Another interesting point -- nowadays, CDText displays in many cars that still have disc players. I
know this because I always author it in when I make my own CDs and it usually comes up on the
"smart" screens of modern cars. So there's actually a compelling reason to get out of the dark ages
and standardize on it, forgetting the alleged menace of those cheapo players that would balk at a
CDText disc.
-- Tom Fine
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tom Fine" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, January 07, 2016 10:47 AM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] A case in point why CDText should have been used for metadata from Day 1
> UMG also doesn't want CDText. There seems to be a phantom fear of some cheapo player out there
> getting jammed up by a CDText disc.
>
> -- Tom Fine
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Mark Donahue" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Thursday, January 07, 2016 10:12 AM
> Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] A case in point why CDText should have been used for metadata from Day 1
>
>
> Tom,
> One or two quick comments.
> The first I saw of CDText in the mastering business was around 2004-5. You
> supplied a .bin file on a floppy with your 1630 master and Sony DADC was
> the only one doing it. It was crude and only allowed for 2000 characters
> total.
> A few years later when the 1630 went the way of the Dodo along with most of
> the old replication hardware, we started encoding CD+Text info on all
> masters supplied for replication. Most of the record companies immediately
> stripped this information out during replication. Warner was still doing
> this as late as 2005.
> All the best,
> -mark
>
> On Thu, Jan 7, 2016 at 9:47 AM, Tom Fine <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> Hi Shai:
>>
>> My understanding is that CDText was always available in Red Book. It
>> doesn't matter what the original players could display, that's my point.
>> Anyone who was using a Commodore or Apple computer in the early CD era
>> could see where media was going. Metadata was going to be very important to
>> digital media. My contention is, by surrendering control of their metadata,
>> the CD producers, owners, manufacturers and sellers surrendered a key part
>> of marketing -- clear, uniform explaination of the product. Depending on
>> booklet text and/or physical packaging was short-sighted. To this day, the
>> metadata released from the record companies to such massive retail forces
>> as Amazon are inconsistent, often confusing and often incomplete, because
>> it's usually a job left to interns and clerks instead of being a topline
>> responsibility of project producers. This is a really important discussion
>> that should have been had at the beginning, but should still be had. It
>> would behoove the copyright owners to come up with standards and release
>> all media going forward with uniform naming of artists, songs, etc, and
>> uniform formats for how to express, for instance, classical works'
>> movements or other track-title information.
>>
>> And by the way, the sloppy metadata has now spread into the streaming
>> services, because they just use the same gobbledygook that is on Amazon and
>> iTunes. If we want "the kids" to use music as something beyond background
>> noise, it is necessary for them to have a clear understanding of what they
>> are listening to. In the purely digital realm (streaming and downloads),
>> the only clue beyond sound is good metadata.
>>
>> -- Tom Fine
>>
>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Shai Drori" <[log in to unmask]>
>> To: <[log in to unmask]>
>> Sent: Thursday, January 07, 2016 9:34 AM
>> Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] A case in point why CDText should have been used
>> for metadata from Day 1
>>
>>
>>
>> Tom, you're forgetting that the original red book didn't even have a
>> provision for the text addition. Players were very crude with just a four
>> digit numerical display that could show time or track. All the other
>> additions that came later were additions that some players were not even
>> aware of. Case in point, the CD can actually be 4 channel from day one
>> (part of the red book), but have you ever seen a 4 channel CD or player? On
>> the other hand there was never the foresight to change bit depth or sample
>> rate. Can you imagine what the CD road map would look like if there was a
>> provision for 20 or 24 bit recordings and even 88.2kHz sample rate? And
>> yes, the original authoring software was terrible. I still remember by
>> heart most of the PQ code rules for track placement and spacing. I'm more
>> of an old fart than I care to admit. haha 😉
>> Cheers
>> Shai Drori
>>
>> On Thu, Jan 7, 2016 at 3:45 PM, Tom Fine <[log in to unmask]>
>> wrote:
>>
>> The 1995 Smithsonian collection "Big Band Renaissance: the Evolution of
>>> the Jazz Orchestra" is a great example of group-source metadata FUBAR.
>>> dBPowerAmp's CD ripper program allows use of multiple metadata sources,
>>> and
>>> by default does some sort of amalgam of whatever sources you've told it to
>>> check. The amalgam on this set is comical! So I manually checked metadata
>>> from each source. They are all different, and only GD3 (whatever that is)
>>> is anywhere near accurate. I find this often happens with compilations --
>>> for instance freedB and/or AllMusic will have different top-level stuff
>>> like titles and whether or not it's a compilation for different individual
>>> CDs in the same box set.
>>>
>>> All of this could have been prevented if the industry embraced CDText from
>>> the get-go and agreed on uniform naming standards for artists and song
>>> titles. I remember the arguments back in the 80's -- it's hard enough to
>>> enter PQ codes into these balky Sony editing systems, and no CD players
>>> have displays for CDText, so why bother. Very short-sighted. The net-net
>>> today is that anyone who wants uniform naming and accurate information in
>>> a
>>> digital library has to spend a lot of time editing the crappy metadata
>>> that's out there in group-source land. And, copyright owners have ceded
>>> control of their metadata to a group-source no-QC cluter-you-know-what.
>>>
>>> -- Tom Fine
>>>
>>
>
>
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