Music CDs - Hidden Tracks - What else have we forgotten after moving to streaming services?

[kingrollo]

Still buy CDs here. General second hand stuff. I don't do streaming, but have bought a few downloads over the last few years. I miss the sleeve notes, song-writer details, and info' on who played what instrument.

I still buy CDs as well. I like the idea that once cd is in the slot your are invested for the length of the CD - streaming you've often got the phone in your hand - so quickly shift onto the next track. By sticking with a CD you get to hear tracks that don't grab you on first play - but you grow to like them - and of course they are always there if you forget about them - and then go back to them.

Or maybe I'm just old....

 

[Dadam]

It is not just we who forget. When archaeologists dig up a site in Mesopotamia there is a good chance some cuneiform material will be exposed — inscriptions, clay tablets, seals and so on. From these we get to know a lot about people we can never meet and can piece together elements of our own history which otherwise go unknown. But in places such as central Turkey and the Indus valley there is evidence of civilizations which do not appear to have had any form of writing. Much can be inferred from architecture and artifacts but, in the end, we know little about how these peoples thought and felt, what they found important and what they did or did not know. When the electricity fails, streaming moves us from the vocal to the silent, from the literate to the illiterate from historical facts to mythical guesswork. At the moment we have a rich mixture; but give it a century or two and how much will be left for some future generation of interplanetary travellers piecing together the evolution of the universe from the remains of a depopulated earth? Does it matter? If what you are streaming matters, it matters.

I went to a very interesting British Computer Society lecture about 20 years ago entitled "Keeping Digital Data Forever". It's a problem on multiple levels.
Access to old media readers (e.g 5" floppy drives, DAT tapes) gets harder over time.
Physical media can degrade. Magnetic media can demagnetise, the plastic substrate of CDs breaks up.
Older encoding formats could be lost.
One example given was the electronic Domesday book from the 1980s. This was meant to be the digital equivalent of the original from 1086, a thousand years later, but it used 12" laserdiscs and the storage format was proprietary. Digital Domesday Book lasts 15 years not 1000

A lot of backed up data nowadays is encrypted and, obviously, the encryption keys are not usually stored with the media.
If we manage not to blow ourselves up or send civilisation back to the stone age, then 100 years in the future computing power may well have advanced to the point where decryption of this is trivial but if not, it's going to be lost forever.

Data is becoming increasingly ephemeral. Everything has to be immediate. People just don't think of what might happen even 10 years in the future and simply don't want to think about 50-100, i.e when they're dead.

 

[Badger_Boom]

...If we manage not to blow ourselves up or send civilisation back to the stone age, then 100 years in the future computing power may well have advanced to the point where decryption of this is trivial but if not, it's going to be lost forever.

According to friends who worked at the Arts and Humanities Data Service the real problem is being able to access old(er) data to keep it accessible long enough to reach the point when storage size becomes trivial. Like electronic Domesday Book, a lot of important (to someone) data has already been lost.

 

[Ming the Merciless]

have never used a CD at all

Still got all my LPs.

 

[Ming the Merciless]

I went to a very interesting British Computer Society lecture about 20 years ago entitled "Keeping Digital Data Forever". It's a problem on multiple levels.
Access to old media readers (e.g 5" floppy drives, DAT tapes) gets harder over time.
Physical media can degrade. Magnetic media can demagnetise, the plastic substrate of CDs breaks up.
Older encoding formats could be lost.
One example given was the electronic Domesday book from the 1980s. This was meant to be the digital equivalent of the original from 1086, a thousand years later, but it used 12" laserdiscs and the storage format was proprietary. Digital Domesday Book lasts 15 years not 1000

A lot of backed up data nowadays is encrypted and, obviously, the encryption keys are not usually stored with the media.
If we manage not to blow ourselves up or send civilisation back to the stone age, then 100 years in the future computing power may well have advanced to the point where decryption of this is trivial but if not, it's going to be lost forever.

Data is becoming increasingly ephemeral. Everything has to be immediate. People just don't think of what might happen even 10 years in the future and simply don't want to think about 50-100, i.e when they're dead.

Why don’t they just buy a second hand laser disc player?

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/286166494166?itmmeta=01JEXZREH1E122X2TM1N423HT6&hash=item42a0da2bd6:g:67AAAOSw5r9nONez&itmprp=enc:AQAJAAAA4Mxmj+iGvOveHXEBClPb29gruGB2kylaH7EM4z4PVCNkjCO1xSTOxTluO5wBL5LaxHG1Qyf9Wt3DGRNOLC0rjXz7lLPGHh2SYJGyACzmAyOD6KrpmLm3yPGpScqpwqjtLR6P9R8O0edxjoIYobYyFYQV5m6b2TSLoDQ7w49IfAnSS2NL3WYMUZdxrnrm0Vtcb8ppPYKgoRbtXbEK7zAv4e3ghjZGYrlU7a+2eMgHbz7xwyWFI3e/bl5PAnZjAN/wxLehwaPpfBQIDaJs2ZFF6AuYDqedoMY3IDSYzi36gf2s|tkp:Bk9SR8zo4b_3ZA

 

[Dadam]

Why don’t they just buy a second hand laser disc player?

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/286166494166?itmmeta=01JEXZREH1E122X2TM1N423HT6&hash=item42a0da2bd6:g:67AAAOSw5r9nONez&itmprp=enc:AQAJAAAA4Mxmj+iGvOveHXEBClPb29gruGB2kylaH7EM4z4PVCNkjCO1xSTOxTluO5wBL5LaxHG1Qyf9Wt3DGRNOLC0rjXz7lLPGHh2SYJGyACzmAyOD6KrpmLm3yPGpScqpwqjtLR6P9R8O0edxjoIYobYyFYQV5m6b2TSLoDQ7w49IfAnSS2NL3WYMUZdxrnrm0Vtcb8ppPYKgoRbtXbEK7zAv4e3ghjZGYrlU7a+2eMgHbz7xwyWFI3e/bl5PAnZjAN/wxLehwaPpfBQIDaJs2ZFF6AuYDqedoMY3IDSYzi36gf2s|tkp:Bk9SR8zo4b_3ZA

It's not just the disc apparently it's the encoding of the data. Reading on wiki there have been a few projects over the years to produce other reader hardware and/or preserve original hardware so it's not completely lost. It's just a combination of obsolescent standards, expensive and therefore rare hardware plus proprietary formats all came together for a project to celebrate the original Domesday book and capture the information for the next 1000 years, became almost unreadable after 15.

 

[further]

I have been listening to vinyl all afternoon, some of it from the sixties.

 

[Juan Kog]

I still buy 78's and the occasional wax cylinder.

You do surprise me I thought Lord @Drago would have a personal Minstrel.

 

[wiggydiggy]

It's not just the disc apparently it's the encoding of the data. Reading on wiki there have been a few projects over the years to produce other reader hardware and/or preserve original hardware so it's not completely lost. It's just a combination of obsolescent standards, expensive and therefore rare hardware plus proprietary formats all came together for a project to celebrate the original Domesday book and capture the information for the next 1000 years, became almost unreadable after 15.

In more modern terms of this for music I used to have a really nice Sony MP3 player, unfortunately it used a proprietary Sony encoding system that was abandoned and that was that. Shame as they were lovely players.

 

[Dadam]

In more modern terms of this for music I used to have a really nice Sony MP3 player, unfortunately it used a proprietary Sony encoding system that was abandoned and that was that. Shame as they were lovely players.

ATRAC or something wasn't it? It didn't appeal to me either due to that proprietary encoding. I was really into MP3 and quite an early adopter. I read a study that 99% (or some large proportion) of people couldn't tell the difference between 256kbps mp3 and CD played back on £10k worth of audio kit.

Maz has 'Tidal' on her i-Pad bluetoothed to a Marshall mini speaker thing but the sound quality ain't great, just a noise.

I thought the whole USP of Tidal was it's all lossless encoded music. Not much point playing it on a mini bluetooth speaker.

 

[T4tomo]

Still got all my LPs.

Me too, and some of my sister's, but don't tell her....

 

[wiggydiggy]

ATRAC or something wasn't it? It didn't appeal to me either due to that proprietary encoding. I was really into MP3 and quite an early adopter. I read a study that 99% (or some large proportion) of people couldn't tell the difference between 256kbps mp3 and CD played back on £10k worth of audio kit.


I thought the whole USP of Tidal was it's all lossless encoded music. Not much point playing it on a mini bluetooth speaker.

That's right, I'd stuck with MiniDisc for years then bought this Sony MP3 in the mid 00s. Loved it but over time learned that everything I was ripping was pretty much locked to this device. Atrac wasn't a bad format IIRC but it wasn't going to come out on top.

 

[raleighnut]

I thought the whole USP of Tidal was it's all lossless encoded music. Not much point playing it on a mini bluetooth speaker.

Maz bought it so she could sit in the summerhouse and listen to music, theoretically we could connect it to the HiFi but she needs to buy an i-Pad to USB lead so that ain't gonna happen anytime soon.

 

[tyred]

I patronise a bard to write flattering sonnets about me.

None of them there new-fangled wax cylinder for me.

 

[Drago]

Pah. I drum on my cave wall with bones while grunting a pre-language lyric.

It's sounds rather like the Sex Pistols.