This is rhetorical, I know.
Why can’t my music CD be more powerful?
When I buy a DVD and throw it in my DVD player (not computer, just regular old DVD player), I often find that I have options. Full screen, or letter box? Theatrical cut, or Director’s Cut? With audio commentary over the movie, or not? English, Spanish, or Portuguese? PG-13, or R?
As best I can tell, there’s a core of data in there, and then other stuff is added or removed on the fly — but all based upon that core data on the disk.
Why can’t I get these types of features on the music CD’s I buy?
I ask this, because on my run on Sunday I was listening to Rhymefest: MAN IN THE MIRROR (download, right click here), which would be an ideal candidate for this.
They are a bunch of songs that are just fine when played by themselves. They’d also be good when played nested together, overlapping each other as one long medley. They’d be good with the narration over the music, like the commentary you hear on a DVD, and they’ve be fine without it.
But they just don’t make music CD’s like that.
Maybe it’s the lack of an interface on the CD players.
August 18th, 2008 at 11:43 pm
Most CDs don’t even use the CD-TEXT support that’s in the spec.
Now that most music CDs use most of their capacity, any extra features would have to fit in the remaining room. I’ll agree that some flexibility about arranging playback options would be nice and shouldn’t take up much room, but extra overlay tracks might challenge capacity limitations.
On the other hand, movies are typically lengths that don’t use nearly all the capacity of a DVD. So, you have room for features.
And, yes, the user interface, including the video screen, is a lot more flexible.
August 19th, 2008 at 1:39 am
Yeah, but a lot of CD’s these days are filled with crappy music. Slice off some crappy songs, add some better, “extra” content, and sell CD’s again.
Might save the CD as a business model.