be many more manufactured. I am not a fan of streaming; not everything is available, the sound can be dodgy unless a premium is paid for lossless transmission (and there is compromised portability to streaming), there is frequently no documentation, and one doesn’t “own” anything. It is definitely the trend for people to subscribe to services for access to entertainment and software, but it seems to me to be as logical as burying somebody in a rented suit. It’s a great model for those collecting the monthly fees but for the music lover, well, not so much. The good thing I can say about my free subscription to Spotify is that sampling certain albums has prevented me from spending money on performances I didn’t like and found out in time. Even if one downloads music on the computer, there is the danger of a hard drive and/or backup failure.
It is the way things are going now, and it’s a damned shame for collectors. I suppose there will never be re-releases of things we haven’t yet collected from Day One, except from specialist companies like Eloquence, whom I love.
Perhaps it’s a generational thing. I’ve recently ordered a manual transmission car, which may not get built at all, to replace a stick wagon that is 18 and a half years old. I know this will be my last stick, if it gets made at all.
There’s no premium paid for lossless on Apple Music or Amazon Music. It’s all CD quality or better. You can download thousands of tracks for those times you have no Internet connectivity.
Regarding hard drives crashing and losing music, important documents, pictures. Make backups: At least 3 copies, with one offsite.
Give me a CD any day of the week. I refuse to download music.
While working at Patelson’s, there was considerable excitement when the first classical CDs came into Darton Records, situated inside the music shop. At the time, I consulted with an audio expert wondering if we would be able to personally record onto CDs similar to cassette tapes. He assured me this would never be possible! Of course, we now have CDRs, the finest ones estimated to last over 300 years. I especially love the loop play feature, and ability to instantly move to any track using remote control afforded by CDs and CDRs. Regarding cassette tapes, they became the primary medium for studying recordings of Indian classical music. The hour-long drive each way to Little India on the outskirts of Los Angeles county became a regular pilgrimage of great joy and excitement, wondering what musical treasures awaited me in the form of cassette tapes from India. Sold in little shops mostly with video tapes of Bollywood films, were immortal recordings of Shivkumar Sharma, Pandit Jasraj, Hariprasad Chaurasia, Bhimsen Joshi, Ravi Shankar and others priced at two to three dollars each. There is also chai, Indian sweets, and the finest Indian cuisine to relish in the magical place named Artesia, though cassette tapes of Indian masters are no longer available. I hope the various mediums of recorded music remain with us. They all possess unique virtues. Music is so ethereal in nature absent of live performances, we instinctively yearn for some physical contact that CDs and cassette tapes afford, including images of the artists and synergistic liner notes. LPs, too, even though I personally have not returned to that deservingly honored format.
http://www.azuremilesrecords.com/patelsonscrossroads.html
For independent musicians in our classical music field, CD’s are a business card of sorts.
They are very easy to self-produce, to mail out, and the liner can contain all contact information that will lead to live engagements. The profit margin of self producing a CD is quite good and they can be sold in the lobby at intermission.
CD’s are not going anywhere for the time being especially when streaming fees are so low that they make no sense for the artist.
And the Hipsters are going back to vinyl so that may boomerang back to popularity.
“News of my demise was a surprise to me” Mark Twain
Although convenient in this day and age, the compression on the streaming/download services, radio etc… don’t come close, at least for now, to compete with the dynamic range of CD’s played on a high quality home system. Of course that’s just my opinion.
The CD is on its last legs? Rubbish!
Is this just another ruse to get people to panic sell their CDs so that a few years down the line when the inevitable “CD Revival” is announced, they can be cajoled into buying them all again?
Having said that, this is a really great time for buying second hand CDs because people are doing exactly that!
I’m still buying them (and playing them), but I suspect that won’t save the industry!
I bought my current car, a 2020 Subaru, because it was the only brand still offering CD players. And it’s a great sound system, which I believe they are still offering today as standard equipment. I can’t imagine I’m the only one who values that.
I bought my current car, a 2019 Ford Escape for the same reason. CD player, fabulous sound system. No way would I have bought a car without a CD player.
The disaster is of course that the music industry gave away their hole catalogue to parasites like Spotify. They wouldn’t have to do it. And I guess most of them regret. They got scr*ed, easy as that.
I am still wedded to my CD collection. If I play a disc, I feel satisfied with the sound quality and with the fact that I actually have the music release in hand.
I am a bit worried that only vinyl and streaming will be left in the future. Worried because it may be a binary choice on how we listen.
If there is an improvement on how we present discs, it would be that there should be PDFs of booklets. The print of sleeve notes, sung texts and libretti tends to be small and bad for the eyes. If there were PDFs, you can save on packaging and programme notes can be interchangeable.
I enjoy receiving the cd with the BBC Music magazine every month. Lots of interesting stuff I would have never selected myself, but enjoy once delivered.
Long live the cd, it’s very important for music to have a physical artifact of the recording.
I still love CDs and prefer to listen them.
Not so, CD sales are up for the first time since the vinyl resurge. Used CD sales way way up since prices so low and vinyl prices so high, both new and used. Do your research before your publish.
The CD is not almost dead. It is undergoing a resurgence in sales now just as, amazingly, the cassette.
Still the best medium for recorded classical music. The clarity makes it perfect for classical music.
when I bought my first CD player and 3 CDs, and played it at home, it struck me that what I was hearing was the same sound I hear from inside the orchestra when playing. It never ceases to amaze me!
My classical library contains 415 operas and even more orchestral music on 2,600 CDs and 1,500 LPs. It will stay with me to the and of my time in this life, and there is nothing that can make me to get rid of my beloved library collected through more than 60 years.
I’m proud of my CD collection and I’m buying few new CDs every week. To sustain my life classical music is as important as air, food and water.
Long live CD!!!
It isn´t.Just bought 15 new Cd´s over the last week.Go to JPC website,Germany´s biggest CD mail order seller.Tons of new releases every day.
The best thing to do is rip your CDs — lossless (no compression) in .wav format. Let the CD serve as an archive (which is great since there are then no scratches, no wear and tear on the physical media). I have literally thousands of tracks at my fingertips. I started with high quality .mp3s, dumped them all after deciding to go with a higher quality format. I can also access my music through the internet so I can play it all through my home stereo, my phone or even my car stereo.
I still buy sacds
So do I; it’s just too bad someone doesn’t make a reasonably priced SACD player! There are some Blu Ray players than decode them, but the sound isn’t all that hot – and there’s no stereo optical TOSLINK! And I can’t afford a $7000 Marantz SACD player.
I take it you’re in the United States? Denon sells there its superb SACD player dcd-1600ne. It sells for 1,499 US dollars and is even currently available to purchase from Amazon.com This player has been selling very well here in the UK and in Europe and will even play DSD files from DVD/R discs at 2.8 and 5.6 mhz. It has been purely designed for CD/SACD and high resolution files and nothing else. It’s Alpha processing for redbook cd playback is quite astonishing considering its price. Build quality is very very good. Check it out! Cheers.
Anybody else here really love rummaging through the second-hand downloads available for pennies at the local Oxfam or other charity/thrift shop? Heh, thought not.
My latest find: the McCreesh recording of the Praetorius Christmas Mass for the princely sum of 99p. While I’ve things like this and a massive backlog of others to catch up on, I’ve no need for downloaded/streamed CDs. The only exception is if I need to hear, for rehearsal/prep purposes, a specific thing that I don’t really need in my collection, say one short work, sorry “song”, from an otherwise irrelevant collection, or maybe a sample, usually in poor-quality sound, of something new.
Does anyone else remember the dark predictions of the 1980s that CDs would self-destruct? Supposedly due to the label layer eating down through the music part? Do I recall a joke about this in a Thomas Pynchon novel?
There was a lot of audio mythology in the air back in those days. Remember the guy who claimed he could identify what symphony was on any LP with the label obscured, by noting the patterns of wider or narrower grooves?
One writer for Fanfare was obsessed with the theory that digitally recorded LPs could cause, and were causing, micro-cracks in turntable mechanisms. Why and how were not the issue. This was a faith-based argument, and you don’t argue with faith. So Fanfare’s editor dutifully printed pages of electron microscope photos that supposedly made this “case closed.”
Then with CDs there was a brief time when someone argued that coating the edges of the CD with a certain green shade of magic marker or highlighter would improve the sound and make the disc last longer. Or maybe it was to cure E.D. I don’t know.
But the bronzing failure was real and painful and I have many great CDs on Pearl and Nuovo Era and some other labels that are not playable or only partially playable.
Off topic but remember when Denon CDs featured internal indexing within a track, so that if your CD player was equipped to deal with indexing, you could go immediately to, say, the development section of the Beethoven 5th first movement, or the recapitulation, the coda, and so on. For a music educator that must have seemed like heaven, but too few players (I only had one) allowed index searches.
Actually discs that were made at a certain Nimbus owned plant in England did ‘self-destruct’ from what was called ‘CD rot’. Even some Chandos discs were made in that plant. People had to get replacements.
DSD may save the CD format.
My understanding is that CD sales increased in 2021 over 2020. That might not be saying a whole lot. There’s certainly no shortage of classical new releases being made.
Beyonce’s latest album is out on CD but not yet on vinyl.
Bumper CD box sets offer excellent value.
What happens whens the technos discontinue whatever format the download is in? You know it will happen, and you’ll lose everything Give me a physical product any day,
Bullshit. Formats don’t die that easily.
Wait until the Chinese Government decides to destroy the West’s economy by blocking the internet. Where will the music come from then?
Now, I admit that should this happen we may have more important things to worry about but at least our boom boxes can be powered by batteries! (It’s not that I’m a pessimist or anything but I do buy packs of Duracell batteries every month whilst doing the big shop. I intend to be prepared for all eventualities!)
There are many wondrous possibilities once something has been digitized. I was rooting for the CD-Rom where you could sync a midi track with your own “enhancement” to works you found compelling. Listening at reduced speed and in any key can expand one’s interest and enjoyment. Hearing stuff at half speed means stuff suddenly appear as part of the sonic tapestry (an intriguing hihat pattern is suddenly brought out to enjoy. The capabilities of the CD were never exploited in a positive manner. The Tascam trainers should have been in everyone’s hifi setup.
Twelve years ago I was given an iPod, which I still have and use. But I was so blinded by its useful qualities – several hundred CDs in my handbag – that I gave away my CD collection to a friend, when I had downloaded them all to the iPod. Recently the friend gave me them all back, with ‘interest’ of his own CDs, as he plans to be away for quite some time. I cried with happiness as I unpacked old friends that I had forgotten about. To find an album on an iPod you have to go looking for it; little chance of stumbling across a forgotten oddity; whereas perusing my newly-reladen shelves of CDs, I am finding forgotten-about CDs frequently. I am never getting rid of my CD collection ever again!
Being subjected to an internet connection people sometimes struggle and lose there internet you lose your internet you lose music and movies
Boris and Donald would have saved us all from no matter the crisis.
I remember when two newer formats, the super audio compact disc (SACD) and the DVD audio disc, were heralded as successors to the CD. Both have excellent sound fidelity. However, few recordings were issued in these formats, and the discs themselves were quite expensive. These formats never really caught on.
If you are a consumer of pop, rap, or country, then digital is just fine. But, I’m a metal head, and metal artwork is almost as entertaining as the music. Pop genres tend to have pictures of the artist as the album covers. Metal and other “niche” styles tend to have awesome art and it’s just seems more fulfilling to listen to tunes while you look at the booklet and admire everything that went into creating those pieces of art.
Cd is NOT almost dead. It may not have the massive sales today that made it so popular in its heyday but it’s still doing ok.
CD is a fantastic format, it is tactile, hands on, storage friendly and something that you own. It has a wide dynamic range, and the manufacturers that still champion it have made great strides in getting the very best out of its 40 year old technology. Denon for example with its amazing Alpha processing. Cd players are a very clever invention, and just when its replay quality has become so good have many people abandoned it! What a shame!
I haven’t bought a cd in years. I sold my player long ago. But Qobuz sends me information weekly on new,primarily classical, cd’s. If I’m interested I add it to my list of favourites. My monthly subscription covers that. I don’t know if Qubuz actually buys a physical cd from the record company. My assumption is that it’s all done online.
As an addendum to my earlier comment on the unmourned demise of the cd, I offer the following:
Streaming in hi res classical box sets through a fine hifi stereo system is so convenient. Right now I’m listening to Dorati’s complete Haydn symphonies without moving from my chair. As another example,Ruzickova’s Bach complete keyboard works is another among many such favourites of mine.
The main reason for decline in cd sales is that the cost cutting mean car manufacturers don’t put cd players in cars to save money people like to listen to their own music instead of the radio stations limited selection of music modern computers are so rubbish they don’t have cd optical drives to save money I use an old computer with cd drive to copy my cds onto memory stick s for my car