#musicbrainz

do we have any CD pressing plant gurus around? I just picked up this CD that should be an old one (from '91) but it's in way, way too new condition to be original. I'm thinking it's gotta be a reprinting, but I'd like to be able to verify somehow

i am not a guru but i assume you did the obvious stuff like checking the IFPI/SID code?

I know *about* those but I wouldn't know where to begin interpreting them......

there's a good page on discogs that knows a lot more about this an i do, let me see if i can find it

https://www.discogs.com/forum/thread/207887 this maybe

seems like a good start, thanks!

it's a bit vague but it does explain the meaning of the matrix codes so maybe you can cross reference them with pictures of the disc on discogs/mb or something

well this is interesting, IFPI codes were apparently introduced in 1994, so an original disc wouldn't even have them, lol

huh curious

so does your disc have one? :-)

ye, lol

but that just makes me even more curious.... new reprint, or something from... in between, lol

in the end I may just politely have to ask the band, lol

do you know how to tell a CD-R from a pressed CD? i only ask because even some reputable record labels send out low-volume releases on CD-R (i own a couple of these from Alfa Matrix)

ofc, i don't think CD-R existed in 1991

oh, yeah, this is a proper pressed CD, at least

and yeah, I've seen the rise of those sneaky CD-r represses, I hate it

a family member once bought me one for xmas from Amazon.... it was so hard not to be like.... sorry but this is not valuable to me as a collector Dx

I feel bad tho, I knew the band had these for sale, and I savvily assumed they'd be represses. I took a chance going with an eBay listing, but now I get the feeling they were just reselling off the band, and that's kinda lame........

waitwaitwaitwaitwaitwait.

youre telling me theres something different out there than a CD-R that isn't a CD-RW?

<duckfromdisc[m]> "youre telling me theres somethin..." <- weren't they just talking about regularly pressed CDs?

There aren't any CD+Rs at least (oh god the horror)

YEAH BUT I DIDNT KNOW THERE WAS A DIFFERENCE

IM SO SORRY I WOULD LIKE TO APOLOGISE TO THE ENTIRE MUSIC COMMUNITY

errr

do you mean is there a thing which is a CD-R which is not a CD-RW? yes there is

but i think there was a fairly short period that they existed before CD-RWs replaced CD-Rs

i believe the physical media is the same though, CD-RW is just a change to the filesystem that allows you to write extra tracks past the first CD-R track so you can "append" to the CD

early CD drives could not read these CD-RW discs

LMFAO

wrong chat sorr sory

s/sorr/sorry/

sorry*

CD-RW have metallic alloy, CD-R had a dye. Quite different physically

the lmfao was wrong chat but yeah i thought all CDS were CDR or CDRW

i didnt realize there were ones that were pressed

But yeah normal CDs are pressed/stamped in a factory not written with an infrared laser like at home. That's much faster

Jakob[m]: you probably know more about this than me but are you sure about this? i understood -RW was just a -R where you wrote a second (third, ...) track to it

ah, no, wikipedia agrees that CD-RW is physically different

-RW introduced in 1997 apparently, i think i'd stopped writing CDs by then

ivy: I recently watched "Technology Connections" videos about CD formats on YouTube. Would recommend quite insightful 😛 Other than that, definitely no big expert

1997 I was still quite little and probably only allowed to handle cassettes

CD-R is writable only once; CD-RW is rewritable (in theory). https://www.techrepublic.com/article/all-about-... has more than you probably want to know. Manufactured ones tend to be higher quality; I have often had problems playing CD-Rs in my car (when cars had CD players) and on a computer, but never with an unscratched pressed CD. For my album, I made sure to get the minimum order that used a glass master, rather than

selling crap. I’ve bought too many of those from other artists.

i never knew cds were pressed

To make things more confusing, there are DVD-R, DVD-RW, and DVD+RW…

Vastly easier to stamp them out than burn each one, just like for vinyl. Carve that groove once, then press a million physical replicas…

i love that people learn new things every day (i do too) but i love that someone did not know that pressed CDs exist

lucky 10,000

like, shall we imagine a bank of 1,000 CD-R drives writing copies of the new Taylor Swift album to CD? :-)

Same for CD-ROMs (meaning data, not music)—I used to do ebooks on CDs (many years ago); had to burn a gold master (literally gold, not just as in gold standard), test it, then ship it to the manufacturer for replication.

Covered my office door in the ones I fucked up.

crism: lol

when you said ebooks, I was thinking literally epubs on discs, and then realised you probably mistyped audiobooks?

Epubs on disks. O’Reilly _The Perl CD Bookshelf_, _The Linux CD Bookshelf_, _The Webmaster CD Bookshelf_… early versions of what grew into Safari.

remember cdrom.com?

HTML files plus a shitty Java search engine.

oh right! so not just a 1MB file on a whole CDROM :)

I had one or two of those at some point...

Five or six ebooks, plus a physical book (so we could get shelf space in bookstores, which didn’t know what to do with ebooks).

got me thinking, not got audio books on CD for a while. Are they valid to input into musicbrainz?

Yeah, there are a bunch of audiobooks on MBz.

good to know :)

here's something i don't understand, how do they make vinyls when i'm pretty sure a Vinyl-RW drive would not even fit into my computer?

I think I might look out for them in charity shops. Want to wean off audible.

ivy: lol

Making vinyl: you make a master disc with a softer substrate and a needle that turns vibrations into a groove, instead of a groove into vibrations (cutting). Then you essentially cast the master and make a bunch of copies (pressing). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd2SW-Fys6I was the first search hit I found…

i did figure it was something like that :-d

Some hipsters will cut live into the master; this was also done back in the early 20th century before tape was a thing.