OFF: Disarray (was: CD Rot)

[Jon Jarrett]

On Wed, 27 Oct 2004, Carl Edlund Anderson wrote:

> On 27/10/2004 10:11, Jon Jarrett wrote:
> >         Weirdest thing I've seen in this line, or rather heard, was last
> > time Sherman and I were working on Larry Boyd's Disarray stuff. The `first
> > album' we have now put together was generating test discs (burnt through
> > Nero using files created in Cool Edit) which were full of unlistenable
> > crackly fizz. On one machine only. We burnt a second one and the effect
> > had got worse, as if delay had been applied to it. But the blaster in the
> > kitchen played them absolutely clean, while two computers' CD drives and
> > soundcards picked up a tiny fragment of crackle but no more. We couldn't
> > figure out what on earth had happened to the files that made it so
> > disastrous for just this one player...
>
> It could be that errors introduced by a somewhat wonky burner are
> smoothed out by the hefty error correction that's built in (especially
> these days) to consumer audio CD players but that computer CD drives
> (not equipped with such error correction features) cough and spit a bit
> more when they run into a bit of digital gristle.
>
> In my admittedly non-pro experience, computer CD drives are much more
> picky about what they will or won't read than standard audio CD players
> (which you have to feed a pretty suspect slab of CD before they start to
> run into trouble).

        Yes, but that's just it; it was the best CD player in the house
that picked up the trouble. The crap blaster was fine with it and both
computers only had a tiny crackle.

        We got a working copy out in the end, anyway, and the trick now is
to get a web-page up for downloads and also some packaging for anyone who
might want something they could actually hold. It's all a long way off at
the moment, what with term-time and distances, but we are getting
somewhere. Yours,
                  Jon

ObCD: The Grateful Dead - _Anthem of the Sun_
--
                Jonathan Jarrett, Birkbeck College, London
    jjarrett at chiark.greenend.org.uk/ejarr01 at students.bbk.ac.uk
  "As much as the vision of the blind man improves with the rising sun,
       So too does the intelligence of the fool after good advice."
       (Bishop Theodulf of Orleans, late-eight/early-ninth century)