This is a mundane and pointless story I hope you like.
It had been a few years since I last burned an audio CD. Way back in the mid to late 90’s when I got my first CD burner for the computer, I was … well, not busy, but it got use. A couple of old albums that I never came out in CD; or at least, I never found them on CD. Burned’em to CD right away. I also put together a couple of “road CD’s”. I took various tracks that made for good listen-while-you-drive music and put them all together in my own compilations. Great fun, but quite time consuming. Wait while you rip the song from its original CD. Swap to another CD. Repeat several times. Then put together the play list in the less-than-intuitive burning software and wait the hour it takes to burn. Since it was such a pain, I didn’t do it again. It’s simply easier to just take the CD’s I like to listen to along for the ride.
Fast forward to a few weeks ago. My old DVD player has been slowly dying for some time. I’ve been putting off buying a new one because I’ve been figuring I’d get a DVD reader/writer that would also replace my old VCR. But just start shopping for DVD recorders. Go ahead, do it. Damn but there’s a lotta crap going on in that marketplace. Gobs of different formats, often mutually exclusive. Then of course, DVD’s aren’t just like VHS tapes, there’s more to them. So you don’t want a DVD recorder that just mimics a VCR, you want something more. Yipes. So, I’m not buying a DVD recorder anytime soon.
But meanwhile the DVD player has been acting more and more screwy. It often refuses to recognize it has a disc, forcing you to play the eject/put-it-back-in game. And for the last year or so it has been making the most god-awful whining sound when it’s not playing a disc. If it’s not in operation, it just goes WEEEEEEEEEEEEEE, so I had taken to unplugging it when not in use.
A couple of weeks ago, I plugged it in and it immediately started that noise, louder than ever before. And this time, when I played the DVD, the sound didn’t completely go away. So that’s it. I’m getting a new player.
So I went down to “Lines R Fun” (not the real name) and looked around. The good news is, DVD players are much cheaper than they used to be. I found a relatively cheap model that also supported the “Super Audio CD’s” that I had heard about. That way I could at least tell myself I was upgrading my old DVD player. See, I hate getting rid of something if it ain’t broke, and the old DVD player wasn’t quite completely broke yet. But if I’m actually upgrading to something with new capabilities, then it’s OK. 
Of course, I couldn’t get Super Audio capabilities without actually getting something to play on it. So I went over to the music section and found a special section for Super Audio CD’s and – something I had not heard of – “DVD Audio”. I bought a couple of Super Audio CD’s and a DVD Audio CD.
Mind you, I bought those mainly so I had a “reason” to buy the player, but really I listen to my music in the car. And the car just has its old fashioned “normal” CD player. Well, no problem. The Super Audio CD’s are labeled “dual use” and can play in normal players as well. Meanwhile I figure I’ll just rip the DVD Audio and burn it to a CD-R, since I still have a half-dozen or so blanks around.
I get home, hook everything up, and everything works great. Fantastic sound! It was an incredible experience listening to the “New World” symphony with full surround sound going. I could swear I was there. And for DVD Audio I had the latest Steely Dan album. Man, I still love those guys.
So anyway, it’s time to make a CD copy so I can actually listen to the thing in the car. I go to download.com and start searching. OK, there are, like, a gazillion DVD Audio rippers. Cool. So I find one that’s been downloaded a lot and had a high rating. I run it and it gives me an error message. It seems it doesn’t support DVD Audio discs. It was made strictly for ripping the sound off of video DVD’s. Wtf? So I try a couple of others. Same result!
OK, I’ll just work around this. I go to my stereo system and route output back to the computer. I’ll just play the darned thing that way. Nope. The minute I plug it in there’s the godawful HUM. OK, I take the audio output from the DVD player itself … nope, same result. Something’s not grounded right, but damned if I can tell what.
Back to the computer. I give download.com one last chance, but this time I search by date. I find one that seems to describe what I’m looking for and … this time it works! It recognizes the disc! And it’s ripping away! Wooo! And … wait. It’s done. It took less than a minute to rip the whole thing? So I play the file and sure enough, the whole thing is there. I fast forward … yep, all 43 minutes. Then it dawns on me that my computer hardware has gone through a couple of generations of upgrading since the last time I ripped anything. This is so cool. Next I burn it back to a CD-R. Of course, writing is slower, but still it only took two or three minutes.
I just got back from driving around and the CD worked perfectly. Ah, I love technology when it works.