The more we talk about this, the less I'm sure CDText is even worth worrying about at this
end-of-life stage of the CD. Screw it, the horse is already out of the barn and over the hills.
The better solution would be if one of the metadata generators, for instance the for-profit
GraceNote, would ally with some sort of standards group and the music companies and sort this out.
What's in it for them is to become the defacto metadata source, so any sort of program collecting
this Official metadata would need to source it from them and pay their license fee. There could also
be a mechanism where an ad window would be in the data-collection software, put their by the
Official metadata provider and sold by them for a profit. I'd be OK with any of that as long as the
ads or license fees got me uniform, consistent, and always correct metadata. And this metadata
should be the source for all non-physical formats, so a HDTracks FLAC version has exactly the same
song titles, artist name, album name, etc as the iTunes AAC version as the Amazon MP3 downloads
version. And, this kind of data should be consistent no matter what remaster version it is. In other
words, Erroll Garner's Concert by the Sea should have the same artist name and album title whether
it's a library record of the LP, it's a rip of the 1980s Columbia CD or it's the original-sequence
reissue CD just out. The Complete Concert By The Sea is a different title because it's a different
album (different sequence, more songs, etc). The different reissues can be differentiated in the
Comments field or in various other technical-information fields that usually don't even get filled
by the robot-metadata sources.
-- Tom Fine
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Donahue" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, January 07, 2016 1:53 PM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] A case in point why CDText should have been used for metadata from Day 1
It's actually much more complicated than just copy and pasting. Anything
generated by any Microsoft product (Word, excel, etc...) uses characters
that are not allowed in the CD+Text character set (Latin-1). Characters "",
-, ..., ', and many others come up as either the wrong character or as a
?. I've spent the last day removing all these things from the series of
master I'm making as I write this. And this is from a seasoned record
company professional. The problem is that some software passes along and
reads the text correctly while standard CD Players (Like the one in Tom's
car...) and other software that are letter compliant with CD+Text show the
error. If you copy things out of Word documents or from Outlook emails
you've probably done this. It's the same reason that Emails show up with
weird characters that you know the person didn't write or strange
formatting.
I use a site that converts all the crappy Windows-1252 text encoding to
regular Latin-1. http://www.articleformatter.com/
All the best,
-mark
On Thu, Jan 7, 2016 at 12:49 PM, Lou Judson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Sending masters for replication as DDP files entails the same typo risk!
> That’s why I always insist on mastering clients sending me the exact
> information they want, and copy and paste it and triple-check it.
>
> The last thing I want is to have a produciton run defective by my hand! I
> may not have to pay for a new run, but I’d lose the client for sure.
>
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