For me, Sony remotes were made of the same stuff as early Nokia phones - indestructible! Surprised to hear someone thought they were cruddy.
It's things like this that make me wish that we'd landed on on a good, popular way to store albums (with metadata!) instead of individual tracks -- or to at least reassemble individual tracks' files properly into whole albums without glitches and weirdness. (FLAC/cue can do some of this, but hardware player support is nearly nonexistant.)
I've been told that this is a stupid thing to want, and I want it anyway.
I'm old enough to remember listening to albums the whole way through by default since anything else would take extra steps, and perhaps fortunate-enough to have generally preferred listening to albums where that is a thing that is also worth doing intentionally.
(And yet, I am young enough to still be bitter about Lars killing Napster. My dissatisfaction is multifaceted.)
I've never looked inside a CUE file, but it's just text and I don't think it supports meta data, right?
We need like a new CUE file to go with the FLAC, right?
The audio should be able to be FLAC. But it should also be able to be anything else, like Vorbis or MP3 or AAC or IDK. It needs to be able to be played continuously without aberration (which can't actually be done with a group of MP3 streams).
The audio needs to be able to be seekable, like a CD is also seekable. By track. By index. (With pregaps, where appropriate -- because CDs also have pregaps.)
Other potential metadata must be able to include whatever subcodes are involved in things like CD+G[0] and HDCD and CD Text, since all of those are supersets of the regular datastream and playback is compatible with any CD player.
And it needs to be a singular container file because...well, that's just easier to keep track of as the years go by and data migrates.
Only then, will we have the beginning of a valid archive format for audio CDs as they actually still exist on [some] store shelves today.
(Some stuff can be optional, just as lots of things are optional inside of an MKV container for a film.)
[0]: Almost nobody ever used this outside of the 1990s karaoke world, but Information Society's self-titled album includes an illustrated sequence, with lyrics, that is completely implemented in CD+G and that runs for the entire length of the album. And I should be able to render that locally here in 2024 from a container on my pocket supercomputer instead of watching a bad rip from a Sega Genesis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b89sSa8QlLg
Audio codecs: use a single stream of whatever codec you'd like. FLAC/Vorbis/MP3/AAC/Opus/etc. can all go into Matroska.
Seekable: Use chapters for tracks, and nested chapters for indices. Matroska documentation even gives an example of using ChapterPhysicalEquiv 20 for CD tracks and ChapterPhysicalEquiv 10 for CD indices.
Other metadata can be muxed into the stream as well.
Lyrics can be included as text in metadata (lyric tag) or as a subtitle stream.
Liner note graphics (and basically anything else) can be included as embedded files.
Music videos can be video streams in the Matroska file.
I mean: As mentioned, these have almost never been usable with real CD players in the wild. Maybe not much is lost there. (But the format must still accept these things, and allow them to be usable! An archival format must respect all aspects of the item being archived, including those that are unpopular or disused. I am willing to die on this hill.)
What of things like CD+G? Here in 2024, they're very simple graphics using 35+-year-old tech, and they should be archived neatly, precisely, and without interpretation, to be rendered client-side at a later point. I think I've mentioned it, but we literally have pocket supercomputers in common use today. If we can make the complexities of MAME work for the past couple of decades, and do it with direct ROM dumps, we can do this for CD+G.
But the CD+G must be rendered synchronously with CD audio data on playback. This applies whether it is my Goldilocks example of an Information Society album, or whether it is a CD+G karaoke disk with Garbage's I'm only happy when it rains (and twelve other crowd pleasers from that month of 1995).
How will that work with MKA?
And how will pregaps work?
(Maybe MKA isn't an ideal container if it does not already include avenues that lead to this kind of functionality in ways that are compatible with the original article.)
There were also a ton of Audio CDs that were not CD+G but had a data track with the music video etc on them.
I worked on a horrible one for Sony, one of those ones with all the anti-rip protection on it, where I was tasked to build a binary blob for a web site that detected if the specific audio CD was in your drive and let you into the web site. What were those things called, ActiveX?
I think you're referring to ActiveX, yes. It's the only thing I can think of where "web" stuff and "hardware" stuff commingled back then in a semi-transparent way.
And famously, as you surely know yourself, Sony once published some rootkitted audio CDs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_compact_discs_sold_wit...
Anyway, I'll just assume that you aren't the rootkit guy -- or even if you are, that your heart is in the right place.
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And yes, CD+G is is important. As are the mixed-mode releases with video. All things CD audio are important if we are to talk about an ideal archival (and playback!) format for audio CDs, and archiving an audio CD is not always quite as simple as ripping a folder of FLACs -- there's a ton of diversity here that FLAC (and cue) can't accurately embody.
We're fortunate that we still have so many CDs right now, and that they're still being sold today. This will change. (It must change. It can't not change.)
The good folks working on the Domesday Duplicator have a relatively uphill battle for the often-older (and often rotting) LaserDisc media that they're working on tools to properly preserve.
It would be good to get ahead of the curve and get something with a practical workflow working sooner instead of later.
There are a number of requests out there to extend the chd format and fix a few things. They are currently tracking some of this info in XML files (called hash files). They would be down with more accurate information though. So you would need a proposal that adds more accurate information and gives them something to work with. More like getting all the info that something like the redump project tracks in there would make them very happy.
There is a separate project that some other emus use libchdr which is a soft fork of MAME. I think they are trying to track closely to what the MAME group is doing but let other emus use it.
But the albums I like to listen to as albums will remain cohesive albums for an eternity.
Lots of stuff from Roger Waters is cohesive in that way, which is perhaps something a person might expect me to say.
But also lots of stuff from Maynard James Keenan, Trent Reznor, and even Marilyn Manson is also this way, which is perhaps less expected.
(And sure, I can rip an album as an album and convert that to a singular MP3 that I can play as an album almost anywhere, and it needs to be a single file since MP3s can't be perfectly concatenated. But then, I can't easily skip around on that singular album when it behooves me to do so.
I could do both things when it was still in CD format.)
Her recordings are excellent. They generally sound simply fantastic. When turned up on the big stereo, they tickle every auditory input I have -- including the usually-strictly-tactile ones.
I've heard that her brother, who is probably (and perhaps obviously) her biggest fan, generally has a huge part in producing and mixing her music. It is apparent that they work well together.
Anyhow, thanks. That album is on the list for the next time the neighbors have left for the weekend.
Which I get on the one hand, but it's a bummer that in all these cases (CD, DVD, Blu-Ray) the metadata for the larger structure of the production got inextricably tied to the specific physical media implementing it, such that the only real way to preserve that data was to rip a full disc copy.
I wish I could remember the name of the textbook because I really liked a lot of the baroque music on the CDs and can't remember who they were by or the titles of the songs...
I have a classical CD from the 80's with index marks for different movements within within the individual compositions represented by a handful of tracks. My understanding is that DG was the only publisher routinely using them. That required some manual intervention to convert the indices to separate tracks. Sony was pretty good about providing index nav. on their full size stereo players. At least until their perpetually cruddy remotes eventually failed.