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.'"

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 [wikipedia.org].

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: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

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