In this item, we hope to continue the discussion on formats of recordings for music and other audio which caused drift in the Jeopardy item (Winter Agora #12). This includes commercial recordings past and present, more modern digital techniques, etc. Okay? Okay, so let's start.126 responses total.
For those of us who did not read the Jeopardy item can you summarize?
Thank you sindi. The most recent Jeopardy clue was about a company and their much-maligned music delivery system. A number of people had responded to this clue (in the form of a question, of course), but it was beginning to drift into a discussion of 8-track, Muzak, digital audio tapes, etc. Therefore, I offered to enter an item (which you are reading right now) to continue discussion of recorded music formats without confusing those who had been playing the game. Any other questions?
My favorite form of putrid music delivery has always been the 8 track cartridge. I remember the first time I heard it, playing some rock thingy which I knew, and I could hear the flutter on the tape. The person doing the demo said there wasn't any such thing and continued on trying to sell people on 8 track players. As far as I know, the only music that still comes out on 8 track is come country, for the trucker industry. Given how noisy a lot of trucks are, I suppose it doesn't matter what you use to make sounds.
Ampex once came out with a 12" floopy audio delivery system. Record-o flex or somehting like that. Designed for radio stations to compete with the use of cartridges, the floopies probably had half the cost of cartridges, but probably about one tenth the life span. I forget if the time available was as much as a long record, like four minutes, for more in the range for announcements--two minutes maximum. Anybody ever spot one of these audio white elephants?
i had never heard of that till now...:)
Thats really bizare. If you can spot a picture of one on the web, I'd love to know about it. I've never heard of this format before. Were they akin to 8" floppies only bigger, something like that?
Off the top of my head I can think of the following. Please correct
me if I forgot or misremembered something...
Analog Physical
Master
Wax cylinder
Wax disc
Acetate disc
Playback
Wax (and/or Acetate?) cylinder
78 RPM discs
45, 33 1/3 RPM pressed vinyl discs
20" 'Vitaphone' movie sound discs (strange pre-optical
movie soundtrack format)
Analog Magnetic
Wire
Magnetic tape
Master/high end
1" 32 track (?, extrapolating here...)
1/2" 16 track
1/4" 2/4-track open reel
Playback
1/4" 4/2-track open reel
8-Track
Philips cassette
Radio production "carts"
Digital
Tape
ADAT 16 track (professional, I'm not really familiar with this)
DAT
Optical
Compact Disc (CDDA)
DVD
Other disc
MiniDisc
Computer HD with various encoding formats
Other
Optical Motion Picture Soundtrack
I was fond of the Elcasette, which basically stood for "Large Cassette;" it was a large tape cassette, maybe twice or three times the size of the Phillips cassette we know and love. Like the 8-track it was designed to run at a higher speed, but it eliminated the tape-loop constrution which caused so much grief for the 8-track system. It didn't fly in the market, of course, because the problems with Philips cassette were being dealt with.
Does anyone have one of those new Sony Mini-Disc systems?
Neat list, David!
My wife has a mini-disc recorder which she uses primarily for recording her singing lessons.
I think your list omits the never-quite-made it "DCC" (or "Digital Compact Cassette" format, a digital tape format that fit into the same form-factor player as a traditional cassette (the idea being that you could build a player that was backwards compatible with existing cassettes.) Its primary attraction, or lack thereof (depending on your perspective) was that its sound quality was better than traditional cassette tape but not as good as DAT -- for the latter reason the record companies were not as panic-stricken over it..
Same thing for MiniDisc.... a lossy compression scheme.
I think that the "answer" is linked to either the mini-CD or the digital
cassette. Weren't those Sony developments? ("Who is Sony?").
regarding 12" record-o-mats: they where naked..no sleeve. A sleeve, such as used for floopy floopies, would have greatly helped this format. Easy enough to introduce error by mechanical means (head allignment and such) but leave the disk open to fingerprints, pizza grease smudges, whatnot, and whatever that it had to be a good idea, not well implemented.
Re 3. I hesitate to ask, but what is "come country" music?
Probably country music that 'turns you on' so to speak.
re 12: Cool, I sat there and thought for a while about the tape formats thinking I was missing something. Regarding digital sound quality, the audiophile in me is hoping that someone will use the new capacity of DVD to introduce a non-lossy audio format using a higher sampling rate (say 88-132Khz) and 24 or 32 bit quantization. Probably not likely too soon as the real market for such recordings would be fairly small until the DVD transports become commonplace. At the least it would be interesting to compare such recordings with current CD audio quality, which clears the "good enough" bar but not by too terribly much. Basically CDDA was introduced just as soon as affordable technology could support passable sound and the format itself has not advanced one bit from there. Obviously the mastering and playback hardware has gotten quite sophisticated, but mostly as a reaction to the marginal quality of the format itself. [How's that for bait... :]
David, it might be interesting on the technical level to see a faster sampling system, but would human ears be able to pick it up? I remember an engineer from Phillips saying that the only recording they'd done that was better on a record was the last part of the 1812 Overture, where the cannons went off. CD's have about a 90 or 96dB dynamic range, and records can do better in that regard.
My impression is that the top-flight human ear's limit is around 20-24 bits (depending on desired dynamic range) and 60KHz. However, each piece of a long signal processing chain (like the one between the guy singing to a mic in Studio 37B and someone listening to the final product at home) may have to be built to a much more demanding spec for the whole chain to perform at the sounds-perfect-to-humans level.
A lot of people at work are downloading stuff in MP3 files, which has the advantage that you don't actually have to go out to a store and get the music on some physical medium. I saw a writeup at one point on an MP3 player for cars that somebody was developing, which I think may have involved having a Linux system in the trunk.
Diamond Rio fits in your pocket and plays mp3s
I think with a vinyl 45rpm record of Anne Murray's "Snowbird" you hear or feel the overtone presence of the triangle; but it seems missing something on CD.
Not to be confused with a Diamond Reo, which they don't make any more, and would never have fit in your pocket! :-)
which is no doubt why they changed the spelling, lest some hapless confused consumer purchase a Diamond Reo and maim himself trying to listen to mp3s with it.
16 RPM vinyl, we get old phonos that play it, has anyone ever heard one? CED - capacitive electronic disk. Used for movies with sound. Same size disk as the large laser disks but no lasers involved. Two styluses that read the top and bottom capacitance of a spinning 12" disk, no physical contact? We had two come through Kiwanis, and about 50 disks, from the seventies?
Wow! That was the format that RCA bet the farm on, against laser disks. After a hundred playings or so, they start to get noticeably worse. If thats connected with Pioneer or RCA I'm just about certain that there is physical contact with the media. 16PRM vinyl? I've never heard of that. How old is that?
Common on the older phonos for 16 RPM, maybe 60's or 70s? I don't think i have ever played anything audio 100 times, video even less likely. 16 RMP might have been ok for voice, like the slower speeds on tapes.
Instructional records were often 16RPM. Remember those ones that went with film stripts?
Isn't it true that CDs get less and less accurate as you go up in frequency? It seems like it'd stand to reason that the closer you get to the Nyquist limit at 22,050 Hz, the more all the waveforms would resemble a square wave instead of their real character. At any rate, the only album which I claim to be able to hear a difference on is Boston's self-titled first album. The reason isn't any inherent problem wit the format; it's that the master tape apparently degraded between when the LP was mastered and when it was digitized for CD. There's some very noticable dropouts on the CD release I have, the most obvious being one in the cymbal track at about 00:39 on track one. There's also, sadly, a lot of vinyl releases that never made it onto CD at all...
A lot of reissue CDs are/were made with non-master tapes, hence worse sound quality. The nyquist limit is how high you can reproduce a sine wave. A lot depends on having a good low-pass filter, though, and that was the weakest point of many early CD players.
As long as the sampling rate is at least 44kHz, all of the frequency content up to 22 kHz will be preserved. As Scott points out, however, just because the information is on the CD it doesn't mean that the player can faithfully reproduce it.
((winter agora #44 <---> music #167))
I vaguely recall that 16 RPM vinyl records were used for "talking books" for the blind back in the 1960s and 1970s. The MP3 format is sending the RIAA, the recorded music trade group, into hysterics because of the ease of shipping bootleg MP3 tracks around the internet. The RIAA sued in an attempt to stop the Diamond Rio portable MP3 player from being shipped to consumers; the RIAA won a preliminary temporary injunction but it was overturned after about a week. The case turns on some tricky definitions of digital recording copyright law -- basically, when the RIAA agreed to the Home Recording Rights Act, they never foresaw that the PC would become a general purpose digital copying machine. News coverage of the case is summarized in the music conference item titled "Changes In The Music Business."
This sounds fun, we will read all about it there. Jim points out that the above is a pun on 'general purpose calculating machine'. He giggles.
Something that has never made sense to me: why are the smaller records (45's) made to spin faster than the big ones (LP's at 33 1/3 RPM)? It would seem to me that the opposite would make more sense: make the small records spin at the same speed or slower so you can fit as much as possible in the limited space. Is there some reason, other than just convention, that it doesn't work that way?
Audio quality, I thought was the reason that 45's spun at that speed. In theory they have more bandwidth than 33's do. I'm not sure it worked out that way in reality, owing to cut cutting in the manufacturing process, but that should be why.
The history, if I remember it properly, is that Columbia Records developed the 33 1/3 RPM Long Playing Record, and RCA countered with the 45 RPM 7" record, rather than going along with Columbia's format. This isn't quite as wacky as it sounds. In the 78 RPM era every disc was a single; if you had a collection of them, they came in a big book with record sleeves, which was called an "album." The RCA 45 RPM discs were more convenient to handle than the 78s. But I don't know why those standard speeds were chosen.
The response in #37 is the beginning of part of the answer. What matters for bandwidth is the linear speed of the groove at the needle. This is equal to the rotation rate in radians/second times the radius to the needle. The 45 rpm record had recording down to a much smaller radius than the 33 rpm records and therefore, for each bandwidth, had to rotate faster. The 33 rpm recording was made possible by using a medium, vinyl, that permitted good reproduction of finer grooves and hence shorter wavelengths for the grooves (to reproduce higher frequencies).
s/each/equal
What were the original 45 RPM records manufactured from, then?
33 appeared on the market years later, after they found there was demand and also after audio quality of the various compenents had godden good enough. Faster speed == higher quality sound, so 33 rpm would not be as good as 45 rpm, unless you also figure in distance from the center like krj said. (Neat story: Les Paul [yes, therye was a guy named Les Paul] used to overdub from one record lathe to another. By using 18" disks at 78rpm, he had *great* sound)
Oop,s credit Rane with the explanation about diameter vs. speed.
I have a 12" vinyl disk made to be played at 45 rpm. It's a product of the late 1970s, when the industry was trying to find a good way to transfer digital recordings to vinyl. Andre Previn conducting two Gershwin numbers. It's the only disk of that type I can remember seeing.
(I have a similar recording, 12" 45 RPM LP-ish length: THE SOUND OF THE SAND, by David Thomas and the Pedestrians, a spinoff project from Pere Ubu with Richard Thompson on guitar. It's from the same era as md's disk. I will have to go grubbing on the web when I get a chance. I could have sworn that the introduction of 33 and 45 records were very contemporary.
I can't see how. They are vastly different in terms of capacity, and that would be a hard sell for the company selling the 45s with such limited time capacity. Maybe there were 10 or 12" 45rpm instead of the "single" size we all know?
Re many responses ago... Yes, there are Audio DVDs. The sampling rate is something like 96K, though I've only seen them as demos. Given that DVD has caught on as rapidly as it has, it wouldn't surprise me to see Audio DVDs available through the usual retail channels sometime in 1999.
it was re #18: Yep, yep, yep. The latest issue of Stereo Review reports the possibility of a format war, since Audio DVD has a similar competitor-- forget the name. Check it out.
I found a web page: http://ac.acusd.edu/History/recording/notes.html
From the section "War of the Speeds:"
1948 - Columbia introduces on June 21 the first 12-inch 33 1/3 rpm
microgroove LP vinylite record with 23-minute per side
capacity, developed by Peter Goldmark in 1947, using players
made by Philco
1949 - RCA Victor introduces 7-inch 45 rpm micro-groove
"Extended Play" vinylite record and player; later records made
of polystyrene
1951 - "war of the speeds" ends as Victor sells LPs and Columbia
sells 45s.
(end quote)
This source confirms what I recall about the marketing drive behind
the 45 rpm record.
Jim thinks 45s were used for single songs only, and the back side was not even important. They were selling hits. No reason to put two hits on one disk. Why and when did 45s stop? There are also 3" CDs (or were) for single hits, that can be played (?) in a regular CD player. Anyone know more?
That's certainly what 45s came to be used for, though I'm not sure
whether or not that was the original intention. The practice of having
a big hit on one side and a lesser known track or alternate version on
the other gave rise to a number of phrases that persist in the music
industry ("B-sides", "version")
I'll bet that the cassette hurt 45's, since you could take a casette with you anywhere. I'll further bet that the final nail(s) in the 45's coffin was the CD.
BTW, back in the early 1960's, many Chrysler Corporation models had the option of a 45 rpm record player. This option was dropped very quickly when carowners complained about records being broken in the car phonograph.
I have a record, a 33 1/3 whose master was not a typical "master". This one was mastered on 35mm film. It sounds like a CD, even though it's a record. The company is Command Records, and the artist is Doc Sevrenson. Y'all ought to hear it. It's really amazing. I'll bring it to a potluck one of these days.
By the 60's and 70's, almost all record players came with options to play 33, 45, & 78's. For 45's, there was usually some sort of insert that you could pop up or put in, to accomodate the larger hub opening on 45's. 78's were originally designed to use a much larger needle, so would have required a different needle to play correctly. Sometimes you would find 45's sold in magazines and the like. Instead of a rigid disk, you would get a flexible square vinyl recording, bound in the publication, that you could cut out and play. These only had grooves on one side. Some reasons why 78's had pretty much vanished by the 60's. The records had a lot more hiss on them. They wore out much faster. And much of the music had gone out of fashion.
I recall (creaky old voice) record players where a little lever would flip the needle cartridge over, exposing a different needle for playing 78's. I also remember occasional records that were laminated into the back of cereal boxes (The Archies had a few that way) to be cut out and played.
Yep, I remember those. They always sounded horrible and usually warped within a week (if they weren't seriously warped from the beginning..) Maybe that's where I acquired my appreciation of the wacky recording- speed manipulations dub-masters do when they're mixing up the dub version of a popular track.. :-)
Oooohhh...I've got lots of comments on this item, I just don't have time right now to make them all. Damn. :-)
Find the time and make the comments. I remember when omni mentioned his LP mastered from 35mm before. It's too bad I live too far away to hear it.
RE #57 Another example of the cardboard record insert I recall was in a _Mad_ magazine compilation, which was a song by Alfred E. Neuman called "It's A Gas", which had burping sounds as part of the melody. One time I heard the song on WCBN, and that was an industrial strength surprise, IMNSHO.
Send me a tape and I'll copy it for you.
35mm "mag stock" is common in the movie industry. It is basically like 35mm film, coated to act as recording tape. They use it because it is very easy to sync to real movie film during the editing processes.
Not to mention no wow and flutter since it's sprocketed. I'm compiling some comments now....
did anyone remember "the archies" 45's that were on the back of cereal? (honeycombs?)
Yeah! That's exactly what was on the cereal boxes I'm thinking of.
we was so pore we hadda use them boxes fer torlet paypuh.
Yeah, I had a few of those. They sounded horrid.
Re the flip needles, we have a few of the cartridges designed for them, but most of the needles in these cartridges are both sides LP - one side diamond, and the other a softer sapphire that you could use after the diamond broke until you got around to replacing the stylus. You can play 78s with an LP needle and they don't sound a whole lot worse.
Re: resp:7 way back there, If I recall correctly, ADAT uses VHS video tapes?
Something like that. SVHS, probably. There have been other multi-track formats based on video tape.
Yes, it's S-VHS, though people who are really fussy about these kind of things would insist that you not use off-the-shelf SVHS tape in an ADAT. They'd opt, instead, for something branded as ADAT, like Ampex 486 (?). For most of my film/video production classes, I used Ampex 486 as SVHS and always had good luck with it, though.
In a related issue, is there any difference between audio DAT cassettes and the ones used in DAT tape backup drives? They seem to be sold under different labels.
I'm sure you could find people who would say so; I don't have enough knowledge of the issue to say with any authority.
I recall the docs for an HP DAT drive saying that data tapes were more critical, but if they use the same basic encoding I can't see where you'd be willing to sacrifice audio quality anyway.
Cool. Glad to know my memory isn't completely off...
Hhuuuunnnn.... I have a vague memory that there was some mention of differing styles of use, like the data tapes were better if the transport did a lot of seeking back and forth. That would be more consistent with a data tape application (looking for specific files) while an audio tape would tend to run continuously.
re one of the questions about 33 & 1/3rd: I just recently seen where
33&1/3rd came from...the movie industry. When they where first made,
they where a combination of a disk record and reel of film. It was
a little while later that the film optical sound track came out. So
it happened that if you slowed the 12 or 16" record down from 78 to
33&1/3rd, one reel of film would equal one disk of sound. It think
it was a Western Electric system, put into practical use for the
first talkie "The Jazz Singer".
In the beginning of the Rock & Roll era, many rock & roll records
where also released on 78s in additions to 45s. I was once enchanted with
collecting a number of the Rock & Roll hits on 78s. However, by 1959,
the last of new releases where made on 78s--within 10 years the new
formats had taken over the market. In the late 70's Art Crumb and
his Cheap Suite Seranaders released a song on 78, making the last new
release on a 78. Come the 80's, Rhino records did a significant re-issue of
Rock & Roll 78s, to be used in the highly (now prized) 78rpm jukeboxes.
By 1986, Rhino also issued those Jukebox Classics on 2 CDs (that I have).
I remain amazed that the 45/LP takeover only took 10 years, as
it still possible today to get new releases on LP or singles on 45. The
reign of the LP/45 pretty much lasted 40 years, the 78rpm era lasted about
60(?) years, the wax cylinder era about 40 years. We could guess that we
are already half-way thru the era of the CD. However if an Audio DVD
format can be standardized, and backwards compatable players made, the
CD era could end by 2004, only about a 20 year run. I thought the next
step would be a solid-state device, all memory, no mechanical playback,
just RAM--maybe the gigabyte chip?
The first 12" 45 that I saw was Electra records issueing a Harry
Chapin song in the mid-70's--all 8 minutes of it, as a single. Radio
stations only, as they would wear out the smaller groves necessary very
fast. I have a small collection of commercially released SuperSound
Maxi 45rpms: 4 on 45 by The Rolling Stones (Satisfaction, Paint it Black
Jumpin' Jack Flash, Honky Tonk Woman); Elton John Band featuring John
Lennon and the Muscle Shoals Horns (John's last public appearance)
(I Saw Her Standing There, Whatever Gets YOu Through The Night, Lucy In The
Sky with Diamonds) 28th November, 1974; The Stray Cats (Stray Cat Strut,
Built for Speed, Sweet Love On My Mind, Drink That Bottle Down); and
Prince (Little REad Corvette (Full Length), Automatic, International Lover);
all of which are probably British imports that found me at Schoolkids).
Could one download music from the Internet onto hard disk, for a fee? Jim says they are considering this with movies. How big a hard disk would 60 minues of digital music occupy?
I can, right now, download music onto my hard disk for free. I was earlier tonight, but for some reason it wasn't working. It's called MP3, and given the proper promotion could be gigantic in the recording industry.
mp4 is supposedly smaller, better audio quality, and includes its own player.
A curretly available portable mp3 player (the Diamond "Rio") holds an hour of music in 32 Mb of RAM.
to more specifically answer #78:
+ Yes, you can download music from the Internet.
the most popular downloadable music format right now is called MP3,
though other formats exist.
there are many MP3 audio files that amateur artists have made available
for free over the internet, some professional musicians have also made
songs available for free download but there are also many recordings of
professional musicians that are distributed without the permission of
the copyright holder.
The music industry is very concerned about Internet music and is convinced
that widescale piracy of audio files over the internet is costing them big
money, they've been actively trying to hamper the MP3 format (which of
course, the Internet being what it is, has only given MP3 a kind of cool
image which has made it even more popular.
Some artists have begun to experiment with the notion of making their
new work available for download at a fee -- this is primarily popular
with obscure bands who don't have major-label record contracts but a
few of the more technophilic successful artists have also been trying this.
+ How much space an hour of recorded music takes up depends on the sampling
rate at which the music was digitized (higher rate is better but takes up
more space -- "CD quality" sound is sampled at 44.1Khz or 44,100 samples
per second..) and also on the format in which the data is stored -- most
popular audio formats include some sort of data compression because
otherwise the files are *huge*. A full CD's worth of audio data
*uncompressed* is about 660MB (for about 72 minutes of music..)
I download only live audio files which are not commercially available, thus not cutting into the artist's profits. This is, however, mostly coincidental, since the only things I want to hear are live.
The music industry must not be doing such a hot job of quashing the "Rio". I've seen for sale all over the place. It's not as expencive as I thought it would be, either, 'though it ain't cheap.
The MTV special I was alluding to earlier says that the recoil reaction of the music business to MP3 and other soundwave files has actually fueled their appeal, making it seem 'cool'. Hmm..blame it on the old counterculture. Of course, the court rulings helped, too.
The music industry's opposition is *definitely* fueling the popularity of the MP3 format. On the whole it's just really not that convenient for most people. Most internet users don't have the bandwidth, the storage, or the patience to really make it practical.. (Yet!)
There's been a lot of hubbub about how the combination of home-appliance CD burners and the MP3 format will mean a lot more music distribution over the internet. Why does nobody seem to be downloading music and then taping it? I've never tried this, but it seems like it would be as easy as plugging the speaker port of yr computer into the microphone port of a tape recorder. Is there some hidden catch to this, or are people doing it and it's just not getting as much publicity, or what?
It's entirely feasible. I'm burning some of the old IEC demo reels
for the band's former drummer right now.
The problem is it's lower-fidelity, really, and it's somewhat
cumbersome to convert audio input (analogue) to wav or mp3 format.
orinoco, its possible and it has been done. =)
It can be done, but most sound cards yield pretty crappy sound used this way. A good sound card is a bit more expensive. I'd like to see portable players that can read mp3 loaded CDs, so I could accumulate a bunch of tracks on just a few CDs. Granted I no longer travel with a CD player, but when I did I carried about 20 CDs in plastic sleeves and still missed stuff I hadn't brought with me. A really neat idea for Rio type devices (mp3 playback) I read somewhere would be to download several hours of talk (books on tape, NPR, etc) at a less-than-CD level, and have news with you at your convenience.
If audio advances follow PDAs, that's entirely viable. PDA's - about
the same price range - handle the same FLASH PCMCIA cards (usually Minis) and
are considerably more flexible when it comes to downloading and playing
nonstandard formats. You could even record RA for a PDA.
Yeah, I think that the convergence of PDA with music player is only a matter of time (and storage practicality.. it can be done right now but for it to *really* take off a more convenient / cheaper / higher density flash memory technology would help..)
FLASH is pricey now because it's not a popularly viable technology.
Perhaps minidisc readers will prove more popular when redesigned and
repackaged?
What it PDA? I've only ever heard that acronym for Public Display of Affection, and that can't be right.
Personal Digital Assistant.
meaning a handheld computer like a PalmPilot or a Newton or such..
Ah. Right. Good.
The new ones are pretty versatile. Instead of using the PalmPilot's
USR-Dragonball processor, they use a MIPS or SH-3, and run a very
stripped-down OS with some resemblance to Windows called Windows CE (the start
menu is about the only similarity). Although ordinarily I wouldn't be
enthusiastic about yet another computer running Windows, or any Microsoft
product, they do integrate well with existing Windows boxes, and have proven
quite handy.
It's pretty hard to get more efficient than the PalmOS operating system, though. WinCE devices need 3-4x the hardware just to keep up. Besides, I refuse to use a PDA that doesn't have its CPU named after an anime series. </drift>
<drift> Yeah, I love that name too. </drift>
When do we expect portable recorded-music players that play digital music, run on 2 AA cells, and are the size of a Walkman? (Smaller than a CD player).
I've seen small DAT recorder/players; I imagine they're mighty expensive, tho.
And there are a few Mini Disc portables out from Sony and some others. I can't make any promises on what types of batteries they use.
What do you call the Diamond Rio? not sure of how many batteries it requires but it plays mp3s, but from what I hear, its a pain to use ( takes a long time to load files)
Is there music on a chip yet (longer than what the answering machine can store)? I heard predictions about buying chips instead of disks, you just plug them in like memory chips and instant access. Is this still a dream? They have short tunes in cheap children's toys now.
It's probably not feasible to manufacture and distribute decent quality music on any of the ROM technologies we have today and expect it to be size, cost, and power-consumption competitive with other technologies so I wouldn't expect to *literally* buy "music on a chip" any time soon. Downloadable music formats that are stored in portable players with large amounts of flash memory (or some other type of non-volatile writable memory) are available now, however, and we'll find out shortly whether or not the market will embrace them under the current cost, size, and battery- life levels..
The Rio *is* "music on a chip". It is a AA-battery run device that is just a little bigger than a cassette, and uses digital music downloaded from a PC. As far music permanently burned into a chip, why bother? Downloadable music will be *much* cheaper to manufacture and distribute.
Want to sign to that prediction? Things could change in 10 years.
I'd be happy too; as a trend it has already been proved. Remember (well, maybe you wouldn't, not being a computer geek) home computers that had software burned into game-style cartridges? Didn't last at all. Generci media like floppy disks were much cheaper to produce, required less commitment to big minimun orders, etc. CD-ROMs are a slight exception, but they are much cheaper to make than cartridges.
Except that besides the technological forces in this market you also have to account for the paranoia of the music industry which is clearly scared stiff when it comes to network music distribution. It's not at all clear that they'll allow the best technologies to become dominant if they don't feel that they can control them. They've torpedoed recording formats in the past and they'll try to do it again. It might even work..
Most of the MP3-format players also have the advantage of having no
moving parts, and therefore exceptional resistance to shock for those joggers
and four-wheel-drive enthusiasts among us.
The record industry's paranoia about MP3 is well-founded, but it has,
for the most part, backfired, and lead to an increasing public interest in
the format.
Re #110: Did the recording industry have a hand in Canada's new tax on blank digital recording media? ($0.50 Canadian per 15 minutes recording time, I believe.)
I think they were pushing for a similar tax on ordinary cassette tapes in the U.S. when casettes first came out. Does anyone else know more about this, or am I imagining things?
This in Canada is a "levy" - technically not a "tax" :S - which Canada's Copyright Board has been authorized by parliament to place on all media "normally used for recording music" leaving some doubt as to whether data CDs would even qualify. The rate was allowed to go as high as 25 cents per 15 minutes of analog storage, and 50 cents per 15 minutes of digital. The Copyright Board has not yet decided the actual rate, and isn't scheduled to even meet to decide it until later this year (October?). However, whatever rate is decided on is to be retroactive to Jan 1, 1999. News of this cauesed a run on blank CDs in Canada back in December, and several stores to jack up their prices to reflect the full "levy" amount, even though it isn't even certain that CDR blanks will be included. Prices are expected by some people to drop, since a lot of media in stock was manufactured before Jan 1, and thus is exempt even if CDR disks are included.
I just bought a MiniDisc recorder while in Japan... needless to say, they have stuff there we don't have in the US. :( The recorder is about 3x3x.5", cost about US$300. And I brought back 50 discs at a cast of about $2 each. Needless to say, the Powers That Be are not interested in MD in the US. Anyway, it sounds quite good, and is wonderful for recording like gigs, rehearsals, etc. If you search for "minidisc" on Yahoo, you'll find a couple little companies that import from Japan at decent prices.
i have no player, but i do have one minidisc, which i confiscated at a concert from a patron who blatantly ignored my preshow announcement prohibiting recording, both audio and visual, of the show or any part thereof. sonofogun is lucky i didn't throw him out of the theatre. he acquiesced without complaint when i required the recording medium from him. he knew i had him dead to rights. if you want the disc, scott, you're welcome to it. (i'll have to blank it first) do these things automatically format the media, or is that just an option for the user?
Sure, I'll take the disc. But you can't blank it unless you have an MD recorder, since the medium is magneto-optical and is therefore immune to magnetic fields except when heated by a laser beam... (I'd bring my recorder over and erase it in your presence, if need be)
The 50 in question are...blank disks I assume, right?
Right, blanks. Much cheaper than in the US.
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Really? Where? I've done well with rebates on CD-R blanks but need to buy more blanks
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I was at Best Buy today, looking for cheap Palm Pilots (old one is getting weird). Out of curiosity I looked for MiniDisc...and found it! Sure, it was isolated off in its own little section, but they did have some decent stuff. The same Sony recorder I bought was available for $350, and they had quite good prices on blank media (10 for $25). Not sure how much they actually stocked, and of course no choice of colors. There was also a small rack of prerecorded MDs, containing all the big sellers. I bought a copy of Pearl Jam's "Yield", at $9.99 (all the MDs appeared to be that price... not a bad deal if you want the hits and have an MD player). Cassettes are now strictly for the car and the Walkman (which gets used rarely enough). I've hated the loss of sound from cassette for a long time, and MD is a very happy thing to have. Especially when I record my own stuff (yes, I didn't buy the MD recorder just to rip CDs)!
So the copies of Crimson's "USA" and "Islands" that mcnally sent me arrived today - (thanks!) - and I'm thinking of trying to burn a CD copy of "USA," since it's no longer in print and I don't like the idea of playing a tape into the ground that I can't run out and buy a new copy of when it dies. But I've heard that burning copies of analog recordings is hard to do. Has anyone here had any success at that? Any suggestions?
The software for some reason started out by showing me the opening posts in this topic from back in January, to which I'm moved to respond: 1) I have held, in my own hand, commercially released vinyl acetate cylinders from circa 1910. They existed. 2) The particular speeds at which records spun, as opposed to other similar speeds, were chosen because they happened to fit common motor/gear ratios. 3) I've never heard of burning a vinyl recording (not all forms of oil burn easily), but you can sure melt one slightly, with amusing playback results. Even more amusing playback can be obtained by drilling small holes in a CD. A friend of mine tried that with some dreadful thing he'd been given as a present.
uhm, I'll bear that in mind. thanks....
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