Highway To Sell: AC/DC iTunes Snub Finally Over

Hugh Pickens "The LA Times reports that after years of stubbornly arguing that iTunes was, in the words of singer Brian Johnson, 'going to kill music if they're not careful,' AC/DC has reached a deal with Apple to sell its entire catalog — 16 studio albums, four live albums and three compilations — through the service. AC/DC was one of the last high-profile holdouts from the digital music marketplace, outlasting the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd, all of which jumped into the realm long after much of the population had accepted the downloading future. Angus Young, AC/DC's lead guitarist (known for wearing a schoolboy's uniform when performing), had long argued against hawking the band's music because he didn't like the idea of allowing for individual song downloads — submitting that the group's albums were designed to be listened to from beginning to end. 'It's like an artist who does a painting,' he said in 2008. 'If he thinks it's a great piece of work, he protects it. It's the same thing: This is our work.'"

Comments

Most albums have index marks, unlike Amarok

[tepples]

Vinyl records have index marks where the grooves are more widely spaced. CDs have index marks in the table of contents. If you want to make your album a unit, make it one continuous mix like a Mike Oldfield album.

Re:Most albums have index marks, unlike Amarok

[xaxa]

CDs specify a pause before each track. Usually it's 2 seconds (my old player counts down -0:02, -0:01, 0:00, 0:01), but it can be set to zero, in which case there's no gap at all, and the index is just a pointer to a frame to start playback from.

I have a few electronic albums like this.

Re:Most albums have index marks, unlike Amarok

[Anonymous Coward]

CDs do not specify a pause at all.

Sure they do. It's called INDEX 00 and shows in a CD player as countdown before the proper song start. Also known as the 'pregap', this was widely used on almost all CDs made in the 80s and 90s:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pregap

Re:Most albums have index marks, unlike Amarok

[tlhIngan]

CDs do not specify a pause at all. The pause you're most likely referring to was that moronic burning software from the late 90s early 2000s that had those default options. A player that imposed such a moronic concept on its CDs would destroy the flow of an album like NIN's Pretty Hate Machine, from 1989, among others. Many CDs are mastered with a "quiet" period of approximately a second or so between songs, matching the pauses between songs on LPs, which were the visible areas (widely spaced grooves) so that a person could drop the needle near the beginning of a particular song of interest. There are also LPs where an entire side appears or sounds as one track - I believe side A of Tangerine Dream's Force Majeure and Rush's 2112 were 2 samples, but it's been a long time since I broke out any vinyl.

The track lead-in/leadout (1 second at the beginning, 1 second at the end) is really just a "landing zone" for the read head. A CD head is not particularly accurate - just because you give a HH:MM:SS.ff (frame) in the TOC doesn't mean if you select Track 3, you'll hit it exactly. In fact, you're likely to be quite a ways off. The quiet period simply lets the head be up to a second off either way without accidentally playing back the previous track or cutting into the next track.

Data CDs kept this for the same reason - a multisession CD also has the same limitation (each new session "patches" the prevoius session so it has to seek around and needs a landing zone).

Bad CD burner apps only do "track at once" mode where it writes a track at a time. This means every track requires a mandatory leadin/leadout (and a write to the TOC), and for audio, that means a quiet period of about a second. If you master in "disc at once" mode, you can lay down tracks with no quiet periods which is how you do "live" CDs with no quiet between songs (the TOC is written at the beginning). TAO does allow you to add tracks at the end, as the disc isn't closed, while DAO tends to force closing of the disc when it's done.

Sometimes shortening the leadout of the disc can give you a few extra MB of storage

When I sell a painting it's part of a show

[kawabago]

When I have a show of my paintings I don't insist someone buy all of them or none of them. I want people to buy the one work that speaks directly to them. Some works never sell and they are taken out of their frames and put away for posterity. I care very deeply what happens to my art work but I certainly don't worry about how people view it. That they do view it is what matters to me.

Re:Individual Song Downloads

[hairyfeet]

Its the HOOKS man, the hooks just aren't there. As a bass player i can tell you there is just something...magical for want of a better term when you're playing and you just hit this...perfect sequence where you have the whole audience just moving in a perfect groove like, like, its almost like everything becomes connected, its like this perfect groove that everything just falls into and you just can't help but go with the groove like a wave.

But I can tell you its DAMNED hard to get that going just right, I know that if I'm not given a decent drummer that can read where i'm going and give me the right back up its just gonna trainwreck and trying to write a truly good hook on a timetable? Damned near impossible, it just don't work that way.

The fact that AC and Rush put out so many great hits in the past meant that at that particular moment in time everything was fucking PERFECT, all the musicians could read each other like books and once one of them starting on a groove the others would pick it up and build on it and the next thing you know BAM! they've got a killer song. Unfortunately chemistry is just one of those things you can't fake, either you are all on the same page or you're not. I have played with guitarists that at one time we just fucking gelled sooo damned good, when they would start playing I didn't have to be told a damned thing because I KNEW, just by the feel and the mood and the tempo EXACTLY where they were gonna go and likewise When I would start to percolate a nice thick bottom they knew EXACTLY where I was gonna go and would compliment my groove so fucking perfectly you'd swear we must have played that song a million times when we were making it up on the spot, but years later I get a chance to play with them and its just.....its not like anybody is BAD,its just you have had different experiences and just don't really feel and understand the person you are playing with so there is this...friction that keeps the parts from gelling, like a grinding gear that once worked wonderfully it just doesn't really...fit in that slot anymore.

I know that probably sounds hippy and weird but its really fucking HARD to describe what it feels like to just be in that zone playing, I've always said its almost like my brain has shut down and its just my emotions pouring through the fingers, i have to go back and listen just to figure out some passages because its almost like it isn't me that is playing it, because without the instrument in my hand I'm just not able to feel or express like that.

And that is what i think happened to AC and Rush, its not like any of them have gotten BAD, on the contrary that many years with their instruments they are more skilled that ever, but its not skill that writes the great hook, its emotion, its feeling that groove and just letting it flow and becoming this one living thing, you are just in this perfect zone and it all just flows, but these guys have grown apart and just don't have that ability anymore.

I'll never forget what an engineer told me when I was recording a song with one of the previous bands i had played with.I had spent a LOT of time on this song coming up with a very intricate but tasty bass line I wanted for the song, and I had played it enough live i could do that riff in my sleep. But when it came time to play the song in the studio while i did the riff i wanted in the first bridge we had been having a great day and we were all into it and I just completely forgot the riff and played what I was feeling then, this wild abandoned fun that we were having together. So afterwards I tell the engineer I want to punch in and replace the second bridge with the riff and he said "Are you shitting me? No way, no way in HELL do you want to screw that up! What you did in the first bridge was cool but the second is just fricking FUN with a capital F, and it fits everything soooo damned good, don't mess it up" and sure enough it got to that second bridge and I pointed out the difference and they played that part back a few times and they were all