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

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Electric_Andy

Heavy Metal Fan
Location
Plymouth
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

Legendary Member
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

Ginger biscuits and cheddar
Location
Leafy Surrey
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!
 

Badger_Boom

Veteran
Location
York
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

Über Member
Location
SW Leeds
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.
 
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!!
 
OP
OP
wiggydiggy

wiggydiggy

Legendary Member
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

Veteran
Location
York
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.
 

Conrad_K

unindicted co-conspirator
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 had a Samsung MP3 player circa 2007-ish. Very nice; aluminum body, glass display, real buttons. Cost a pretty penny, too.

It didn't take long to learn to hate it. If you paused playback, it would jump back slightly when you resumed. Which was probably nice for 4-minute song tracks, but in a single-file audiobook it would jump you back 20 or 30 minutes. And you couldn't just fast-forward - it technically did that, but it was at something line 1.25x normal speed, so slow it was useless.

It charged via USB. But only if it "recognized" the PC or charger. Sometimes it would, sometimes it wouldn't. There was no indication if it was actually working until you unplugged the cable. Great to find out just before going on-shift. And as an extra FU, unplugging the charge cable reset playback of whatever track you were listening to back to the beginning. Great for a 10-hour audiobook and no practical fast forward.

It also wanted to randomize playback, even with "random" turned off. It didn't care what the file name was, or what the tags said, or what the cue sheet said. And if you had more than one book, each in a separate directory, sometimes it would grab a track from a different book and play that one instead of the next one in the current directory.

The replacement player from 2010 or so was much better, except it will also occasionally play some random track instead of the next one.
 

Electric_Andy

Heavy Metal Fan
Location
Plymouth
I agree it's far more convenient to stream, but I do miss a shelf full of CDs to look at sometimes. Fine if you have the space (which I used to when I lived with my parents) but now space is more at a premium, I'm glad I don't have to store them all
 
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