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The Failed Experiment of the Digital Album Booklet (theoutline.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Before the ubiquity of MP3s and streaming platforms, one of the many small joys of buying a new album on CD was slipping the booklet out of the jewel case and reading the liner notes, credits, and lyrics while the music played for the first time. These days, the biographical information, album production notes, promotional photos, and printed lyrics that fans once relied on physical literature for have found homes in other areas online. Artist websites, social media accounts, and sites like Genius and WhoSampled offer a patchwork of album information, like credits and clues to what happened behind the scenes. But those details rarely exist in one place, and production and songwriting credits seem less and less important. Meanwhile, the form that was intended to replace the traditional booklet, the digital booklet, remains a rarity when it comes to new releases. The idea of digital album booklets may appeal to only the nerdiest of music fans, for whom having everything in one place is a ritualistic way to listen to music and for whom album credits are crucial. But in an age where branding is often as important as skill, the lack of digital booklets feels like a wasted opportunity for artists wanting to communicate directly to fans without a social network as a middleman.
But I would be happier if I could just view decent sized, high resolution album covers. iTunes & Spotify at least, offer only thumbnails in their canned "experience".
Agree completely. Not everyone cared, but for your favorite albums or favorite band or even an unusual track you might want to know something more about -- the CD booklet, preceded by the LP jacket (sometimes with accompanying booklet) was often really informative. (Oh, and those tiny print things on cassettes too... I don't miss those.)
Like DVD extras that gave fans insight beyond the movie, "liner notes" are going the way of the Dodo. I have a friend who has been trying to write on recently released music, and the basic info you'd often get in liner notes is often hard to come by, if they exist at all.
I want the full-size posters that used to come folded up in many LPs.
When I was in high school, half the wall space in by bedroom was covered with those things.
It's already May, dude... FLAC or bust. Lossily compressed audio is so last quarter.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
One word: hipgnosis.
Millenials are mourning the loss of the CD booklet?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
There was a widely available format for exchanging information that didn't require a login or membership. This format would require some sort of system for making sure the names didn't get mixed up, and you might need some means of searching it, too. But a band could use this format for promotion of their work, links to concert reviews, additional information about the inspirations for the tracks on their albums, links to interviews they gave and all that stuff. Rather than being just boring text and some photos put in a jewel case, it would be so much more since you could use text, images, videos and so on. A band could create single stop shopping for not only their own information, but provide information about how people could listen to their music, watch music videos and buy concert tickets. If they so wanted, they could allow people to optionally sign up for their fan club or connect fans to their accounts on social media. Plus, the band could ... get this ... add new information as the album was released!
Oh wait, that already exists ... it's called a website.
music used to be something somewhat special, today its all the same polished to death generic flat loud noise no matter the genera or band, why would I care to see pictures of people sitting in front of a computer fixing the "dont give a shit" music that took a half a day to record
I can't believe it's 2017 and we have widespread adoption of digitally-distributed music but lyrics don't already come embedded, with time-codes.
You'd think with all the plastic they're saving they could afford somebody to key in some time codes.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
That time is when you learn nothing from it.
If nothing else, we should have learned that the sacred album is as obsolete as the IBM 360.
Well, ... actually all of it, on iTunes: I have most of the time a digital booklet.
at those times a CD costed the equivalent of our days 30$
Now they cost less than 10$
And as I buy most of my music, hm
What was this article about again?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Honestly, the liner notes and cover art were only really good during the LP era. Cassettes and CDs were just too small to put much there.
These booklets do satisfy music nerds. But for the most part, I think they were included as a way to try to justify the high price of CDs. After all, you were getting a lot more than just audio for 10 songs! Now that music has been decoupled from the CD medium, and people buy music a-la-carte, the motivation for spending the time and money to create the booklets (or some digital equivalent) is no longer there.
According to Steve Jones, a distinguished professor of communications at University of Illinois at Chicago, the absence of digital booklets can be attributed to two things. First, given all of the different platforms on which people consume digital music, juggling the different template standards for each can be cumbersome. Second, people aren’t looking at digital booklets because we aren’t listening to albums like we used to. “You don’t bring it home in a container and listen to it and look at the sleeve, read the liner notes, et cetera,” said Jones. “You buy your music or stream it instantaneously, usually while you’re doing something else. The space in which one would have looked at the visuals has gone by the wayside.”
I think these are good points, but there are a couple of other things we can point to. For one, the any creative effort or marketing money that would have gone into making booklets has most likely moved to crafting a social networking presence. Social networking is probably a more obvious method for connecting with fans and sharing information.
However, I would guess that part of the problem is that early attempts at digital booklets were so poorly executed that it has poisoned the well. I remember a time shortly before MP3s really took off, and they had started putting this kind of information on a data section of the music CD. That is, if you bought a music CD and put it into a computer, it would show up as a data CD with a terrible Flash application that would auto-play. The apps were poorly thought-out, annoying, and often didn't even include the information that would be in the liner notes (e.g. lyrics). It often seemed like the booklets were only put in there so that the disc would be recognized as a data disc, making it harder to rip the disc and convert them to MP3s. (This was when the record industry was trying to prevent MP3s from becoming mainstream, arguing that it was illegal to rip CDs.)
Over the years, I've only seen one attempt at this sort of thing that didn't seem horribly designed and stupid. A few years back, there was an iOS app for Bob Dylan that was meant to accompany a recently released anthology. It came with some free information, and then for each Bob Dylan album it detected on your device, it would unlock information about that album (or something like that). I don't think it's even available anymore, but I found a video of it.
It wasn't perfect. The interface was still a little wonky in places, and it wasn't in some kind of universal format that you could view on any device. However, it was clear that someone had put in the effort to collect a bunch of photos and information, including various interviews and new content created for the app. They'd at least made an attempt to make an interesting design, and have it somehow connect with the music (e.g. you could listen to the music and it would show you the lyrics currently being played). At the very least, it was interesting enough, and had good enough content, that a fan might find it worthwhile enough to spend some time exploring. I haven't seen anything before or since that seemed like the people who made it had any interest in making it good.
Move with the times FLAC is SOOOOOO May 11th.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Touche.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
AAC is very similar to MP3, including technical . Perhaps (very slightly) incrementally better, but in the end a 128 kbps AAC will sound bad and a 256 kbps MP3 will sound good.
I suggest you spend a couple minutes in the command line trying Opus. It is really impressive, more like the H264/H265 of sound codecs. Simply take a good wav or FLAC and try many bitrates, down to 32 kbps, 64kbps and 96 kbps.
I used to love the liner notes. How else could I prove to my meathead friends that it wasn't Reverend Bluejeans...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
The problem with Opus is hardware support or lack thereof. I'd venture to say that FLAC is better supported in various embedded devices than Opus is. Hell you are still hard pressed to find devices that support Vorbis. Maybe someday Opus will have the support of MP3 or AAC. In the mean time...
How many people really cared about the cover art? I would look at it once to read the lyrics then it would disappear in my closet somewhere and the CD went into a book.
not to mention all the album & cover art sites
foobar2000 has so many tagging and scripting options in this regard that I'm overwhelmed with info, if I want it
just saying
MP3 has no patent encumbrances or licensing fees....
Good-bye
Just like DVDs/Bluray discs with Behind The Scenes content.
95% of the world doesn't care at all for any release extras.
That leaves 5% who might care, but only for a few specific releases.
If this were Apple deciding, they'd stop bothering unless Steve demanded it. Limit the choices to not confuse anyone. Not worth the effort for the tiny subset of people who actually care.
DVD rentals have dropped the behind the scenes stuff for years. Instead they add 30 minutes of mandatory previews for movies you don't care to see (usually).
So ... album extras - provide a link so any mistakes in the rush to meet release dates can easily be fixed.
The only time I care about lyrics is when someone points out that I'm singing the wrong words to a song. If they don't point it out, then it doesn't matter.
I agree. I about never use embedded devices to listen to music though. If I do, that will be mostly for the FM radio. One I have also plays MP3 CDs, has an old style iPod dock (new iPod/iPhone connector came the same year I think!), jack input, USB drive input (maybe not).
What I dislike is that the CD/radio/MP3 combo devices like that don't support DVD-R (it's easier to find DVD-RW or DVD-R for sale than CD-R or CD-RW, and they're a lot cheaper per megabyte I think). Might have gone for procuring an untaxed pile of DVD-R, actually connecting the optical drive that's in my PC tower, and burning things like it's 2002.
So : I don't really have anything to play "computer-less" music anyway. ;)
I know, my little use cases aren't that interesting for everyone
Opus is used for audio conferencing and on soundtrack of some recent youtube videos, so I believe it ought to be supported on recent stuff.
Smartphones both are embedded and non embedded. I have a friend not able to play ogg or wma (don't remember which) but it's a general purpose computer and it's possible to install player software that will play anything. Only the battery life will suffer.
In Japan the tapes are digital you dumbnut.
Yeah, like any of you basement dwelling fuckheads know a thing about japan.
I've posted this before, on Slashdot, but I can't find it now. I very much want to see a standard digital album format. Something simple and open, like a zip file with a standard folder structure and files easy to find within it.
I want high-resolution images of the album art, the original liner notes in both EPUB and PDF format, lyrics (ideally with optional time marks so that the lyrics can be displayed properly as the song plays) and room for extras. Like, I once saw a GIF of the cover of Wish You Were Here with an animation so the flames looked like they were burning... what the heck, let's have the album art optionally moving.
If I have a home entertainment system hooked up to a large screen in my living room, the album art can show while the music plays.
The old beautiful album art? I want to see it bigger than ever and in digital quality. I'd love to look at the details in the cover of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.
I figured Apple would have done this by now, and it would be patented and locked down and only work right on an AppleTV. But nobody has done it.
Heck, if this was done properly, I might be willing to buy again some albums I bought on CD and ripped, just because I can afford it and the extras would be nice.
And it would be interesting to see new albums designed from the start to be in this format, doing things I'm not clever enough to dream about yet.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
It did have both of those though. Given time, AAC won't have any either. In the meantime, AAC is better than MP3 at the same bitrate.
...that I used often called Wikipedia.
Why can't they just include a pdf of the booklet?
...
So what's the best lossless format nowadays?
You can do all that with Matroska files. (And I suspect many other containers might be flexible enough too, though I'm less familiar with them.) I don't personally know of any players that will easily show you a PDF or EPUB embedded in the file while you're playing it, but if people were to start putting stuff like that in, it'd be pretty easy to add that to the players.
Everything else, though, you have that right now, today. There's a good chance you already have the software installed. If Apple patents it, there's already many years of prior art, widely deployed and used by millions of people for about a decade and a half (or possibly longer).