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!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!
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 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.
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.
I had a Samsung MP3 player circa 2007-ish. Very nice; aluminum body, glass display, real buttons. Cost a pretty penny, too.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 know we miss the physical disc to play music but you have go to admit, streaming music is so much more convenient.