How can an album have 200% content?
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- Опубліковано 7 сер 2023
- Jeremy Fielding, Estefannie and Inés Dawson face a question about an album with a 'fuller' sound than normal.
LATERAL is a weekly podcast about interesting questions and even more interesting answers, hosted by Tom Scott. For business enquiries, contestant appearances or question submissions, visit www.lateralcast.com
GUESTS:
Jeremy Fielding: @JeremyFieldingSr, / jeremy_fielding
Estefannie: @Estefannie, / estefanniegg
Inés Dawson: @DrawCuriosity, / ineslauradawson
HOST: Tom Scott.
QUESTION PRODUCER: David Bodycombe.
RECORDED AT: The Podcast Studios, Dublin.
EDITED BY: Julie Hassett.
GRAPHICS: Chris Hanel at Support Class. Assistant: Dillon Pentz.
MUSIC: Karl-Ola Kjellholm ('Private Detective'/'Agrumes', courtesy of epidemicsound.com).
FORMAT: Pad 26 Limited/Labyrinth Games Ltd.
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: David Bodycombe and Tom Scott.
© Pad 26 Limited (www.pad26.com) / Labyrinth Games Ltd. 2023. - Розваги
The half-speed double-watchtime video is from The Spiffing Brit.
Of course it is that makes so much sense it would've been HIM who did that
Pewdiepie did it too, but Brit might have done it first idk
All hail Yorkshire tea
And it did work well right? It’s his 6th most viewed video
Watching that video at 2x was something 😅
The overburn Tom is talking about was a buffer intended to cover the fact that machining is never 100% perfect, so adding an extra tolerance into the disk ensures that even in the worst case scenario you're never under your stated capacity.
Problem with it was you never knew how much over burn you'd get, it'd vary by manufacturer, batch, and sometimes within batches; and there's just no way to check until you write something and try to read it.
The same thing happened with DVDs.
You could also turn off error correction and get ~100mb more, but any scratches would be the end.
Also eventually, regular writers were by law not allowed to burn to the innermost some% of the disk literally because they'd have DRM there. That's how if you bought a game and burned a copy of the CD, the game still wouldn't play off of the clone
sounds like a tech connections video :D
As a longtime fan of Die Ärzte, I could have answered that before the question was read in full. Genius idea of them, in my opinion. Thanks for the weekly podcast! Hope it'll continue for a long time (not sure if you said anything about that in THAT video)
We're planning shows until summer 2024 at the least!
Same. I listened to that "album" so much because it's too funny.
Es gibt nur einen Gott:
@@mortuos557 BelaFarinRod ❤️
BelaFarinRod
Monty python did the 3-sided record album back in the day. It was called "Matching Tie and Handkerchief" released in 1973. The a side had one track, the b side had 2 grooves, thus having two different tracks, making it "3" sided record. Both the a side and b side were labled "b" adding to the confusion. Also the original see and say toy ( think "the cow goes moo") had one disk that you "spun" with the lever on the side, and depending where the arrow thing on the front was pointing, it would fall in the corresponding track, effectively having 12 grooves, so 12 tracks on the same side.
The Monty Python 3 sided record is fantastic!
Imagine if both tracks sound good on their own, and then, when played together, they complement each other in some interesting harmony, leading to another 21 minutes of novel playtime. (And now the real question. How long is the playtime of the cd where you listen to neither channel…?)
Although Jeremy first said "songs", when he read the solution, he said: "So the Mini-CD had one track on it called 'Proverbs II', consisting of the band's concert announcements." So probably the two halves did not sound great together.
It was an interview bonus CD and they were recorded in mono anyway, so you're not even missing out on playback quality.
Superb and entertaining episode as always!
Because it came up in the conversation:
The Band is called Die Ärzte (the t and z are switched around in the text in the video) and that just means "the doctors/physicians"
I doubt the video can be changed, but maybe at least the subtitles: it's "Ärzte", not "Ärtze"
This is consistently spelled wrong throughout the video and the captions.
Not the video, but as a closed caption correction over the typo could be an alternative.
FYI, the original German title of the track is ‘Sprüche II’ and it was released on their live compilation album ‘Wir wollen nur deine Seele’ (We only want your soul)
In this episode, we learn Tom Scott is subscribed to Techmoan.
When I heard that question my mind went to "can CDs tell the player to loop a part of the song and repeat certain passages one or more times, in example you would only need the refrain once as data, but could play it three or four times in a song", but I wasn't sure if CDs could be coded that way. It was wrong obviously, but I still like my idea
The ends of those segments would have to literally match _exactly,_ as any difference would cause audible clicks when it looped. Of course, in a lot of records the refrain _is_ looped during production, so that won't be too hard to do. Most real artists like the songs to correspond to a real performance, though (and, in most good songs, the refrain isn't exactly identical every time).
The right answer clicked to me half a minute in during the podcast when they were talking about this because I something like this in Techmoan a few years ago. To be honest, it's brilliant.
I’ll show my age and point out that, back when stereo was a newfangled technology, there were bands that released albums with both mono and stereo versions of the same track, so that fans of mono sound wouldn’t have to compromise.
There are "fans of mono sound"? Sounds like an audiophool goldmine.
Being a complete nerd who at one point knew half the CD (and DVD) specs by heart, I could think of at least five different ways of (possibly) achieving that, but only two would actually be guaranteed to be compatible with all players, and one of those would imply having long periods of silence between the songs (does that count as "content" if you're not John Cage?), so that really only left the "mono" option.
I actually had to adjust the playback speed on a CGP Grey video once when trying to show it to my grandparents because he was talking too fast for them to understand.
I think it would be useful if there were some kind of annotations here and there. For example when Tom mentioned the video from spiffing brit which had to be set to 50% playback speed, or when Inés tried to translate "die ärzte" (the physicians) or when Estefannie called the band "indie" (actually: punk rock. one of the biggest and longlasting bands in Germany) you could have clarified it.
Has Tom forgotten that you can _still_ burn CDs? I have a blu-ray burner right next to me that's happy to do DVDs and CDs without issue.
Yeah I didn't quite like how he phrased that either. The thing is that the medium is used less and less so we don't do that anymore.
But the way he parsed it was like it some how became impossible. Just bad diction.
@@MorinehtarTheBlueI still have working floppy drives!
3:54 - "Die Ärzte" are not an indie band. They are among the most successfull and longlasting german language bands around.
4:05 - Their band names would be translated as "The Physicians".
They also did one Trick on an album and put a hidden track before the first track - to hear it you had to rewind right at the start of the first song, there was no way to directly select the hidden song
I was geniunely enjoying how much Tom seemed to enjoy this question.
Interesting. What would have been particularly cool is if they'd constructed the left track and right track such that, if you DID listen in stereo to both at once, it would still be decent music. But that would take a lot of careful planning and composition!
Old cassette tape audiobooks used to be recorded on 4 tracks per tape. Left and right audio on each side. My guess, having heard the question, is that. Separate audio tracks for each ear.
Ah man, when watching this I totally guessed the stereo trick. But only because Tom mentioned Vinyls and it reminded me about a Technology Connections video about how stereo worked on Vinyls and the angled grooves and what not.
Now imagine: a half-speed album that has two sides, both of which have different tracks for the left and right audio that can be reversed to get a different set of songs. Over five hours of content on a 21 minute disc!
but you'd lower the bandwidth for keeping the same sampling rate; or translated to non-engineer speak, you can't fit as much treble in the sound signal when you ask people to play half speed. recording at double speed will squash the entire sound in a way that it will be possible to recover the lower frequencies when played back at half speed, but not the highest of frequencies. easier to just burn a 5 hour 96kbps opus encoded file on it!
Techmoan would have got it, surprised Tom Didn't get it straight off to be honest, he's a survivor from the age of physical media.
It's interesting how the domination of pop music and streaming through single wireless speakers has made stereo much less of a thing these days. We've gone from the era of a shellac 78 being played through a mono horn on a table, through the era of stereo hi-fi and ended up back at stuff being played from a mono box on the table.
I had to discount using a single board bluetooth/amp for my mono speaker design because it would be harder to bridge the bluetooth stereo to mono than a stereo receiver to mono amp with resistors (a lot of chinese digital amp boards don't accept speaker bridging because the channels are already bridged for more output capacity)
I think the way the question was worded confused Tom. The way the question was worded makes you think that it automatically played for 41+ minutes. It would be possible if they had implemented the mono format. And with mp3 encoding even longer, but then it isn't a red book cd anymore.
I had that!!
My dad got three Ärzte discs for me when I was in my first year of school and we walked towards a restaurant to get some food.
A record store (JPC, I think it was) had a box with discounted products, mostly for having broken packaging.
The album "We want only your soul" has three discs and mine were in a plastic sleeve held together by a rubber band 😀
I sang those songs all day without knowing their meaning xD
There were "99 minute" CD-Rs and to my surprise, you can actually burn just over 99 minutes of music on them and they will reliably play to the end on every CD player I've tried. See my video about them: "Burning a 99-minute, 99-track Compact Disc - Real or fake?"
My guess was a hack to the TOC or other instructions in the CD data that caused it to jump to different places in the disk to construct a new composition depending on which track you started at (but not sure in retrospect how that could be longer than 21 minutes.) You could do the left/right thing plus record both sides of the CD maybe?
Exactly what Asian VCDs did for movies - would have (for example) Cantonese in the left audio channel, and Mandarin in the Right.
Also, I am pretty certain They Might Be Giants had a track on their Apollo 18 album that was designed to be played using the 'Random' Feature, so it would piece together 20 or so short tracks to back the song unique every time (I know this wouldn't be quite the same as the question, but Random and repeat would mean your track could be.. well infinitely long)
3:05 There was an experimental vinyl album that had several holes punched in in different places instead of one in the middle (and it sounded like a circus act with power tools in any position)
Also, 5:00: It's called sample rate and I think it would just play the recording twice as fast, because the player will use its standard rate anyway, so it'll become 21 minutes again
Die Ärzte did another interesting thing with one of their vinyl releases ("HimmelblauPerfektBreit") in 2009: The vinyl had three grooves instead of one, with three different tracks recorded on them, so the vinyl was basically played "on shuffle mode" all the time as it was practically impossible to put the needle on the exact groove of one of the three respective songs.
I'm guessing Tom is also a Techmoan fan. That's where I first saw the multi-groove horse racing records. There's also that Little Richard interview record that local radio stations had - that could be an interesting collaberation - both Matt and Tom "questioning" Little Richard on Upper Ramsbottom FM. Matt has already done his interview on his own - it'll be interesting to see how Tom, or both Matt and Tom do it!
Spiffing Brit did. the 2x speed video
Half way through:
I am wondering if the CD standard supports mono tracks.
5 minute update:
overlapping table of contents
Well that's very artsy and old school. I was just gonna assume it was compressed to heck (and more) with some niffty software on the writing/burning end to allow more quantity within the data
2:08 SPIFFING BRIT
I recalled it immediately!
There's all sorts of fun hacks you can do with recording media. The first one I had direct experience of was with 5¼ inch floppies, where you could use single-sided disks as double-sided by cutting out a second write-enable notch on the left hand side of the sleeve and putting the disk in the drive upside down. I suspect the reason this worked is that it was easier for manufacturers to make all the disks double-sided, then sell the disks where one side failed certification as single-sided. Intel were rumoured to do something similar with the 486DX/486SX - disabling the FPU on 486DX chips where it was faulty and selling them as 486SX - but the evidence for that is sketchy at best.
It was really fun watching adults start to describe CD technology and then give examples applicable only to tapes and vinyl. It's something that's been so out of use that we've started to forget how it even worked. This isn't a criticism, btw, it was enjoyable.
Old books on cassette tapes did that trick to reduce the number of tapes used for unabridged audiobooks. I always thought that was pretty clever.
First "Lateral" I've ever guessed correctly straight off, so happy. 😊
This is such a 2001 question. I remember they used to give out “personal minidisc players” as a prize on Jungle Run and it being the pinnacle of tech that every kid wanted to get their hands on 😂😂😂
He-he. I've guessed the right answer instantly🤗
without watching, i think it's once in each audio channel?
edit: :D my novelty audio knowledge comes in handy for once. i think some classical full-size cds did this to get past the 80-minute limit
that is brilliant
That's genius! I know the reverse of that is done to record 2 tracks at once, like recording a voice and guitar on 2 channels by panning one hard right and the other hard left.
My reply to the question would have been that maybe the additional 21 minutes consists of silence added to the pre-gap on each track? As in, when you play a CD and get to the end of a track, the timer counter switches to displaying a negative countdown to the start of the next track. Usually it's just a second or two, but my thinking was that maybe there are ways to extend that?
But I suppose that would depend on how CDs handle that. i.e. if the pre-gap silence is stored as an instruction like "play 0 volume for x seconds", then you could store arbitrary amounts of silence on any disc. But if that silence is stored the same way as the other normal non-compressed audio on the disc, then it would take up the same amount of space as any other piece of audio, so the disc would still be limited to the same total running time.
There was also a VHS based video game system sold in the US that used the answer to allow the tapes to play different sounds depending on the actions the player took.
It was meant for small children as the library was six muppets videos and one Disney cartoons one.
Tom I think the UA-camr your talking about is the spiffing brit
I remember listening to audiobooks on cassette that did this trick. Allowed for twice the content on half the number of cassettes.
I would have guessed along the lines of "they put MP3s onto the mini-disc instead of a standard recording."
Initial thoughts: I know quite a bit about CDs, and I was informed in the previous Lateral video that these guests are scientifically inclined; I'll keep that in mind. It could be as simple as having the disc written on both sides, similar to a vinyl disc of old (A/B sides). But that's too straightforward for a "Lateral" question.
Bear in mind that CD and mini-CD is the "same" thing, except that the mini-CD is much smaller in radius. I know you can, to an extend, go beyond the limits dictated by the standards, using more of the leading and tailing margins (e.g. first had 650 MB CDs and, then reliably, 700 MB CDs, followed by more specialized cases of >700 MB...). But to double the playtime and still be compatible with standard Mini-CD software and hardware, I don't know ... yet.
It could be flirting along the standards like using mono instead of stereo. You listen to the "left channel", converted to stereo or not, for side A. Then, play back from the top using the "right channel" for side B.
More convoluted than that, like using custom codecs (e.g. writing MP3 on the disc), using the disc for video content (which would be much shorter because AV>A), using media other than AV (e.g. a picture slideshow would be of indefinite length), putting a very slim sleeve over the disc to mimic the behaviour of "another disc", even having a mini-CD disc that expands under spin (use of the CD drive) to the size of a regular CD (talk about convoluted)... They would all not be viable solutions for various reasons.
Maybe, the spiral of 1s and 0s that the drive reads and interprets had a custom "tracking data" that confused the drive to repeat parts of the disc (maybe the last one to recreate the "70's never-ending song" trope. But that's, once again, way too convoluted, and wouldn't be compatible with the majority of the drives. Although it gives me a new tangent to ponder.
So it COULD rely on a principle similar to the CD-RW (ReWritable). A CD-R (Recordable) uses a laser to not only read (whether it bounces off or onto the reading eye), but also heat ("burn") or not the medium (substrate) of sections of the track of a blank disc, marking the 0s and 1s. A CD-RW expands on this by having the medium respond to two levels of heating: one to behave similar to a CD-R, and another to revert back the medium to its default state, leaving the disk as good as blank for the next use.
Using a different medium composition, it could be possible to use relatively safe temperature differences to have the disc display two "separate" tracks. For example, play at room temperature for side A, then cool/heat or even put in sunlight for a while to use UV as reactant, to play side B.
Well, at least, good effort on me.
Results: second guess in is the right one. I must admit I went a bit deep on this one. Would have been more excited for the clever let's "skip back" at the end of to disc to repeat the refrain over and over.
Honestly that thumbnail does have a connection to the answer. On the Velvet Underground's second album (their first is the one spoofed in the thumbnail) there's a track where the left side is all guitar and the right is a short story read out.
My first thought was also playing it backwards and having it sound good. Now I really wanna hear an album like that...
3:00 my fave ex. of this is the monty python record with a secret double groove
so when you would go to show your friend a specific bit, but you would inevitably place it in the wrong groove and hilarity ensues
I'd work through my understanding of "mini-CD", i'd check on that being the 3" format, I'd check about if the 21 minute limit is regardless of mono or stereo, I'd ask if maybe they'd had the first half of their album on one channel the the second half on the other channel so the listener would have to play it first all from the right (or left) channel and then repeat it all from the left (or right) channel
They even had several hidden tracks (on multiple albums) before the first track by messing with the indexes of the tracks. So you had to rewind your CD at the beginning.
There's a Blur album (Think Tank) that has a hidden track in the pre-gap before track 1.
I was never able to rip that track to my PC, even with Exact Audio Copy. :(
@@variousthings6470 pre-gap! That's the word. Thanks!
Tom, that "someone did that as a UA-cam video" is the channel "The Spiffing Brit". The video is called "This video breaks UA-cam".
I though answer and then discounted it (chasing internal looping ideas and dual layer ideas). I discounted it because as a band (ie, people who care about sound) they had to say "we're OK with our music not being in stereo", which I didn't think a band would do.
I’ll show my age and point out that, back when stereo was a newfangled technology, there were bands that released albums with both mono and stereo versions of the same track, so that fans of mono sound wouldn’t have to compromise. Mono can be a valid artistic choice.
First time i got a question right!
The b-side to Public Image Limited's debut single Public Image is a song titled Cowboy Song which employs a similar method where each side has a slightly different recording. Funny enough, like Tom mentioned early in the video, the song also ends in a locked groove with infinite radio static. Which seems to be making the song potentially infinity% content in this case?
They love these weird hacks. Two of their CDs (and two of the members' individual solo albums) have a track before the first track and you have to rewind to that point in order to listen to that song. On one of those albums there are song fragments in the pause between the tracks. So you can hear the segments when listening to the whole thing but you can't find it by skipping through and it wasn't there when you ripped it to a PC.
And they did the things Tom mentioned. They had a triple-a-sided single with one song by each of their members. The vinyl has all three tracks in parallel grooves so it's random which song you get and there are three different versions of the CD with different track order and they all look the same and were distributed randomly. So if you bought two of them in the same shop the songs would play in a different order. And on of their members has a solo live album running 87:31 minutes which is WILDLY out of spec.
But the strangest thing for me was what they sold on a tour in 2012. When they finished playing their three hour set consisting of 38 songs (!!!) and we left the concert hall, we could go to the merchandise stand and buy a thumbdrive in shape of the band mascot. It was around 15€ and contained the concert in mp3. The concert that just finished!!! The last 10 tracks were missing but you got a card with a code to download it later. How crazy is that?
I feel quite bad i jumped straight to separating stereo because i did that for a friends song. Dual guitars, but the idea was you picked a channel to play and played along with the recording on the other channel. Or listened to both to hear the song.
I guessed rather than audio files, it some compressed file or script you have to decompress or compile first into audio files.
The urge to type an answer in the comments when you think of one is soo strong even though you know it'd be pointless.
I can't tthink of an example right now, but I know this has been done with vinyl records and cassette tapes as well.
How did they manage to get it to run 42 minutes if you had to restart it inbetween (and change audio channel)? They must have somehow encoded an automatic restart and switch of audio channel, that somehow worked for all operating systems/cd-reading hardware, and all audip playback softwares - including custome home-brewed ones.
At least for his questions phrasing to work out correctly.
"Ladies and gentlemen, se band with se best Ansagen on road" - phrases that are burnt into my brain.
[2:08] It was the Spiffing Brit. Time for a crossover event.
reordered in mono
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The UA-cam hack thing sounds like a SpiffingBrit thing. He also did something weird with Premieres where as the premier time got close he pushed it back a certain amount of time so it was forever heavily pushed/suggested by the UA-cam algorithm and got many times more views than normal before even launching or something. I feel like he's done another one too and UA-cam actually fixes things. Finding game breaking exploits in things(mainly pc games) is a spiff thing.
Mono and stereo versions?
I love the podcast! I wish we could contribute somehow like on Patreon or donations :)
I thought, could you burn a command like "go back to beginning" onto the CD, that digital readers would understand and follow?
Im pretty sure the video that scott was referencing when the were talking about speeding up the music and then slowing it down was made by the spiffing brit
writing this before I heard the answer. mp3 vs wav files? compression?
I guessed this one early on. Cue minues of frustration that nobody was suggesting it!
ooh i literally said the right answer as soon as i saw the title !!!
Tom Scott knows about the Spiffing Brit. That's what I'm taking from this.
First guess is they recorded it at twice the speed and there was a way to play it at half the speed, making it sound correct.
Nope, that got put down pretty quickly.
The Spiffing Brit did that 2x UA-cam video thing. He loves to break UA-cam.
"Back when you could burn CDs at home..." Umm, Tom? We can still burn CDs at home.
I think what he means is that most people don't own a CD/DVD drive anymore.
I'm going to guess some deal with one track for one ear and one for the other. I've seen something that does that on a Techmoan video I think.
Edit: Yay, got it! Thanks Techmoan! (If it was your video and not someone else)
I got it just as Tom did.
If Tom is Nico, who’s Lou Reed of the remaining three?
Did the fist line of code in the cd tell the record player to play the song at 0.5x speed? Then they recorded 41+ mins of songs speed it up to 2x speed so it take 20+ mins to play and then record that into the CD.
After watching the video further...
Huh... I guess I'm not as clever as i thought i was.
That's clever. I was thinking that they encoded the tracks in half the "standard" bitrate, therefore taking half of its supposed file size, allowing them to store a track twice as long.
If you simply have the CD player moving at relativistic speed...
The cd spins at different speeds depending on where on the disc it is
74 minutes Tom - the same length as Beethoven's 9th Symphony. The two are not unrelated
Either compressed music or a Sega prototype of mini GD-ROM?🤔
0:58. "Back when you could burn CDs at home..." Wait, what? What's stopping me from doing that now? (Besides FLAC being so much better, etc.)
Well that's the first time I've got the answer within a minute of the question. Having worked as an audio engineer probably helped. 🥴
My initial thoughts:
2 sided - but that would be too obvious, wouldn't it?
maybe the recording was mono, therefore having half the bitrate?
So the actual limit of a CD is 42 minutes, or 21 in stereo.
Monty Python's Contractual Obligation Album had three sides...
DVDs can do what Tom was dealing allot where they truck the player into thinking there's more on the DVD then actually is. -anti piracy feature.
But that CD wouldn't get the CD Digital Audio mark on it, because it is not manufactured to the standard.
that's clever.
Before the answer comes up: It's two different tracks in either of the stereo channels. Play once listening with the left ear, another time with the right ear. Good for people with headphones. Sucks for people with no headphones.
I was thinking the opposite. Sucks if you have headphones and have to listen with one ear only, but great if you can listen to one speaker with both ears.
@@Squant but then you have to have a decent stereo equipment that allows you to fade one or the other channel completely. If you have a Bluetooth boombox, you’re SOL.
2:26 And I watched that video at 2 times speed instead.