Old-School, New Enhanced CD

Blog entry posted by Keith Adams on 10/15 at 05:14 PM
Category: Answers from Adams

It's tough to be a musician nowadays. Not like it wasn't rough in earlier years, but thanks to this crazy, super-convenient Internet world we live in, there's all kinds of competition for your ears (and eyes). If you have a new bunch of tunes you'd like to get out to the world, you need to think of ways to set yourself apart outside of just being "awesome musicians."

So in putting together our new five-song EP, "Hey Girl," Giant Wow had the idea of value-adding it with extra content: MP3s of additional songs, photos of the band, and even the video for one of our songs, Cosmonaut. How would we be able to do something like that? By making our new CD an "enhanced CD" -- a hybrid of an audio disc and a data disc.

I remembered that it was pretty easy to make these kinds of discs with your standard CD-burning software. So imagine my surprise when we found out that today's professional mastering software couldn't take care of the task. As someone who considers himself a state-of-the-art nerd, I figured that I could [1] use the mastered audio, [2] plop it into some standard, out-of-the-box burning software like Roxio or Nero, and [3] make it happen quite easily.

I was basically wrong. And after Jess and Rob had taken time out to organize the extra materials (or make the Cosmonaut video, in Jesse's case), that was a horrible wrongness to have to admit.

Was I dreaming the whole thing? Luckily for me, Wikipedia exists, and I was able to research my techno-folly pretty thoroughly and quickly.

Long story short: Thanks to older CD player issues, no BluRay-like standard format, the increased affordability of DVDs to use as extras, and the rise of broadband web, enhanced CDs and mixed mode CDs peaked in the late '90s and stopped being used much since.

But there was the hint... I had to look into the past! And thanks to being a gadget hoarder, I discovered that time travel was as easy as digging out my 10-year-old Windows 98 computer and plugging it in!

Of course, I had some immediate concerns once I pressed the on button. It took about 5-10 seconds for the fan to fully throttle. The PC was much louder than I remembered it being, and it was putting out a mercifully subtle odor of burnt dust. It also took a full 10 minutes for the thing to finally boot up. I didn't like torturing this machine that had been peacefully at rest a half-hour prior. Would this actually work?

Luckily I can tell you that my old computer, my old CD burner, and my old version of Nero were fully up to the task. As a result, we can offer you a five-song disc that will actually be a 10-song disc with pictures and a video.

That's how we roll.... kicking ass with a blast from the past.