Wow. That high a concentration of pretentious wankery makes me wonder of Poe’s law is in play.
In case anyone’s forgotten, this guy is prone to being a total asshole in public:
http://www.analogindustries.com/b1267/An+Open+Letter+To+Jona+Bechtolt/
I have to admit I got kind of lost halfway through with the fake CCTV camera for the solemn oath he was making his fans take to buy a CD or something.
The Disco reference on the album about a dying form was good one.
So they’re selling a product that does not perform as advertised, and requiring a non-disclosure agreement. Where have I heard this song before?
Can I buy this CD with a non-negotiable check??
Perhaps someone could enlighten me as to how a foil-less “unplayable” Cd contains an “entire musical catalogue”? No actual media = no actual content eh?
Is there some other form of info on it? Record player grooves? Link to site where the content can be downloaded?
This is like Nigel Tufnel Goes To Art School.
Exactly what I was going to ask. If it is unplayable, there is no evidence that the back catalog is on it, or the for that matter relevant.
This sounds like pretentious BS to me. If it’s meant to be an artistic statement , they should just say so. In the same way a Monkey throwing it’s own fecal matter at a canvas is art.
Plus if it really does contain their back catalog, it’s presumably compressed in some lossy way.
On the plus side, I did my usual sniffing around and they do actually sell their music as FLAC/WAV downloads, which a lot of bands who complain about falling sales don’t bother to do. On the minus side, they don’t bother to link there from their web site, because that would make it too easy.
I admit to only making a cursory read of this, but it seems this makes a good case from for a new kind of license, the Pirates License; use my software under license and any subsequent work is fully protected by copyright. Use it without the proper license, and anything you make can be freely distributed without regard to copyright law.
I kinda like the symmetry of that. Shall we call that the Gneral Pirate’s License?
I like that.
“For one, technology eventually outpaced the allegedly perfect fidelity of the format.”
Sounds like he’s been talking to Neil Young.
if anyone hasn’t said it yet… CHRIST WHAT AN ASSHOLE
I like to think my entire oeuvre is written on the wind. It justifies a high-fibre diet.
The actual data structure of a CD is in the transparent polycarbonate layer. A reflective layer of metal (aluminum is cheapest and most common; others will work) needs to be sputtered onto the polycarbonate to make reading the structure with a laser easy enough that a $20 CD player can do it.
The structures are pretty small; but you could easily enough look for them with slightly more sophisticated apparatus. The metal layer is enormously helpful; but it doesn’t contain any data itself and is there as a convenience.
However, if they released an actual glass master, not just an unsputtered CD, you have the additional challenge that the glass master is just step one in the process, used to create the metal master, which is actually used to mold the polycarbonate layers. There should still be a discernible physical structure; but you probably wouldn’t have much luck just sputtering it and dropping it into a stereo.
(edit: forgot to mention, if you are actually that interested, it is very common for CD-R blanks, the bulk packed ones, not the classy stuff with jewel cases, to have an un-sputtered; but patterned, polycarbonate disk at the top and the bottom of the stack for protection. Since these are CD-Rs, not stamped disks, there won’t be any pits/lands like on stamped disks; but that is by far the easiest and cheapest way to get a look at approximately what an unsputtered CD would look like. I wouldn’t want to actually recover data from one, though I suspect that a few grad students, a microscope with digital camera attachment, and a copy of the Red Book standard could do it; but a magnifying glass or any cheesy microscope is easily enough to verify that there is in fact structure.)
(Another edit, forgot to mention: the data structure is on the top of the polycarbonate, with the sputtered metal coating it, and the protective lacquer and any text or art protecting the very, very, thin metal layer from oxidation and damage. This is why CDs can take pretty nasty scratches on their apparently soft underbelly, since it’s just ~1mm of polycarbonate, and why such scratches can be repaired with buffing, optically suitable wax, and similar hacks; but they just die horribly if damaged on their less vulnerable looking top side. DVDs made the major improvement of putting the data structure in the middle of the disk.)
The earliest known device for recording sound is the phonautograph, whose inventors apparently did not even anticipate that its products might be used in such a fashion. Perhaps they are anticipating a similar degree of notoriety a hundred and fifty years from now?
Oh no, it performs exactly as advertised. Which is to say, they are advertising that it doesn’t perform at all. TL;DNR - Art!
Magnets.
As long as the smell was somehow managed, I’d buy monkey poo on canvas over this self-absorbed nonsense any day.
Is a great song, played on a stolen guitar, any less great?
