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August 22, 2003
CD's
The Michelle Branch CD is a mixture of getting things okay and being annoying. As with most autorun flash stuff, it takes over your PC without asking when you insert the disc (autoplay is actually useful which is why I don't turn it off by default). It also has all it's content as macromedia embedded .swf files which, unlike the previous penchant for .mov files, I can't view in full-screen.
So I bought at 19 inch monitor running at 1280x1024 for fuck? (yes I do realise resolution doesn't actually matter in full screen mode, but I assume it does somewhat in midget size)
On the up side, the trend in these things has been to make them much easier to exit than before, which means that the content is actually easy to access, meaning you're actually going to bother to view it more than once, since it's not as annoying as it once was.
Still no initial menu for playing the CD instead of going straight to the extras. Viewing the extras is not the only reason you put a CD into your PC. Fuckwits.
The Neil Young album I bought was slightly more elegant, putting the extras on a DVD - and in this case, it seems (I haven't seen the extras yet) that the content is actually an integral part of the musical experience. Oh the wonders of economic circumstances creating new forms of art :D.
Of course I'm in many minds about the rather pathetic fillip that most offer in terms of special extras to get people to pony up for the CD rather than downloading. But then I've just recently been evangelising my annoyance at the inadequacy of compressed audio formats - CD quality is really just so much sharper and fuller.
The album's wonderful, Young just sounds so much more crunchy with Crazy Horse. And I'm quite impressed with the HDCD format in which the CD's released, though I suppose I shouldn't have been pissing myself/been surprised by the discovery that the format is now owned/propogated by the Vole :).
Posted by subtitles at August 22, 2003 1:40 PM | Personal