Tracks, but not as you know them

[mdlbear]

I've just spent the last hour or so persuading my album build system to cook me up a CD-ROM with audio tracks. The Mac and Linux, at least, are perfectly ok with this. I will see tomorrow whether a range of other, mostly cheap, players can handle it. It turns out that multisession insanity probably won't be necessary for About Bleeding Time -- CD-ROMs are allowed to have audio tracks.

And I might have enough information now to make multi-session disks correctly; the documentation for TOC files seems to have improved considerably during the last few months of the run-up toward Etch.

Comments

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

First off, cool, and congratulations on your progress! I'm really looking forward to your CD(s).

Re the question I had earlier for you about mixing data and audio tracks on a CD:

CD-ROMs are allowed to have audio tracks.

Um. Just checking, but does this mean that the audio tracks on a mixed CD will play on a regular CD player? Or am I confused (again)?

Because I'm only a few days out (I think) from having a pdf songbook for _I Promised Eli_ and it would be cool if it could go on the same CD, but much less cool if that meant that non-techie types who just want to pop it in their CDman would have trouble with it.

[mdlbear]

The audio tracks on a mixed CD will play on most recent CD players; in some (most?) cases you may have to skip track 1, which is the only place computers will look for CD-ROM content.

There's a way of making a "2-session" CD that has all audio at the beginning, and adds a CD-ROM at the end. Apparently not all players treat these the same as "real" CDs, either, and I haven't figured out how to make one correctly. The ones I've made that actually play in my car have the first track replaced by the CD-ROM data, which isn't very good either.

What I'm doing with Coffee, Computers, and Song is simply printing the URL on the disk label.

[thatcrazycajun.livejournal.com]

Congratulations on your progress from here, too...and kudos for the label design; I think it's quite clever and amusing as a carrying forward of the CD title (graphics geek and incurable pun-freak talking).

[mdlbear]

Thanks -- I came up with the title and graphic almost simultaneously, at which point it was a simple matter of throwing money at a graphics wizard to turn the vague idea of a bleeding clock into something really brilliant.