Something tragic I just realized about the death of the CD

no more hidden tracks

mysterious untagged mp3s>>>>>>>>>>>>>whatever u were talkin baout

Those are good, too

That sure is a lot of greater than signs.

I didn't realize CDs didn't exist anymore. someone in Best Buy's corporate HQ is gonna fry for selling me fake music!

Are CDs about to die in the same way that vinyl did in the late 80s?

At least we'll still have Search and Destroy threads.

Track 69 - Eurotrash Girl

Hidden tracks always sucked, and they suck even more in the MP3 age where you've got to edit them into their own track!

"This song's so great we hid it after 30 minutes of silence"

xp at least in the MP3 age you can delete the shitty hidden track.

"This song's so great that you'll be happy when it wakes you up after you fall asleep during the 30 minutes of silence"

The CD is not dead, but the hidden track may as well be.

ppl still listen to music?

xxp see Pulp's 'This Is Hardcore'

Just separate the last track and the hidden track with 10 separate 10-second tracks of silence.

i pretty much delete any "iTunes bonus tracks" which are invariably shitty

no more sneaky trick cuts either like the incredible loud-whispered "What do you think you're doing" at the tail end of Ooberman's original Shorley Wall e.p. which brought about a near cardiac arrest on first 'listen' long after i'd forgotten the CD was still running.

Fellini.Kuti, I shake my fist at you. This is the worst, most ungodly shit ever.

i pretty much delete any "iTunes bonus tracks" which are invariably shitty

could name endless examples where the bonus tracks (or even leaks that never made the album) are superior to the "regular" tracks. many artists/labels have a v weird attitude to their strengths.

also w/r/t the premise of this thread, stop this bs faux nostalgia

Eg, pretty much every bonus track on Bionic is better than the album proper.

I do like bs faux nostalgia though.

no more sneaky trick cuts either like the incredible loud-whispered "What do you think you're doing" at the tail end of Ooberman's original Shorley Wall e.p. which brought about a near cardiac arrest on first 'listen' long after i'd forgotten the CD was still running.

omg @ this

i was going to put a hidden track on my ilx anthology mix (that I'm still making)
now it won't be much of a surprise

did you know that some bands had hidden tracks where you rewind the first track?

no but I just stuck a noodle up my nose

I don't like where this is going

Its not like CDs started this either; I have a copy of a Bauhaus album on cassette (lol, shoosh) and there's a spoken word thing after about 20 mins of silence at the end of side 2. Scared the SHIT out of me when I first heard it.

Fuckin goths.

I hate that shit. I can't remember which cd it was but one of them made me fly out of my chair for the exact reason described above. maybe Pig Destroyer?

I also remember when I was a kid I had the Kokomo/Tutti Frutti cassingle (from "Cocktail"), and of course "Tutti Frutti" begins with Little Richard's shout and because I could never mentally time when he was going to come in, everytime I played that side of the cassingle I got startled and jumped everytime he started singing.

Lordy. Cassingles were the worst idea ever.

I still have a whole bunch of them from childhood. including Kriss Kross "I Missed the Bus"

also "Batdance/200 Balloons" by Prince, Coolio's "Fantastic Voyage", Ice Cube "You Know How We Do It/2 'n The Mornin"

They always seemed such a waste of a casette. :/

Just tape some random whooshy noises over it, hand-design the packages et voila -- chillwave.

just tape some random whooshy noises over it, bankrupt the label et voila -- Loveless.

bingo

Raggett smash.

Just tape some random whooshy noises over it, hand-design the packages et voila -- chillwave.

― Ned Raggett, Sunday, October 3, 2010 11:20 PM (11 minutes ago)

Motorpsycho - Another Ugly EP
Hidden Tracks:
6. Deathprod's barely audible mellotron interlude 2:19 (it really is barely audible)
7. Motorhead Mama 3:23

Best Hidden Tracks
CD Secret Tracks Hidden Before Track 01 0:00
Hidden tracks on CDs, S&D, CoD

I am aware that there are stores like best buy that still sell CDs, and I have bought three new CDs myself this year, but I've bought as many cassette-only releases and substantially more vinyl, and then nearly everything else was mp3. CDs are dead in the same way that Rome fell, or something. It is gradual, so much so that it's still there, but the glory days are over.

This thread was inspired by listening to mp3s of cLOUDDEAD's Ten, which has like 15 minutes of silence at the end and then a hidden track that sounds a lot like No Age to me. I never really gave it much mind because it was short and so far after the end, but it seemed like a minor epiphany the other night. And then I realized that that record, from 2004, is probably the most recent thing I have that has a hidden track. And to me, that is a big harbinger of the fall of the format, that people stopped making their albums around the quirks of CDs. Hidden tracks, I figure, were largely the result of bands who grew up on vinyl albums recording their 10 or 12 songs for the album, and then realizing there was still 40 minutes of space on the disc, so they played around in the studio or did some cover, and then they hid it from you, so you could feel like you'd found some rare 7" or something. Most are terrible, sure, as are most rare 7"s in my experience, but it was something I used to encounter a lot and now I don't. I suddenly missed it and thought I'd share. Fuck you guys.

Also, I had a Korn cd as a child that had 12 1-second tracks of silence before the first song, which began on track 13, so I would listen to my CD player hiccup for a bit before the music started. I feel like Merzbow or someone should have made a CD that just manipulated your CD player into making its own noise. That would be neat.

could name endless examples where the bonus tracks (or even leaks that never made the album) are superior to the "regular" tracks. many artists/labels have a v weird attitude to their strengths.

― لوووووووووووووووووووول (lex pretend), Sunday, October 3, 2010 6:58 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

ENDLESS EXAMPLES

i'm not talking leaks, i'm talking officially label-sanctioned iTunes "bonus tracks"

Rewindies never took off, really, did they?

yeah yeah yeahs' itunes/ japan-only/ whatever the hell it was bonus track 'Faces' was better than most of 'It's Blitz'.
whoever in their right mind thought this should be left off all official worldwide versions of last year's YYYs albums and singles is clearly insane:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDyAR0C6CBM

I feel like Merzbow or someone should have made a CD that just manipulated your CD player into making its own noise. That would be neat.

seek: gescom's minidisc.

"I Cannot Be Played on CD Player X"

for whatever reason my copy of Candlemass's Epicus Doomicus Metallicus has never worked on my home stereo system's CD player, despite working on all computer cd players (even those 10 or more years old), and my various car cd players.

Has anyone done anything really inventive with the MP3? It seems like it would be well suited to releasing stuff Zaireeka-style, where you line up 20 MP3 files in different players on your computer and let chaos commence.

First I read

Just tape some random whooshy noises over it, hand-design the packages et voila -- chillwave.

― Ned Raggett, Sunday, October 3, 2010 6:20 PM (Yesterday)

and I was like "lol haha"

and then I read

just tape some random whooshy noises over it, bankrupt the label et voila -- Loveless.

― horton whores a ho (crüt), Sunday, October 3, 2010 6:29 PM (Yesterday)

and I was like "LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL"

(the end)

Oh crap - I gave away all my CDs a wee while ago thinking they'd never be worth anything in future.

No, I like the fact it's over - an MP3 player never stops playing

this isn't true.

you sound like the alan partridge audiobook on this thread. it ended tonight on my iphone and stopped playing. i put on something else as quickly as possible.

There are handy tools online, like Last.FM and Spotify and YouTube recommendations to encourage passive music discovery, but none of them are as accessible as simply having the TV on

so inaccessible that dense, lazy, prefabricated sentences about these "handy tools" sound less homely than the bloody good ones about the tv.

A casual music listener wouldn't necessarily go on YouTube to do this, but when it's on TV straight after Eastenders, there's a captive audience made to sit through songs they do and don't like.

there are music shows on tv though, just not totp. the most popular tv show in recent history which gets viewing figures people thought would never be clocked up again in the uk is a music show.

i'm going to stop cos i can't post hilariously about deep space 9 and i'll just appear mean, but trust me when i tell you these "casual listeners" you romanticise about while patronising as total luddites don't really exist.

people who don't use the net for music now listen to utter fucking dreck that is spooned out anywhere and everywhere.

My dad isn't exactly searching out new music and he mostly listens to satellite radio while driving

^^^

Thats my dad.

also my dad, who hilariously went through a 3 year phase of listening to house and techno when he got satellite radio

my dad has mysteriously gravitated to the "indie rock" style station

or I guess I should say "alternative rock"

a lot of dads like indie rock cos it mostly sounds like shit from 30 years ago

sorry, 40 years ago, getting old

Indie rock sounds like Kraftwerk?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ag9y6_LfdyM

Think there is a lot of alt-rock sounding kids music, often made by people with formerly sticky-uppy hair, exploiting this parental weakness.

My dad seems to be fixated on the Grateful Dead satellite station.

his dealer must be doing right by him.

Hey ronan, glad to know casual listeners who don't buy digital music downloads (my parents, my brothers and sisters, my girlfriend and many friends for example) 'don't really exist'. I must have my definition of 'patronise' all wrong because apparently saying 'some people would rather buy music from a shop' is patronising, but 'people who don't buy music online listen to
Spoonfed dreck' isn't. Going on to reference tv shows like xfactor as a natural replacement for totp isn't really an argument against such dreck now is it? And when I said 'mp3 players never stop playing' I think you know what I mean. I won't go so far as to patronise you with an explanation.

And when I said 'mp3 players never stop playing' I think you know what I mean.

I have no idea FYI

Obv if I treat my mp3 player like a cassette, i.e. load one album into the playlist, listen to it from beginning to end without skips or random, it will stop playing; but all too often it's tempting to load up a huge number of files, hit random repeat etc, which leads to a near-perpetualisation of music until I switch it off. I'm not saying 'mp3s play and play and play until time itself collapses',

sometimes i put one cd on after another until i switched them off.

why are you so weirdly beholden to formats? do you have no agency over your consumption of music at all? if you don't want something to carry on playing then switch it off.

Sorry, I must be mistaken in thinking that this is what this thread's about? Formats and the differences between them? how they affect our listening and purchasing habits? Is that not what we're talking about? I'm typing this from an iPhone while listening to music. There's no problem with that. It is different from listening to cassette or vinyl or cd. There's no secret there.

you can pick and choose tracks on cd or vinyl too. on cassette if you can be bothered.

like as soon as cd players existed they came equipped with features to avoid playing the cd from beginning to end then stopping.

Yes of course you can, and that is one step towards the Tralfamadorian 4D listening of the digital music experience. If I wanted I could get a dozen albums on tape, cue them up so that each one is at the start of my favourite track, and then play a little DJ set in the sequence of my choosing. Doesn't mean I would. The ability to mix and match tunes has always been there, but it's infinitely easier when working with digital. As Schlump said upthread, there's a difference between how one can use a format and how one does use it. MP3 players and programmes actively encourage the building of playlists and the ability to sculpt your own bespoke listening experience.
This is really good in most cases, but in rediscovering the LP, my experience is that it's quite unburdening (not to mention time saving) to let the sequence of one side of an album play its course. I find myself, and others in the room, interacting with the music more than if I'd put together a playlist or randomised my collection until it becomes this flatscreen technicolour blur of styles and sounds. The fact there's a physical object with attached artwork being dragged across a needle is part of it. The fact I don't have the option to change the music through a mere click of a button is another. Skipping through a randomly ordered playlist is a bit like running through a zoo or a museum at top speed. The lions are asleep - BORING! The chinchillas aren't moving - NEXT! Sometimes I find myself spending minutes skipping through looking for the ultimate track simply to complement my walk to the railway station. So in this way I felt a remarkable relief, satisfaction maybe, at the concluding clunk of the record needle lifting itself back into its holder at the end of 'Gold Dust Woman'.

Anyway, I've said all this already and it's only going to make this thread all the more boring to those who've read it all the way through.

my experience is that it's quite unburdening (not to mention time saving) to let the sequence of one side of an album play its course. I find myself, and others in the room, interacting with the music more than if I'd put together a playlist or randomised my collection until it becomes this flatscreen technicolour blur of styles and sounds. The fact there's a physical object with attached artwork being dragged across a needle is part of it. The fact I don't have the option to change the music through a mere click of a button is another. Skipping through a randomly ordered playlist is a bit like running through a zoo or a museum at top speed.

as long as you recognise this all about your subjective experiences and beliefs, and almost nothing to do with technology or any other objective criteria.

the advent of the vinyl album didn't dictate the listening experience, a certain kind of listener chose to dictate to the album, rather

multi disc CD randomisers are as old as the CD player, what limitations existed were only temporary delays in tech, not in the desires of listeners.

the sedate, reverential plod thru the museum of dead culture was only ever one way of approaching sound - an aberration really, pop is speed, the Sacred Album is just another killing and pinning butterflies instinct

I've said it so many times in this thread, but I'll say it again: I'm not championing one way of listening over the other. I don't prefer one way over the other. But I will maintain these are different listening experiences on the whole. It's very very easy to put your entire music collection into Winamp and hit random (or make a playlist of only your favourite tunes or whatever) - in fact it's actively encouraged. It's not the same as putting three CDs into a changer or listening to a tape in a linear fashion (maybe with a few FFWDs and RWDs), or dropping a needle on a record. I'm not talking up the album format, I'm just saying that I'd forgotten how liberating it can be to have that path marked out for you.
This goes double for a mixtape given by a friend, where the order and sequencing has been preordained for a reason. As for the album, I don't necessarily see it as sacred, but is it not the case that the sequencing of an album is often part of the artist's vision, as much as the drum patterns, lyrics and instrumental arrangements? Sometimes a track has a particular resonance for being placed between two others.
Another analogy would be that of a music festival. Oftentimes the weekend ends and I look back at the programme and think "Fuck, if only I could have a time machine so I could go back and watch all the bands I missed". I wish that I'd been able to witness each band at every angle in every crowd during every set - to magically appear and disappear at various points in space-time so I could squeeze every drop from the performances. But as it happens, I live a linear lifestyle and don't own a time machine, so my real festival experience is waylaid by mundane, time-wasting necessities like trudging through mud, waiting for friends, going to the toilet etc. But that's kind of what a festival is about, no? Most of my festival memories aren't of watching the bands, they're of the happy accidents that occur along the way.

dog latin you do realise you can listen to full albums on mp3s in itunes, right? i have done it once today already! and am midway through another! i also cherrypicked a few random tracks in between them.

how is randomising itunes encouraged? i have literally never done it

Oh it's very easy, there's a button I believe.

it sometimes even gets switched on by mistake

you should try it. it makes you feel like Doctor Who.

Another analogy would be that of a music festival. Oftentimes the weekend ends and I look back at the programme and think "Fuck, if only I could have a time machine so I could go back and watch all the bands I missed". I wish that I'd been able to witness each band at every angle in every crowd during every set - to magically appear and disappear at various points in space-time so I could squeeze every drop from the performances. But as it happens, I live a linear lifestyle and don't own a time machine, so my real festival experience is waylaid by mundane, time-wasting necessities like trudging through mud, waiting for friends, going to the toilet etc. But that's kind of what a festival is about, no? Most of my festival memories aren't of watching the bands, they're of the happy accidents that occur along the way.

I'm pretty sure not many happy accidents happen while you're switching the sides of a cassette or vinyl though. To user you festival analogy, it's like if you were enjoying to a nice gig in a tent, then in the middle of the gig you're all of a sudden teleported outside the tent, and you have to walk back in to listen to the rest of the gig.

Haha, true that. Although I wasn't really referring to the physical flipping over of a tape or disc, rather the linear fashion in which they tend to be listened to. This is opposed to the free-roaming, pan-temporal existence of the digital listener who has the ability to pop up and disappear at various places around the festival site at will. This allows her to witness every act at the festival in the order she chooses, but it also eradicates the more undesirable moments of the festival that nevertheless make up the wider tapestry of the festival experience. Why struggle in the rain with a heavy rucksack when you can skip straight through to the moment Orbital play 'Chime'?

for real; it's that the ideal, most rewarding sequence of events isn't necessarily all the best things, all of the time; there is mood generation & slow-release reward elicited by listening to a whole thing; there is the value of being exposed to something that comes on, decided by an external source (like sequencing) rather than by following your own internal reasoning & matching up with your mood. the festival analogy is excellent; you have an entirely different sort of experience - broader, deeper, with a greater range between good & bad and encountering different things - traipsing around than you would receiving various specific acts are individual spectacles. the latter would obviously be great!, & i love being able to hear the thing i want to hear when i want to hear it. just i probably found a lot of those things when i wasn't in control, wasn't expecting them or didn't know that it was them i was looking for.

If I wanted I could get a dozen albums on tape, cue them up so that each one is at the start of my favourite track, and then play a little DJ set in the sequence of my choosing. Doesn't mean I would.

lol I did this

sometimes you would even copy all of those songs onto another tape, creating what was colloquially known as a "mixtape"

when I said 'mp3 players never stop playing' I think you know what I mean

i genuinely don't! the ipod, prob the most popular mp3 player, stops playing at the end of an album. so no, i actually am not being willfully stupid, i 100 per cent do not know what you mean.

some people listen only in shuffle mode

some people put on another cd when one ends!

others listen to the radio all day...

a child was struck by a car in county louth in 1941

please send what you can

I've got some Hungarian Mangalica paprika sausage - what should I do with it? Stew it with peppers? Fry it with white beans? Soup? Goulash? I'm at a loss.

eat it from one end to the other, then stop

No, you should take small bites from random areas of the sausage until you are full.

i'm sure that's not what the butcher intended

The birth of the sausage is the death of the butcher.

It's a shame people don't share sausages in the same way as they used to.

Technically, my Mangalica sausage is in two parts, like a mini string of sausages. So I could either give one half away, or save half for later, or else endure the fascistic compulsion to consume one half of it first and then get up, put the second half in the frying pan, and then eat that.

No, you should take small bites from random areas of the sausage until you are full.

― jon /via/ chi 2.0, Thursday, 3 November 2011 21:20 (Yesterday) Bookmark

You do realise that you can still eat the sausage from one end to the other if you want, right?

But that would be so normal

tapas