November 2006 – Train of Thought

Why do record labels insist on adding ‘secret’ or ‘bonus’ tracks to CDs? You know the ones, they aren’t listed on the cover notes, and appear if you leave your CD playing after it has finished. After a period of silence – 10 to 20 minutes seems common – along comes another track.

It’s not that I object to the tracks themselves, I object to the need to ‘manage’ them. Am I supposed to sit reverently in silence waiting for the artist to deign to play the last bit of music? Am I supposed to drop what I’m doing and fast forward until I hear music? (Oh, and then skip back a bit in case I missed some) Am I supposed to hit stop and never hear these tracks?

And when I rip them to my iPod (Which is, of course, a legal grey area. Ha!) I have to put up with some stupidly large ’30 minute’ track that contains ages of encoded silence. As I’m listening along in jukebox mode, suddenly the music stops while some prat of a record label decides that 20 minutes of silence are on the menu.

And the labels wonder why CD sales aren’t booming.

The trigger for this rant was Jarvis, which contains the bonus track ‘Cunts are still ruling the world’. In order to have some MP3s to listen to on the train, I’ve just had to spend half an hour ripping (and then editing) the CD, which is a task my computer usually achieves for me before the album’s finished playing the first or second track.

Thank you Mr Cocker, and Rough Trade Records for providing another reminder why I just don’t bother buying CDs any more. At least you didn’t put a root kit on it. I do have to remember to check the labels on every CD I buy though – just in case it suggests ‘special software’ will be needed on a PC. There are days when that means I can’t be bothered to buy CDs…

Rant over.

Cleaning through some shelves this weekend, I stumbled on a pile of 3.5″ floppy disks, with labels like ‘DoC Unix Archive’ on them. Intrigued, and vaguely recalling what to expect on them, I set about trying to read them.

Which was not so easy. I currently use an iBook as my main PC, and floppies have long been obsolete on Macs. No problem, I have an old Toshiba laptop running Windows 2000 (Another blast from the past!) which I was thinking about consigning to the bin. Now it is a ‘compact’ model, so I had to find the floppy drive accessory that came with it.

Plugging that in, I could read about half the disks. I found I could copy them to a CF card, and then mount that (via a USB dongle) on my mac. Presto, I had old files from 1993 sitting on my hard disk! Very cool!

The remaining disks seemed ‘corrupt’, until I remembered that at college I owned a Powerbook 100, and in those days, Mac’s had their own floppy format.

Right, over to Google, and I found two old, but still working, bits of software: hfsutils (binaries here) and RSXNT, found here (Thanks again Google – the link in the hfsutils readme had long gone stale).

Now I could, slowly, copy the remaining files to my CF card. After getting the files over to my current PC, I was then extremely impressed that Microsoft Office still recognised the formats it wrote back in 1992-1996. Very impressive Microsoft!

Among the gems were the accounts I kept at the time. Fairly dull (I was that kind of student), but as a side effect a pretty accurate record of my travels and habits. At the time I wrote them up for The Times as an ‘here’s what students spend their money on’ article. Now their URL has long since gone stale, but Imperial College still mention the article in the archive of their staff newsletter. I’m at the bottom of the page, and seem to have been last of the big spenders as a student. Divide those numbers by four to learn my annual budget!