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

[wiggydiggy]

Some companies now actively limit bandwidth on their wi fi for streaming, so even having wi fi near doesn't guarantee you can use it (or is secure!).

Although hands up I don't carry a Discman around anymore, it's all MP3 files on my phone.

 

[cyberknight]

you cant play streaming music backwards and find out freddy is the devil

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIRFkpQHMYw

 

[rogerzilla]

At the next house I will use CDs again. They are all ripped but I've bever found a wholly satisfactory hi-fi media player that sounds good, does gapless playback and doesn't cost a fortune. I had a Cambridge Audio one for years but it sounded muddy and they stopped supporting it so it was useless for Internet radio. All these modern connected devices can be turned into landfill at the whim of the manufacturer, and frequently are.

 

[wiggydiggy]

At the next house I will use CDs again. They are all ripped but I've bever found a wholly satisfactory hi-fi media player that sounds good, does gapless playback and doesn't cost a fortune. I had a Cambridge Audio one for years but it sounded muddy and they stopped supporting it so it was useless for Internet radio. All these modern connected devices can be turned into landfill at the whim of the manufacturer, and frequently are.

Its one of the reasons (forced obsolesence) I've never adopted any kind of digital music service, its a bit like my gaming collection. If I don't have it in my hand I don't own it.

 

[campagman]

My car is 03 plate and has a tape player. I have a few tapes that I change, when I think about it. The speaker on the drivers side has a dodgy connection, just need to hit the door panel occasionally.

 

[Electric_Andy]

The other thing that I realized today when my SS got an mp3 player, even though we've been paying for streaming services for years, you still can't copy or the music across. Well, you can, but I'm not going to ask him how he did it legally or for free

 

[rogerzilla]

I remember being astonished bow hard it was to get anything onto an iPod unless you bought music (for the third time, probably) from iTunes. The iTunes software was appallingly buggy bloatware and strongly resisted any attempts to use self-ripped MP3 files. I have studiously avoided all things Apple since.

 

[lazybloke]

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

The bbc did have the 1980s Domesday Discs on their website. I finally got round to looking at it about 2005 and was quite cross that my contribution had been heavily truncated!

 

[raleighnut]

The bbc did have the 1980s Domesday Discs on their website. I finally got round to looking at it about 2005 and was quite cross that my contribution had been heavily truncated!

Does it now read 'Mostly Harmless' ?

 

[Badger_Boom]

I remember being astonished bow hard it was to get anything onto an iPod unless you bought music (for the third time, probably) from iTunes. The iTunes software was appallingly buggy bloatware and strongly resisted any attempts to use self-ripped MP3 files. I have studiously avoided all things Apple since.

I only ever used it (and still do) to transfer CDs onto my iPod and it did that well enough for me.

 

[Dadam]

I remember being astonished bow hard it was to get anything onto an iPod unless you bought music (for the third time, probably) from iTunes. The iTunes software was appallingly buggy bloatware and strongly resisted any attempts to use self-ripped MP3 files. I have studiously avoided all things Apple since.

Never owned an iPod but I've had apple devices (phones, tablets and last couple of years Macbooks) since 2011. iTunes was a slight pain in getting my 30Gb of (mainly self-ripped) MP3s onto the phone in that it wasn't just a drag and drop file operation, you had to select specific albums and then "sync" but wasn't hard in any way.

 

[wiggydiggy]

The Sony 'pebble' MP3 player I bought (first one) had it's own software, and Sony's proprietary ATRAC encoding. Needless to say I wasn't impressed! It also was absolutely dog slow with large playlists, it could lock into trying to browse ones for up to 2 mins sometimes.

I will say from a design POV the player was very stylish, something I think Sony had always done well.

 

[Time Waster]

Just seen this thread. Do you remember those music rags that would tell you about a bonus track on a certain band's CD only to hear it you had to keep playing the CD for what seems like hours?!!! I remember one and it played for 30 minutes before I gave up and I still have not heard that supposedly free bonus track. I am not totally convinced it was not a practical joke. I mean all they needed was burning the spare space on a CD with white noise and some sucker but keen fan will listen to it all to hear that rumoured free, bonus track!!

 

[wiggydiggy]

Just seen this thread. Do you remember those music rags that would tell you about a bonus track on a certain band's CD only to hear it you had to keep playing the CD for what seems like hours?!!! I remember one and it played for 30 minutes before I gave up and I still have not heard that supposedly free bonus track. I am not totally convinced it was not a practical joke. I mean all they needed was burning the spare space on a CD with white noise and some sucker but keen fan will listen to it all to hear that rumoured free, bonus track!!

Yes! Those are exactly the tracks I was thinking of when I started this.

Two that I'll always remember are on "Marilyn Manson - Antichrist Superstar" and "Queen - Mad In Heaven". The MM one is track 99 and can be skipped to, I found that whilst recording the CD to Minidisc and wondered why I had 80 or so blank songs, the Queen one was a surprise as it comes at the end of the album and an extended period of silence. I think it's Freddy Mercury saying 'Fab' at the end.

I don't really do streaming, but I'd be interested to know if the hidden track has evolved into something else on those platforms.

 

[Badger_Boom]

Yes! Those are exactly the tracks I was thinking of when I started this.

Two that I'll always remember are on "Marilyn Manson - Antichrist Superstar" and "Queen - Mad In Heaven". The MM one is track 99 and can be skipped to, I found that whilst recording the CD to Minidisc and wondered why I had 80 or so blank songs, the Queen one was a surprise as it comes at the end of the album and an extended period of silence. I think it's Freddy Mercury saying 'Fab' at the end.

I don't really do streaming, but I'd be interested to know if the hidden track has evolved into something else on those platforms.

My favourite one is Kuwait City which was a bonus track at the end of the CD version of Bang! by World Party. I must have been listening to it for a year or more before I left the disc running while I was working on something and was surprised after about 20 minutes by a spoof Beach Boys number about the voracious activities of US contractors after the first Gulf War.