I think the age of the CD is dead.
That's why I often do a 101/201 labelling
because I know you are unlikely to burn CDs.
You just open the whole thing in 'mySwedishMediaPlayer' or similar.
So this triggered an epiphany.
I'd like to continue with the graphic art but maybe not in CD form.
Perhaps a series of images to accompany each post.
And it would be great for sorting those 3 hour Phish gigs
where there are no splits that wouldn't bug me/you.
I think I am inventing something new here. LOL
Any thoughts would be very much appreciated.
Kind of sad for me. My CD art is all over the net.
Which always makes me smile :)
regards
Titus
They (whoever they are) said vinyl was dead too. Don't believe the hype. Keep on doing what you do and fuck the herd, I know I do.
ReplyDeleteso I'll take that as a vote for retaining the CD art format :)
DeleteIn opposition to the music you share, keep it square:)
ReplyDeleteIn my leisure times, I'm downloading some music all around the marvelous sites we all know. Then I'm giving the download a quick listen on my PC Bose speakers and when the music and audio quality looks more than interesting, I start my real thing : preparing the files through Magix Audio Clinic, upgrading a little the sound if necessary, burning them on CD, checking the artwork provided or found on internet, printing it on my Canon Pixmar printer, putting it all together, showing the result to lady Derek who just smiles and find it ok, and then put it on the HIFI Denon Amplifier/CDreader and PLAY IT LOUD when I find some time to play some air guitar in my living room. So to me, I'll keep it to burning CDs because of all this and I like to have a real object in my hands where the music is written on, like a vinyl 33T, like a book made of paper pages and not kindl pages. That's my vision folks !
ReplyDeleteGreetings from Paris
You seem to be in the majority opinion Derek
DeleteAdd me to that crowd :). I think Derek put it well into words so i´ll just agree on what he said and throw in some more thoughts. Here in Sweden (huh, is there a swedish media player? I wish :-D, anyway i´m really pleased with VLC, the free french equivalent) it seems like a bit of a sport to guess what year the CD format will finally be redundant and "everything" will be floating around in the fantastic but mysterious cloud of Internet. Seems nice in a way, all portable and accessible from anywhere... until somebody somewhere decides to pull the plug and access is denied. I´ll stick with the CD´s and DVD´s (a fine option for those 3 hour gigs) for prolonged archival life and besides i´m too lazy to make playlists for my mobile phone :-D. And just like you Titus, i like to make my own cover art when there is none to be found, so that´s another good reason to keep going with the CD´s. As for obsolete formats, of course there is no Rosetta stone but the CD format will propably be around for a long run yet as it´s so widely spread and who ever thought that the vinyl LP would make a comeback in the market place. As far as i know, compact cassettes still make good sales in some markets due to them being very versatile and not demanding expensive or complicated equipment that is also environmentally extra sensitive to moisture, heat and dust in comparison to most smartphones and computers. Oh, and yesterday i saw a short segment on TV about the VHS tapes still keeping up popularity with some diehards (well, i keep a few hundred around myself :-D) and rare movies seems to be passed around for up to SEK 10.000 (aproximately a 1000 Euros) a piece. As long as there´s an audience, expect good stuff to survive.
ReplyDeleteI'm a bit surprised at the responses. BTW I have many CDS that will no longer play. I call it disc rot. Do not trust discs my friend. It's safer on a hard drive. However, I shall continue with the CD artwork. Thanks, as always, for taking the time to contribuite. I appreciate it very much
DeleteThanks to you Titus for lifting the subject. As for magnetic media of any kind, it´s of course always a game of physics with even the universe itself trying to interfere by cosmic radiation. The life expectancy for CD´s seems to be very questionable, especially the early generations has been said to be not really durable but if you don´t mind the cost there are archival CD-R´s that comes with a warranty claiming they will stand the test of time for generations to come. Me being on a low budget, i use DVD-R/DVD+R to store files at the lowest cost and hoping that the encapsulated media layer between the two discs made of sturdy polycarbonate plastic (at least the better ones) will hold up better than the CD´s which i believe are made out of brittle acrylic and has the media layer only covered by a layer of paint which propably has succumbed to the elements on your "rotted" discs - as far as i know, mold infestation might destroy them if stored in an environment not optimized for archival use. I suggest spreading the risks of oblivion by making copies on SSD disks or the more common (and cheaper) USB sticks that uses a similar technique for storing information. But then, always make sure not to expose the USB stock´s connection to static electricity or removing it without shutting it down first. Or expose them to temperatures above some +80 degrees C or below -10 C (i think that´s the rules of thumb). And never, ever buy the cheapest you can find on the Internet - go with the brand names. Otherwise, i´ve experienced that at least some will withstand both being machine washed in a jeans pocket at +60 degrees C or accidentally being crushed under the wheels of an office chair and still working so the data can be recovered. :-D
ReplyDeleteMy God you are over the top I like your comments but I look at it thid way: I want us old rockers to hear these recordings in the best quality I can muster before we die
DeleteThis spring I checked one by one my CDrs, about 4 000, for disc rot. Two or three of them awere indeed lost and won't play anymore, some 100 other ones had somehow some surface moisture that with a bit of water and a drop of vinegar were perfectly cleaned as new. But yes, these CDr have to be stored carefully. And if possible with a hard drive back up. One silver CD was also rotten but it's a well known problem with a series of wrong manufactories.
ReplyDeleteYou are obviously on to it Derek, You can'[t rely on those ten year old dscs on the shelf...which I have learned.
DeleteIf you play/rip them through a different laptop/CD burner they can sometimes be saved. I stand by my HD copy rules motto. If I have any credibility as a muso/blogger this is my experience
If you buy pro standard CD' r you won't get disc rot. The main problem is that everybody seems to want everything either on the cheap or preferably free. Also, hard drives are not eternal whether they're internal or external. I am a poet and I know it.
ReplyDeletethe best ones I have that seem most consistant are from ASDA so not 'pro' I would have thought but even some of those have faults now. hard to judge but I suspect I will hear faults where others might not
DeleteASDA? 'Nuff said bro.
ReplyDeleteThought you'd like that :)
DeleteASDA? Tried to check that out but only got come-on´s about various other products from dubious online advertisers. An online retailer link or two would be appreciated :-) (this thread is turning into a consumer help line as we speak ;-D). I´ll keep looking but for now i´ll be drawing from my stash of Verbatim discs. Maybe not the best brand but way back at the at millenium shift it was the preferred brand (like, maximum bang for the buck at the time and certainly on the cheap for better or worse) at the educational facility where i was taking a course in web design. On the good side, those seldom come out as a failed burn contrary to some more common trusted household names you are more likely to find in your local supermarket but of course there are other reliable brands so shop around. From what i´ve learned from rubbing shoulders with the archival culture albeit sometimes working alongside it, we have to accept continous migration of digital information as a bit of life in the modern age. Derek´s note on vinegar as an easy means to save "rotten"discs is thankfully noted - sometimes the time tested defences against natural decay are good enough, however simple they may seem in contrast to modern hi-tech chemical agents. When it comes to psysical hard drives (HDD´s) i´d like to remind you all that it´s not a matter of if but WHEN they will crash due to mechanical issues - i´ve been through that a few times and the last time (okay, the last so far) it was not just a case of a magnetic pickup skating rogue across the disc but this external disc itself disintegratiting into splinters as it... errr... yeah, it fell of a table . My bad :-p. But anyhooo...´ve lost confidence in mechanical hard drives, they don´t take too well to working long hours collecting heat and as anyone having worked any bit with bearings know, sooner or later they will need to be re-lubricated regardless of the conditions. I still haven´t seen a detachable HDD (unless maybe you drill the rivets out of the lid) so the SSD´s seem to be the better alternative for now,
ReplyDeleteNot sure ASDA do the own brand anymore. All data should be double stored (two external HDs) If one crashes make a new back up
ReplyDeleteFor arguments sake ;-) and hopefully adding to our collective knowledge, here´s a couple of other collectors points of view on the subject of CD´s pros and cons:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfbzH6gCXp4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMahjuxnUsI
Two related things i wonder about at the moment - are just about everyone interested in this subject men in or around their fifties :-D and does anyone know if digital sound can gain something (or will the higher sensitivity instead just reveal the flaws?) from being transmitted through an old-school glass tube amplifier, the kind found in pre-transistor age radios rather than the high priced "pro" amps being put together today by specialist companies? I just happen to have an old beaten-up but working radio grammophone and what i believe to be a similar amp set (all Philips 1950-ish era) salvaged from a parted-out one about the same standing around, i was wondering about their useability as transmitters of sound, even though they are mono amps. Like, would there be something extra in frequency range and audial dynamics to be had from extracting an old mono 45 rpm disc via one of these as a reciever from a stand-alone vinyl record player instead of say a all-in-one record player with a built-in mp3 converter with a USB outlet? I think you get the picture, i´d like to churn out some FLAC or VAWE files to enhance and clean up before storing it. Any ideas?
Forgot to mention an interesting fact - it´s been said that the Soviet military kept using glass tubes (don´t know for how long, though) for their radio transmission and surveillance listening equipment in the post-war era instead of opting for transistors to do the job. The western intelligence and military operations at first thought this was just another evidence of technical backlog in the Warsaw Pact, but it was found that their engineers had noticed that while transistors was superior when it came to impact resistance and such, they are far less sensible to picking up signals and has less of a frequency spectrum to deliver. Oh, i won´t try and go deeper into that just to get lost, but the sum of it that as most of you propably know there is a much richer, warmer sound to be had from tubes than transistors. Too bad there are hardly any replacements to be found off-shelf when a tube goes down but as with most everything, New Old Stock can be found for a price if you look around.
ReplyDeleteI'd say once the files are digital you may well lose any 'sensitivity' anyway. I'm slightly skeptical about getting too bogged down on sound perception. I can't tell the difference between FLAC and 320 mp3s. vinyl sucks for me. Any ambience is overshadowed by surface noise/crackles. I remember hearing Peter Gabriel's humdrum on CD for the first time. It was how it should sound...just the sudden voice from silence. Thanks for the links
ReplyDeleteYour welcome, glad you found them interesting :-). One of the best things about digital audio, how it can re-produce sound without adding any. Unless digital compression kills it and adds an awful bunch of fluttering digital artefacts, equivalent to what happens to a picture compressed as a JPEG file as i understand it and it goes south fast when you go below 128 kbit. Someone claimed online though that most of us can´t really differentiate by hearing between files at some 280+ (i think it was) and higher bitrates, so therefore the issue of MP3 vs FLAC would if so be theoretical for all but a few. Well, myself i have a rather strange side effect of Tinnitus (not Titus :-D) that has developed over time to the degree that it is extremely irritating when for example trucks go by in the winter when the tires go hard and creates a high-pitched noise against the road surface, then again it´s very useful when trying to pinpoint the noise in recordings (i´ve also found that the very highest noises can be useful when trying to directionally locate your key chain with high precision, given that it has an attached key fob that responds with a beep if you whistle - quite handy if you are absent-minded and tends to ponder on less general subjects, like now ;-D). I once came across an MP3 of the techno tune "The girl and the robot" by Röyksopp and Robyn but could hardly listen to it as the sound was awful, full of ear ripping high pitch treble noises. I checked and the bitrate was 96 kbit, about the same as the sound from a mobile phone. Not good, but since then i´ve had the same experience with a few factory made CD´s so it can hardly be all about the bitrate. A few years ago i worked as a janitor/handyman with attending to a serious professional PA sound system (not only counting the Kilowatts loaded :-D) as one of the recurring assignments, setting it up for stage performances in house and occasionally at outdoor events - boy, was that fun! - and i found that even the soundstreams found on Youtube hooked up from your smartphone can produce real good sound on a professional PA system. Of course you have to set it up correctly, but it works well if the uploaded quality and bitrate streamed is good enough and i´d say that as low as 360-480p on the video file may very well be sufficient for giving an enjoyable audial output as long as the file streamed isn´t crap to start with.
ReplyDelete