The CD Emoji 2 💿

We were spending the day at my in-laws, when we discovered the CD collection of a long lost era. These were our picks: The Original Soundtrack of the Fifth Element, "If you're Feeling Sinister" by Belle and Sebastian and a self-burned CD that had only "Chicane" scribbled on it.

I couldn’t believe that people still had CD drives in their households, but my mother-in-law proved me wrong. CD drives—if you don't remember—offered trays, into which you could insert these shiny discs of nostalgia. I inserted the Fifth Element album into her laptop's built-in CD tray, which promptly started buzzing and scanning and huffing and puffing. I was ready to open up the legacy Windows Media Player on her laptop on what I expected to be Windows 10, but was delighted when I realised that her ancient device was actually running on Linux Mint—following a trend to power really old devices with Linux—in her case, kindly installed by a friendly neighbour.

The Rhythmbox app opened, the CD drive fired up, like its life depended on it and what we heard was the Mondoshawan theme, skipping every 3 seconds or so. Immediately, I was taken back to the old days and that feeling of frustration when your data medium had scratches on its surface.

We tried the Belle and Sebastian CD next—this one even came with its own cover inlet. When "The Stars of Track & Field" played, I remembered how listening to music worked back then: if you were true to the game, you removed the inlet to flick through it and learn about the individual tracks. Like with The Fifth Element, Rhythmbox successfully registered the ID3 tags of the album and the inlet did the rest of the magic. Every page of the thin booklet showed the lyrics of the individual songs. I read along the lyrics and felt set back. Man, listening to music back in the day was a different experience.

Chicane‘s CD was up last. The CD could be read without problems, the tags failed to be recognised—maybe due to the self-burnedness of the matter—but I was able to identify the album by comparing its 10 tracks and their respective lenghts with what Wikipedia disclosed. It turned out to be Chicane‘s popular 2000 release "Behind the Sun", featuring its most popular single "Saltwater".

We listened away and I remembered the turn of the millennium, what a time to be alive!