CD players came out in 1983! When did portable audio file players come out? Oh, around 2000. I would love to be able to someday burn a data DVD with FLACs and have my home player play back the files. Currently I burn DVD-Audio discs (up to 7 hours of 16/44.1 audio on ONE disc) so I don't have to burn tons of CDs. It has to be authored to DVD format though, which is time consuming and necessitates the burning of another disc. It is also uncompressed. If all the files were FLAC, I could probably fit about 12 hours on one disc.