No, Your PlayStation 4 Won't Play Audio CDs

Seems like a bit of an odd move, but all digital is the ultimate goal for cheaper content delivery for the majority of the entertainment industry, so I suppose we should count ourselves lucky to have an optical drive at all.

Interesing indeed they are trying to make it as cheap as possible to fight back to the current and only next gen competitor the Wii U if they keep reducing cost it might end at 400-450$ if they sell at loss.

Well darn. That was the only reason I was going to buy a PS4. Oh well, hope they bring it back for the PS5.

This seems very very odd. Maybe a weirdly timed April fools joke? I can't think of any technical or financial reason to do this.

I'm surprised but don't really care either. I can count on one hand how many times I played a CD on my PS3.

Surprise you only just picked up on this, as I saw it a few weeks back.

I still buy CDs, as prefer to have physical copies as a backup. But I have a hi-fi to play them on. I've never used a console to play them, so this doesn't bother me at all.

Nope, never used it. So it won't be affecting me.

Although it is an odd move though. Is it to push digital content or for price concerns? Although the earlier comments states that prices won't be reduced that much if at all...

Funny story.

Plugged in my Dreamcast a week ago when I decided waiting for Pikmin 3 to buy a Wii U was going to be a long haul. On the start-up screen there were 4 icons, 1 said "Music". I thought it odd that the DC would play random music, but after about a minute I remembered it played CDs. I have never put a CD into any videogame console and I don't think it would ever occur to me to do so.

PS1 is officially more powerful than PS4

@Savino I think it's something you eat.

It's not a feature I look for, but if the next thing they say is "ohh, it also doesn't play blu-ray/dvd video discs" than THAT is a mistake. Honestly though, I buy a game system for the games that come to the system, not because it has a blu-ray player or whatever, but not adding video disc playback on a PlayStation system now is just, weird.

@rjejr I miss the Dreamcast Hell, I forgot my PSOne played CD's!

@get2sammyb They don't need to expend money on a optical driver that can read any type of CDs they will just focus at this rate on their own patented Bluray Discs.
Supporting both will always end up in a 10-25+ production costs.

This is.. Well just plain pretty stupid. I love rippingy CDs onto my P3S. I guess I can just wirelessly put them on from my computer, but I would much rather just put them on directly. This won't stop from getting the PS4 (I would hope nobody would do anything but shake their fist before being excited again), but I'm still not happy with this decision.

@Epic Actually the drive itself is more than capable. They're simply not installing the required codec to read CDA information- which is why it's such a bizarre move. The codec is freely available to the public, so I would hope at least that the option to add the codec at a later date is offered. I used to use the earth/sun visualiser quite a lot on PS3.

Just another step into the future, I guess. They've been pushing digitalization since PSPgo, so I see their motive, but why do I have to import the CD to a computer, put the files on a USB drive, and finally copy the files over directly instead of popping that son of a gun right in??????
I know why... Nobody actually likes music anymore

For me personally that's a bit annoying. I have a pretty substantial CD collection and I've always slapped my favourites onto my PS3. To take this out seems a bit needless but... here we are.

Seems like there'll be a lot of importing libraries and media servers going up.

After using it for a few days, I'm hoping they make good use of Music Unlimited.

Fun fact: I once had a CD of Rayman 1 so scratched that the PS2 thought it was a CD, it even played the OST (although it was garbled on some tracks)

Well, it's just another reason, other then backwards compatibility, to hang on to the PS3. Like most others, I've rarely played a music CD in any console.

But I wonder could you burn MP3's to. A BluRay and play music from that?

honestly who buys CD's nowadays anyway?

i can't actually remember the last time i got a CD i get all my music off amazon via MP3

Who cares, i get ALL my music from on line anyway

@Magolor: Even more fun fact: Some PS1 games actually COULD function as music CD's if you plugged them into regular CD players. You could listen to the entire soundtrack of Theme Park that way, for example...even though it's not on the Wikipedia list. And look, Rayman 1 is on that list! How about that...

I'm no tech genius, but I THINK they actually need a separate laser head to read CD's...if that's true, it would explain how this cuts costs. It also means that they definitely will NOT support PS1 discs even if they do port the emulator over...which they might not, I dunno. This doesn't bother me too much anyway because I was already going to keep my PS3. Odd, but whatever.

Have many CDs, but don't care at all.

The only music my PS3 ever plays is streamed from my computer (which may have been ripped from a CD originally).

Doesn't really bother me since I prefer using my PC and held onto my old CD player just in case. I just seems really backwards to me that any old PC can play CDs but the PS4 can't for whatever reason. If this is in fact a way to cut costs then its a pretty weird way to do so.

Well...anyone who can afford a PS4 should already have at least one device that can play CDs. But let's stop assuming that everyone has so much money to buy consoles without having to sell old stuff...too bad for those people in those cases.

Goodbye Compact Disc. PS4 to play Cassette Tapes confirmed!!

Don't really care, since I rarely use a CD anymore

Meh. While an odd move indeed...I can just use my computer to rip an Audio CD and then transfer the audio to the PS4 via USB or whatever options they have.