81–90 of 138 posts
I read this whole thing twice and I now know what pregaps are and the history but still have no idea why people would put them on a CD or why they’re useful for hidden tracks.
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I wonder if you could just tear the controller out of a CD/DVD drive and build a new one from scratch, kind of like the new floppy controllers being used now to read the raw magnetic data. You could just command the head to move to the center, find the beginning of the data and just keep reading until you hit the buffers.
Why? You can extract raw data and raw subchannel data directly from a CD/DVD drive. This isn't the case with how floppy drives work.
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Why? You can extract raw data and raw subchannel data directly from a CD/DVD drive. This isn't the case with how floppy drives work.
The "why" was covered in a parent comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40923030
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> Broken was re-released as one CD in October 1992, having the bonus songs heard on tracks 98 and 99 respectively, without any visual notice except for the credits, and tracks 7–97 each containing one second of silence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_(Nine_Inch_Nails_EP)#Pa... Amarok (1990) by Mike Oldfield is a single hourlong track with 53 index marks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amarok_(Mike_Oldfield_album…
Broken was absolutely perfect to put into a multi-disc player along with TMBG's Apollo 18 , which contains "Fingertips", a suite of 21 very short songs. Set it to shuffle songs from everything in the player, and enjoy your sonic whiplash
(Both have their merits, but I unfortunately have neither at hand. And I only have one of these 2 albums. And one of those albums is the original Broken, which only has 6+2 tracks across two discs instead of 99 tracks on one disc.
And how do the 91 silent tracks on a more-common release of Broken affect things compared to the 26 musical tracks that the original 6+2+18 track-count ensemble may entail, in terms of inter-song delay or any other such thing on a real multi-disc changer?
I know TMBG fairly well, and NIN very well, and I enjoy the fuck out of gear, but I have so many questions.)
(I vaguely jest above, but Spotify only shows me 18 tracks on Apollo 18. And only one of them is Fingertips. Am I looking at this wrong?)
This specification anomaly sounds like the polycarbonate equivalent of vinyl's multiple-groove capability. [0] I'd first heard of this for a Monty Python record (wikipedia notes this is in fact the most famous use case) but checked to see if people went for >2 grooves, and seemingly they did. I expect the casting for the pressing was horrendously expensive, which is why it didn't happen an awful lot. I suppose both m…
This is supremely cool, thanks for sharing. I'm probably missing something obvious but why would the casting be any more expensive than any other pressing?
A needle creates the groove(s), replete with bumps for sound, in a not-quite-set (slightly soft) master disc - and I _speculate_ those follow a specific path defined by the mastering tool.
In comparison, playback just drops the needle in the track, and it necessarily follows the extant spiral form.
Making the master of a multi-groove record I'm assuming would require recalibration of the groove-defining mechanism (doubtless carefully designed for conventional layout), once for each of the grooves you want to make, ensuring they each stay within the boundaries defined by the previous grooves.
The one exception is a field for "extensions", which should have some bits for 'compatible' extensions (ie. there will be extra data ignored by readers which don't understand them), and other bits for 'incompatible' extensions (ie. you have put a DVD into a CD player).
I had a Rammstein ablum, that if you rewound before track 1 there was a black box audio recording of a plane crash were everyone died. It was pretty macabre. I think the CD cover was like a plane's black box if I remember correctly.
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> At least until their perpetually cruddy remotes eventually failed. For me, Sony remotes were made of the same stuff as early Nokia phones - indestructible! Surprised to hear someone thought they were cruddy.
They were physically robust but the carbon button contacts always became dodgy for me. I tried to avoid Sony products for this reason because I encountered it so often in other people's gear. I have a remote from the late 00's that saw virtually zero use and it conked out with age alone.
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I'd love a new solution that wasn't "break the CD data into pieces." I've never looked inside a CUE file, but it's just text and I don't think it supports meta data, right? We need like a new CUE file to go with the FLAC, right? p.s. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40923646
Ideally, I think I'd want a singular container (of whatever sort) that has the album's audio, the music-related timing metadata (as applicable), and whatever other metadata may be appropriate (lyrics? liner note graphics? music videos? sure!). The audio should be able to be FLAC. But it should also be able to be anything else, like Vorbis or MP3 or AAC or IDK. It needs to be able to be played continuously without abe…
Audio codecs: use a single stream of whatever codec you'd like. FLAC/Vorbis/MP3/AAC/Opus/etc. can all go into Matroska.
Seekable: Use chapters for tracks, and nested chapters for indices. Matroska documentation even gives an example of using ChapterPhysicalEquiv 20 for CD tracks and ChapterPhysicalEquiv 10 for CD indices.
Other metadata can be muxed into the stream as well.
Lyrics can be included as text in metadata (lyric tag) or as a subtitle stream.
Liner note graphics (and basically anything else) can be included as embedded files.
Music videos can be video streams in the Matroska file.