Lorde's New CD is So Transparent That Stereos Can't Even Read It (theverge.com) 90
An anonymous reader shares a report: Lorde [a popular New Zealand singer and songwriter] fans are clearly struggling to play the CD version of her new album. Customers who purchased the special edition of Virgin released on a transparent plastic disc are reporting on Reddit and TikTok that many CD players, car stereos, and other sound systems they've tried are unable to play it.
Wait (Score:1, Troll)
What did she cram up her ass for the cover photo?
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The least fun answer in history!! (Score:3)
Re: Wait (Score:3)
There is also a contraceptive coil, but that is also not likely to be where the OP suggests.
Female artist (Score:2, Troll)
Let us not forget that as a female artist, there is more than 1 option for sticking stuff into.
What kind of looks like a selfie stick at first glance before I focus enough to see zipper, could be either.
I've also read enough EMT stories to believe it.
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Pity, it looked like she put some sort of selfie stick up there. That would have been a statement.
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Huh? (Score:1, Insightful)
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Re:Huh? (Score:5, Funny)
People still have CD players? And in their cars?!
Don't be silly, people don't have cars any more. They ride a bus, take a walk, ride a bike, tele-work, or just close their eyes and imagine what it would be like to be able to afford a car, fuel, insurance, and food.
I found your challenge verbose (Score:2)
sheesh.
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Thanks anonymous reader for telling us who Lorde [wikipedia.org] is. sheesh.
Honestly I'd only ever heard of her in some clips of South Park; I had no idea it was a real person.
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>"Honestly I'd only ever heard of her in some clips of South Park; I had no idea it was a real person."
LOL, me neither. Just South Park. Never heard actual Lorde music, not only because I didn't know it existed but also because I probably wouldn't detect any good music present. A lot of stuff out there people listen to, I would hardly even define as music.
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It's a shit idea for shit people. I would laugh at anyone who admits they own this. Might as well just take a dump and put that on display.
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CD players were standard until 2019, when luxury brands started to phase them out.
The last manufacturer to have them standard was Subaru, through 2023.
You must be a lessee?
My truck never had a CD player. I replaced the head unit with a cassette player with a $30 Walmart bluetooth unit a few years ago, and it's legit the fastest bluetooth connection I own. About a second after it gets power it's linked to the phone.
It's good to own multiple paid-for vehicles.
ThriftBooks has great deals on DVD's and CD's.
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Sure. I do. Sometimes I even listen to it.
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I don't, but I'm one of the minority of people who have a new car. You'll probably find that most people have CD players in their cars.
Don't forget antique cars (Score:1)
A typical 25 year old "classic car" will have a CD player.
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Cars last about 10 years on average, 10 years ago, CD players were a standard feature in most cars, and many of these cars are still on the road.
My current car don't, but my previous car (2004 model) had a cassette player! It was already outdated in 2004, but it was the cheaper option, so that's what I got. By the end of its life (2018), it was completely obsolete but I could still use it if I wanted to.
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>Cars last about 10 years
...like, for each owner?
Re: Huh? (Score:2)
Huh? "Stereos" can read CDs?
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Yes, duh.
You expect me to rely on streaming while driving through the UK countryside with a 4 your old who wants nothing more than the scooby doo theme?
shut up and buy (Score:1)
User reports indicate that older hardware is less likely to work with the CD than devices with newer sensors.
Looks like the tech bros found a new way to create new revenue streams. Your 2 year old cell phone needs replace, because no more security updates,has come to physical media.
Who buys CDs these days? (Score:2)
And even if you buy the CD, don't you just stream anyway, or download files?
Re:Who buys CDs these days? (Score:5, Insightful)
And even if you buy the CD, don't you just stream anyway, or download files?
I do.
I do this so I can rip it myself and have a single disc FLAC image - absent any compression, watermarking or DRM that may be in downloaded files, and present the proper gaps (or lack of gaps) between tracks.
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Damn right. I rip in .WAV, 320k .mp3, and ATRAC, which is a bitch.
And keep them online, offline, hard storage, and the original disc in above average storage. I like owning the media, and not arguing where the hell my library went if some corporate weasel instituted new licensing. Or ended the old. If you can't hold it you don't own it.
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Plus, a music CD will hold maybe 7 or 8 songs, but most CD players can play mp3s, and a 600 MB CD will hold a hundred or more of those.
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Plus, a music CD will hold maybe 7 or 8 songs, but most CD players can play mp3s, and a 600 MB CD will hold a hundred or more of those.
Standard music CDs can hold 74 minutes and the average pop song length is 3.5 minutes. Even at 4 minutes, that's 18 songs. The CD Louder than Bombs [wikipedia.org] by The Smiths, at 72m 44s, has 24 songs on it, most between 2.5 and 3.5 minutes long. I'll note that one of my devices can't play the last song -- it's probably to depressed by then. :-)
Google: average length pop music [google.com]
Compact disc [wikipedia.org]
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And mp3s average about 1 MB/minute. So a data CD with a 700 MB capacity will hold 700 minutes, or about 200 songs.
Like I said, the capacity is a lot more.
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And mp3s average about 1 MB/minute. So a data CD with a 700 MB capacity will hold 700 minutes, or about 200 songs.
Like I said, the capacity is a lot more.
Sure, but the quality isn't. Everything's a trade-off. My point, though, was that your estimate of a music CD's capacity was way off.
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and present the proper gaps (or lack of gaps) between tracks
This gives me the shits soo hard. Way too many client applications don't support gapless playback from Streaming services.
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Re:Who buys CDs these days? (Score:4, Interesting)
I buy CDs.
"Buy" access to a song on a streaming service that will go out of business and permanently revoke my access? No thanks.
Or, buy and download a song in an electronic format, which will then be lost if I have a disk crash? Again, no thanks.
Physical media is worth the cost, IMHO. I can rip it to .ogg files and listen to them, keeping the CD as a backup.
Re:Who buys CDs these days? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Who buys CDs these days? (Score:1)
Listen closely to the same track on different services. Sometimes the differences are so subtle as to be imperceivable, but sometimes they are quite audible, and these rerecords are ubiquitous.
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I wish. Stuff that I like regularily disappears for good. This is one of the reasons I still buy the CDs.
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> Or, buy and download a song in an electronic format, which will then be lost if I have a disk crash? Again, no thanks.
Unfortunately this seems to be the way the world is going. I do recommend doing two things: creating a media server of some sort, and keeping it in a back-up schedule.
(Disk media isn't immune from problems either, I'm finding a large number of DVDs I have suffer disk rot, probably because WB cheaped out in the mid-2000s)
Back-ups aren't hard these days. Use older, disused, hard drives of
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"Buy" access to a song on a streaming service that will go out of business and permanently revoke my access? No thanks.
Why do you need to own a song? It's a form of entertainment. It is fungible and easily replaced with another song. Look I'm making a point here, I too buy CDs but that's mostly my desire to actually support the artists in some way that actually nets them more money than being raped by streaming services. Often I actually buy a vinyl or even better, merch like T-shirts.
But as to why I subscribe to access to a streaming service? Well it's simple cost/benefit. I could spend 100s of thousands of dollars to buy
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>"Why do you need to own a song? It's a form of entertainment. It is fungible and easily replaced with another song. "
That entirely depends. Music quality has gone down steadily my entire life. The older songs can't just be replaced by some other song if you are picky. Much of it is truly excellent and unique. I hand-screen and rate every song I listen to, deciding what to keep "forever" and what to not even bother ripping. Even carefully selecting which artists to screen, my rejection rate is curre
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You can still buy MP3s on Amazon, and download it. You can then back it up or burn it to a CD if you want to. In MP3 format, you can fit more than a hundred tracks on a CD-ROM, and hundreds on a DVD-ROM. No need for stacks of discs that hold maybe 10 songs each. Oh, and if you just want one song from an album, you don't have to buy the whole album to get it.
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Exactly. Although "buy" is usually "rent".
Unless you are on the platform all day randomly listening to stuff new and old, I see no financial sense in forever renting access to music.
I have about 30 CD's at home and the bulk of ALL my listening need and pleasure is handled by them. They cost me nothing besides the initial purchase price, spread over the 30 years I've had most of them plus manay were cheap as chips charity shop finds, they cost practically nothing. If I were to do what I'm told to do I'd r
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I do. The music is mine. I'm not dependent on someone else playing it for me over some shitty link.
Further, there is cover art and words to the songs.
I own it. I'm not renting it from anyone.
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I also still buy CDs and then rip them.
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And even if you buy the CD, don't you just stream anyway, or download files?
No.
You asked.
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I have a six disc changer in my Jeep. It can play dual-layer DVDs with MP3s on them. That's a shitload of music (around 12000 songs) - and it works when there is no cell reception too.
Same six discs have been in there for about 18 years.
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> Who buys CDs these days?
People who want to own the music forever.
People who want stuff that will never appear on streaming.
People who are fed up with "buying" and album on a platform only to discover:
- Missing tracks.
- Tracks that *go missing after a period of time*.
- Tracks in the *wrong order*.
- Tracks that have the wrong name.
- Tracks that have been censored
- Tracks that are re-recordings
Also, we should consider "Who sells CD's these days"?
With the answer being: Artists who actually want to make mon
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> don't you just stream anyway
Um, tell me. Why on earth would I rent the same music forever?
Where is the logic? I have never understood it. If you were addicted to randomly listening to loads of stuff, maybe it would make sense. But why would I rent the same few albums? And get this, it's not even pay per play! I pay to play the music...even when I'm not playing it.
Take a car for example. Renting a car is pretty normal, but there is always an end data where you can purchase it or move to another
Ah shucks! (Score:2)
And I was hoping to rip the disk to MP3. Darn it, Universal!
One good anachronistic music format deserves another, I always say!
Did they read the "red book"? (Score:5, Informative)
There's reference materials on how to create an audio CD, in fact there's a "rainbow" of books on how to stamp out compact discs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I remember going shopping for music and noticing a warning in small print on one of the CDs I picked up, it stated the disc did not follow the audio CD standard and so may not play in some CD players. I then checked the other discs I picked out and they all had this same warning. I then decided to put them all back on the shelf.
The large record labels appear to put some kind of copy protection or something on the discs to where they can no longer claim to be a "compact disc" as that is a trademark or something, if they don't follow the "red book" then they can't use the trademarks. Smaller labels seem to do fine on following the spec, and I have no problems with them playing in any CD player. Though realistically I'm using DVD and Blu-ray players for music than any true CD player.
I wonder how much of this trend to no longer release music on CD is about plastic waste and how much is on locking people into downloads that have larger profit margins and more complex copy protections.
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The large record labels appear to put some kind of copy protection or something on the discs to where they can no longer claim to be a "compact disc" as that is a trademark or something, if they don't follow the "red book" then they can't use the trademarks.
Google for "Sony rootkit fiasco". Basically, Phillips (cocreator of the CD... with SONY!?!) hit them with a suit for trademark infringement.
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The large record labels appear to put some kind of copy protection or something on the discs to where they can no longer claim to be a "compact disc" as that is a trademark or something, if they don't follow the "red book" then they can't use the trademarks. Smaller labels seem to do fine on following the spec, and I have no problems with them playing in any CD player. Though realistically I'm using DVD and Blu-ray players for music than any true CD player.
The last time I remember this actually happening was in the 2000s. I do sometimes buy CDs and I honestly can't remember the last time I bought one that seemed to have any copy protection on it. Unless you want to give specifics, I think you're talking about how things were a long time ago and assuming incorrectly that they never changed. I think pretty much everybody figured out quite a while ago that people who actually want to buy physical product aren't the enemy and treating them like potential th
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I have been buying CD's since they came out and have many, many hundreds. I think only once have I ever encountered a disc I could not rip. And I think that was just a production run error and had the disc replaced.
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It's a but more fundamental than that (Score:3, Informative)
A system that requires the laser beam to be reflected off the disk back into the detector is hardly going to work well if the disc doesnt reflect. Really sensitive new drives may pick up enough scatter to partly work but the data will be horribly corrupted.
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Error correction isn't magic , it has its limits. If all you're getting is intermittent garbage then you're out of luck. Eg Digital TV in marginal reception areas.
Solution (Score:2)
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What makes you think they need to follow the red book? There's no hard rule about following that spec unless you stamp the compact disc digital audio logo onto the CD package, which they don't do.
There's quite a lot of CDs on the market that don't follow the red book standard.
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What makes you think they need to follow the red book?
If they expect people to be able to play the disc than it being a piece of decor then they'd be expected to follow the red book spec.
There's no hard rule about following that spec unless you stamp the compact disc digital audio logo onto the CD package, which they don't do.
If the disc is sold among the inventory of discs that do follow the spec then people will have an expectation of the disc being playable like all the other 12 cm discs of polycarbonate around it. If it is sold among the merch like T-shirts and posters then there's a different expectation. If it is not a red book disc then don't claim it to be playable, or blur the lines on w
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The reason people don't release music on CD is because it is inconvenient. It has value as a collector's item, but if you just want to listen to music, a digital file that you can put on a USB stick, your phone, computer, etc... is so much more convenient. Streaming is even more so if you have internet access.
At first, the music industry fought hard to keep CDs relevant, it was a time when downloading meant piracy. They then tried to offer their own (paid/legal) download platforms, with DRM, no one wanted t
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So long as it isn't Nevermind, Led Zeppelin 4, or anything by Elvis.
DRM is working (Score:3)
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If I can't play it, it's a coaster. I still have enough AOL discs somewhere should I need another coaster.
Just paint the top side? (Score:3)
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Paint the top with a solid colored paint.
I don't think that will help. The issue is that the aluminum layer which would normally selectively reflect back to the optical sensor isn't doing so. I don't think a solid background would change that. The laser will shine through (not reflecting) to hit your paint regardless.
It looks like the top disc (Score:3)
Of a spindle
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What's a stereo? (Score:1)
A blessing in disguise (Score:3)
Format Whores (Score:2)
From the makers of CD+R and CD-R comes an exciting new format: CD-CD.
So it's... (Score:1)
BTW, the music is just alright (Score:2)
Assuming you get it off the internet...
I am not impressed. It's quality music, but there are just no bangers like on her first album. Royals and Team are great tracks. Everything else I've heard from her is kind of boring. I think her singing was more interesting back then, too, though her voice is a bit better now, technically.
Just shit on it (Score:1)
... transparency solved!
Transmissive Disc Technology (Score:2)
Just put an optical reader above the laser. Problem solved.