First off, some reasons to take this road: iTunes is a decent audio encoder, and it'll get your music from point A—the CD—to points B, C and D—your computer, your MP3 player and your backup drive—without much trouble. But it'll do it with a less-than-great encoder, with occasionally inconsistent tagging, with album art that'll only work on Apple devices, and without support for the best lossless audio formats and MP3 encoding options, which you probably want, whether you know it or not.

In short, the ripping process deserves a little more care than iTunes or Windows Media player can give it. You can pay people for this, which feels dumb and wasteful, or you can do it yourself. It's not difficult, at all. Here's what you do:

Get Your Software

The first step to ditching iTunes is to, well, ditch iTunes. What we're looking for is ripping software that offers more encoding options than iTunes, but more importantly, a better encoder. And as far as MP3 encoders go, the open source LAME is as good as they get. There's plenty of software for both Mac and PC that leverages this encoder, but here are two programs that do lots, lots more.

Mac OS X: Max
From the makers:

When extracting audio from compact discs, Max offers the maximum in flexibility to ensure the true sound of your CD is faithfully extracted. For pristine discs, Max offers a high-speed ripper with no error correction. For damaged discs, Max can either use its built-in comparison ripper (for drives that cache audio) or the error-correcting power of cdparanoia.

What this translates to: Great error reduction, fantastic sound quality, and tons and tons of encoding options—not that you really need those to do a good rip, but hey, they can't hurt. On top of all this, Max is also a great file converter, in case you've got some delinquent WMA files scattered around.

Windows: Exact Audio Copy
From the makers:

Exact Audio Copy is a so called audio grabber for audio CDs using standard CD and DVD-ROM drives. The main differences between EAC and most other audio grabbers are
• It is free (for non-commercial purposes)
• It works with a technology, which reads audio CDs almost perfectly. If there are any errors that can't be corrected, it will tell you on which time position the (possible) distortion occurred, so you could easily control it with e.g. the media player

What this translates to: The best error correction money can buy, for free. Seriously: Audiophiles swear by exact audio copy, and with good reason. You'll have to download your own LAME encoder before you can enable MP3 encoding in the program options, but you can do that right here without a problem. Additionally, setting up tagging, which you'll definitely want to do, takes an extra, albeit easy, step.

If you want to take a simpler route you can just download CDex, which supports LAME and tagging databases out of the box, and produces results nearly as good as—if not as good as—Exact Audio Copy.

On both platforms, you're going to have a lot of personal decisions to make. How do you want to organize your files? How do you want to name them? Unlike iTunes, these apps don't pressure your to store your music in a certain way—it's up to you to archive as you please. Both offer plenty of options for storage and organization, easily available in their Preferences menus:
As I said, this one's up to you.

Choose Your File Type

MP3: If you're encoding only for portable devices, not concerned about archiving perfect copies of your music, hate hate hate audiophiles, think FLAC and OGG just sound like gurgling baby noises, you're probably going to want to stick with MP3s. Yes, there are other formats that offer a better size-to-sound ratio, and no, it's not open source or anything, but for pure compatibility, control, and encoder choice, it's hard—-no, impossible—to beat MP3. And if you set up your encoder correctly, MP3s can sound great.

It's tough to pick the optimal MP3 bitrate on your own, since at a certain point, differences in sound quality seem to come down as much to psychological factors as to actual clarity. Thankfully, we've crowd-sourced this issue and come up with a rough guide: 256kbps is, it seems, where people just can't really tell the difference. In practical terms, this means setting your encoder to these settings:

That's no higher than 256kbps VBR—for variable bitrate, which modifies the amount of information in your file's stream according to how much is needed, and saves you space without sacrificing quality—with the highest (read: slowest) available encoding option. For almost everyone, in almost all circumstances, this'll do, and it sure beats iTunes default 160kbps constant bitrate rips.

FLAC: If archiving is your intention—as in, digitizing your music without losing any quality, no matter how imperceptible—then you're going to want to go lossless. And of the lossless formats, FLAC is the most well-supported in terms of software and hardware, albeit not on any of Apple's products—though iTunes can be made to play nice with FLAC with a few simple tweaks.

But don't fret! The beauty of FLAC music is that it can be converted to other lossless formats, like Apple's iPod-compatible Apple Lossless, without losing any quality, or compressed into MP3s without having to worry about muddy transcoding. Think of them as CDs without the physical disc, basically.

Embed Your Album Art

On Mac OS, assuming you're doing your listening in iTunes, which is pretty handy at fetching album art, you can just use one of Doug's famous iTunes scripts to write said album art directly to your MP3 files. Here's how you install it:

To install the files/folders, drag the items in the disc image window to your [username]/Library/iTunes/Scripts/ folder. If there is no folder named "Scripts" there, create one and drag the files into it. AppleScripts placed in this folder will be listed in the iTunes Script menu. You do not have to install the .rtf/.rtfd documentation file in the "Scripts" folder, but it's as convenient a place as any.

For Windows users, Lifehacker's written a fantastic guide to collecting and embedding album art, which you should definitely read. The short version? Download MediaMonkey, and let it do the work for you.

Granted, once you embed album art into your files, apps like iTunes and Windows Media Player might not display it, and may ask you to search for it from their databases. This is fine: Both programs use proprietary album art storage systems, so just because they can't see your ID3 tag album art doesn't mean it's not there, or that you shouldn't have embedded it—having it around can't hurt, and it's by far the most compatible and rational method for storing album art, as far as other software, most MP3 players and long-term storage go.

Anyway, that's it! Now you can set your CDs aside comfortably, knowing that you've squeezed the purest, most delicious audio files you can out of them. Now:

Listen to Your Music

Because that was the whole point.

If you have more tips and tools to share, please drop some links in the comments-your feedback is hugely important to our Saturday How To guides. And if you have any topics you'd like to see covered here, please let me know. Happy ripping, folks!

Technological Detail and Environmental Protection

1. Solar Energy System

The Shanghai Corporate Pavilion features a 1600m2 solar heat-collecting tube on the roof. These solar tube can collect solar energy to produce hot water up to 95°C. Ultra-low temperature power generation techology, a novel way to generate electricity through solar power. The power generated using this technology can be used for both the exposition and for every day.

2. Recycled Plastic materials
Shanghai produces nearly 30 million of waste CDs every year, and only 25% of them are reclaimed and recycled. If these CDs were reclaimed and washed, they could be used to produce polycarbonate granules and manufacture more polycarbonate plastic products. The external facade materials of the Shanghai Corporate Pavilion will use polycarbonate transparent plastic tubes to create its dreamlike appearance. After the Expo, also plastic tubes can be easily recycled to reduce social wastage.

3. Water/mist System

For the Shanghai Corporate pavilion, rainwater will be collected and recycled. After such treatment as sedimentation, filtration and storage, rainwater can be used for daily purposes at the pavilion and for the "mist" in particular. The mist can lower the temperature, purify the air and create a comfortable climate in pavilion. The spray can also be used to form various patterns under ceiling of entrance hall and make the overall appearance of the Shanghai Corporate Pavilion fresh and elegant.

[Arch Daily via Inhabitat via Boing Boing Gadgets]

And the even cooler part is that the base tech will be very similar to the laser systems used to read CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs today, so the new holographic-enhanced players and drives would still be backwards compatible with previous optical discs.

Still quite a while until this approaches the realm of a product, but it's good to know about the next stupid format war this will surely spawn well before it happens! [NYTimes]

For full resolution, click here.

It wasn't until the beginning of the 20th century that mass-produced recordings were available to the average person—the concept of buying music is amazingly new. (Or to some, ooooooold.) Just a century ago, the first records began to do for music what the Gutenberg press did for words. Before them, music was handed crudely from person to person; after, it could reach millions, untouched and unspoiled.

If we couldn't record music, the Beatles would have never left Liverpool. By the same token the Jonas Brothers would have never left Georgia or Disney World or the Old Testament or wherever the hell they came from. Talk about progress! There may be no accounting for taste, but you can thank these reproducible formats for the very existence of the notion of pop music.

Listening Test: It's music tech week at Gizmodo.

For those of you who know me, it shouldn't come as a surprise to know the very first CD I bought was the soundtrack to Walt Disney's Beauty and the Beast. I was about 10 years old when I purchased the CD, but before that, I recorded my own cassette of it by holding an old boombox, with a double-tapedeck, up to the speakers through every single song of the movie.

I don't remember the gadgets I used to play them on, but from VHS to cassette to CD to digital download, I still listen to "Belle" at least once a week. It's true that living in my little magical bubble might make me a little detached from the real world, but you have to admit that this sparkly, yellow ball gown is so much more flattering on me than your wizard capes and crumpled up binder paper. Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt!

For Gizmodo's week-long Listening Test (a tribute to all things audio), each writer will be sharing his/her first album. In other words, there will be many more to come.

Listening Test: It's music tech week at Gizmodo.

Album art used to be a serious pursuit, as if it was equally important to catch both the eyes and the ears of the music shopper. Perhaps, we don't need the allure of album art anymore, since we can instantly gratify our need to hear the music we want to buy or steal. But when I was growing up, it was vital.

Vinyl albums - The mama pajama of album art came from the cardboard, paper and sometimes tissue wrapping around and within 33rpm records. A favorite of mine was Prince's Purple Rain, because the lyrics were printed on the outside for easy sing-along access. ("Ain't gonna let the elevator break us down, oh no, let's go!") More often, lyrics would be found on that easily torn inner sleeve. The best album covers were the ones that opened, with a booklet of photos and lyrics inside. That was the jackpot.

45s, which I actually bought quite a few of in the early to mid 1980s (cuz they were cheap and I was a kid), they usually came in almost no protection at all, just a thin paper wrapper with a hole in the middle to see what was what. The way you could tell the best 45s was, a full-color photograph covered the whole glossy envelope—and there was no hole.

Memorable records:
• Queen - Flash Gordon Original Soundtrack
• Weird Al Yankovic - In 3D
• Pat Benatar "Love Is a Battlefield" 45

Cassettes - This was a dark time for album art and music packaging. Cassettes were frickin' ugly, especially those standardized ones released by Columbia Records, with the red block lettering on the side, and like zero information within. Sealed tight with cellophane, we were first introduced to the concept of needing tools to open our own music. (Though the really cool record collectors sliced open the easily torn plastic wrap, to protect the art within, I always thought of that as the equivalent of Granny covering her couch with plastic.)

As cassettes dominated vinyl, labels put more info into the packs, so that you'd get a piece of paper folded 97 times, out into this long thing. That was it for tape evolution, though—a frickin' long long piece of paper with tiny photos and even tinier lyrics. Folding it back in took origami ninja skill that I didn't have.

I enjoyed cassette singles (or "cassingles") because they were cheap, and only had the songs I cared about. Still, they came in a sleeve that was open at both ends, so the damn tape would always fall out.

Memorable cassettes:
• Steve Winwood - Roll With It
• Hall and Oates - H2O
• Prince - "Alphabet Street" cassette single

CDs - They actually started shipping in long rectangular boxes, so they'd take up exactly 50% of the rack space of a vinyl album. I think this was on purpose, so record stores didn't have to retool their shelving. The upside was lots of surface area for cover art, and the early days of the CD were like a return of album art. These long skinny boxes had huge busts of Jim Morrison, huge prints of the famed Zeppelin explosion that launched a band into stardom. The boxes were also wrapped in easy-to-tear plastic, so getting into your CD, though it took a few steps, was pretty easy.

But then the green freaks got their way, and the cardboard boxes were discontinued. Jewel boxes—and their never-too-popular "eco pac" brethren—just got thicker and thicker booklets, and more and more digital features. Worse, they came increasingly hard to open, to the point where record stores literally started selling specialized tools to open CDs. That's just wrong, but nothing is more wrong than the mercifully short-lived "dogbone" security wrapper, that scarred your jewel box for life.

Memorable CDs:
• Don Dorsey - Beethoven or Bust
• Paul Simon - Graceland
• Dire Straits - Communique

Digital downloads - And so we reach nothing. Not totally nothing, as it seems like every album still requires a 6-inch square illustration to validate its existence. But there's no series of photos, long lists of musicians and instruments and lyrics and writing credits. We're doing with less and less in the way of local information about our recordings—those booklets that told us who played sax on tracks 2, 3 and 7, they're disappearing. We can use the web to gather specifics when really necessary, but label-controlled artist websites really don't help. Some bands put out those digital booklets, but not many. And as far as track metadata, the details are scant. And the gratification is so quick, I almost yearn for the days when I needed a special knife to cut into my new CD.

Memorable downloads:
• Jack Johnson - On and On (first time I skipped the CD)
• David Gray - Life in Slow Motion (first "digital booklet")

I came across this excellent site, the Album Art Exchange, when thinking about this subject. If you want to get a sense of the history and the elaborate nature of album art dating back to the 1960s, I suggest you hop on over.

Listening Test: It's music tech week at Gizmodo.

I played 'em on a big ol' Sony boombox, which I actually brought on a family road trip that summer because I didn't have a Walkman yet. That fucker needed about eight C batteries and took up all the footroom in the backseat of my parents' station wagon, but I plugged my headphones in and rocked Let's Face It on repeat for the whole 9-hour trip to Cape Cod.

I insisted for about a year that the Bosstones were the greatest band of all time, and wore out the CD within a few months. The Bosstones were also the headliners at my first concert, the Y100 Halloween Bash at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia back in 1999 (if you grew up in the Philly area, you're now expected to exhale sadly and reminisce about the brilliance of Y100). Let's Face It has been long absent from my enormous music collection, so I downloaded it just two days ago to see how much I remembered, and to try to understand what my pre-pubescent self loved so much about it.

Turns out I can can still sing along with almost the entire album, but I'm just not capable of judging it objectively. It's too important to me, and it's informed my tastes ever since. I can trace my love of vintage soul back to the Bosstones' horn section, my power-pop obsession to their anthemic choruses and harmonies, and my easy acceptance of unconventional singers (Joanna Newsom, Antony, David Bielanko, John Darnielle) back to Dicky Barrett's growly, result-of-20-years-of-cigarettes-and-booze vocals.

Even though I'm a super annoying music snob these days, at the time I didn't really get Beck; I thought he was kind of weird and noisy and not nearly catchy enough. The only song I really liked off Odelay was "Where It's At," and even that didn't get as much play as my least favorite song on Let's Face It. In the years since, of course, I've come to see Beck as a genius, but it wasn't until Midnite Vultures that he really started to make sense to me.

Let's Face It isn't a cool album. It's got no cachet, it's got no cred, and it was part of a fad (the "third wave" of ska) that died out nearly a decade ago. But it means a lot to me, and I know I'll never let it disappear from my collection again.

For Gizmodo's week-long Listening Test (a tribute to all things audio), each writer will be sharing his/her first album. In other words, there will be many more to come.

Fremer, if you have yet to decipher this, is an audiophile of the highest calibre. Literally millions of dollars of premium audio equipment have passed through his listening room under review for Stereophile magazine, and he's been obsessing about vinyl since he was four years old, memorizing the labels of his parents' 78s. A man who, when digital recording and reproduction methods began to surface culminating in the compact disc's takeover as the predominant music format, became a figurehead for the vinyl superiority movement, staunchly advocating its greater tonal resolution over a CD's 44.1 kHz max. (See this MTV clip for Fremer in action, circa 1993.)

In short, a species of human I had never known prior to hanging out with him in his New Jersey basement listening room last week, and a species, frankly, I was skeptical of in just about every possible way.

Upon getting picked up by Fremer at the train station near his home, my fears immediately began to feel all too real. It was but a minute or two into our car ride from the station that a rant on Walt Mossberg's inferior review of the Airport Express, Apple's music-streaming mini-router that Fremer and I both enjoy in our home systems, begins in earnest:

"If he's not going to tell people how it sounds, then what's the fucking point? Don't step into my world, Walt!" Multiple emails of complaint to poor Walt are cited. I am definitely thinking "uh oh" at this point.

But then, settled into the lone leather chaise in Fremer's basement audio temple, nestled right in the sweetspot of his $65,000 Wilson MAXX3 speakers, I hear the needle drop on Air's "Run" from Talkie Walkie. It's a song I've never heard (kind of fell off Air after overusing Moon Safari considerably), but one that I'm now listening to all the time. Because, with all honesty, I have never heard anything like that song played on that stereo system at that moment. Ever.

The song ends, and after emerging from an opiate-like haze, I hear a hiss. And yes, while the record was playing, I heard a pop, a crackle or two. Isn't this as high-end an audiophile system as they come? Shouldn't the sound be of such purity so as to sustain life in lieu of water for days on end?

I mention this slight—very slight, but noticeable—hiss to Fremer, and it's probably a frequency that 50 plus years of rocking have eliminated from his spectrum. He doesn't even care. This is when I start to understand.

After hearing I'm a Bowie fan, Fremer drops into his near limitless stacks and spins a pressing of "Heroes" with part of the title track's chorus in German. I'm giggling with pleasure at the frankly obscene level of detail I hear (Ich! Ich werde König!), but of course, I'm hearing the pops and crackles that a 30+ year-old record is likely to have. Shouldn't a $350,000 stereo system be completely free of such impurities?

"It's like when you go to the symphony, and the old men are coughing—same thing," Fremer says. Necessary impurities. Reminders of being in the real world.

We play my solid 256kbps VBR MP3 of "Heroes" off my iPod; it sounds like shit. Free of pops and crackles, yes, but completely lifeless, flat in every way. This is the detail that matters: Audiophiles are basically synesthesiacs. They "see" music in three-dimensional visual space. You close your eyes in Fremer's chair, and you can perceive a detailed 3D matrix of sound, with each element occupying its own special space in the air. It's crazy and I've never experienced anything like it.

It is within this 3D space where the audiophile lives and operates, and spends all his money. Fremer himself is the first to admit that it would only take $3,000 to $5,000 to build a system that will be deeply satisfying to most music fans. On a scale of 1 to 100 completely of my own devising, let's put this system at around 85. Now, imagine that you've tasted 85, and you want to go higher; you want Bowie's cries of kissing by the wall to inhabit the most perfect point in your system's matrix, and Bryan Ferry's back-up fly girls on "Avalon" to flank him just beautifully. That, friends, is where you might end up paying hundreds of thousands.

Our little scale, unfortunately, is logarithmic, in that going from zero to 85 doesn't take a lot of effort or money, but going from 98.6 to 99.1 by swapping out a $2,600 AC power cable for a $4,000 one becomes a justifiable end. We did exactly that, and I strained to hear any difference at all (more impressions of our test will follow later in the week), but to Fremer, the difference was abundantly clear—not necessarily better with the more expensive cable, but different, a warmer, fuller sound, as Fremer described it. Here's the breakdown of his current listening-room hardware:

The point is, people like Fremer can not only hear the difference, they crave it. I walked into his listening room expecting to discern absolutely zero difference in the comparison tests we had planned, swapping out speaker cables that cost as much as a meal at the best restaurant in New York for another set that cost as much as a year of undergrad at Harvard. I actually did hear a tiny difference. But to people like Fremer, that tiny difference becomes a mind-boggling disparity, and it's worth paying for if it means a few decimal points closer to perfection. Unfortunately, the logarithmic curve is asymptotic: There is no ceiling. Fremer will be the first to admit that this type of dragon chasing is not and should not be for everyone.

This obsession with tiny differences explains Fremer's fevered defense of analog music sources over digital. Two anecdotes from the past are particularly illuminative:

The first is his memories of rushing to the record store in 1979 to pick up Ry Cooder's Bop ‘Til You Drop, the first mainstream rock release to be recorded using an all-digital process, which at the time was being lauded as the next big thing. But upon getting it home and dropping it into his high-end system, the results were not good:

"It made me feel horrible!" he remembers. Even though it was played on vinyl, Fremer could already detect some missing elements in the 3D audiophile space that just weren't there. "And it's not like I was a digiphobe at this point—I had no reason to be. I was as excited as anyone to hear this."

The second was the first public playing of a compact disc, to a room full of expectant audiophiles a few years later. While they breathlessly applauded the first track played from the then refrigerator-sized device, Fremer was horrified. He heard the same flatness and lack of detail in the 3D audio world he loved to inhabit. "I felt…weird. My hands were shaking. All I could think, then, was WE'RE FUCKED!" A few days later, a new, custom-printed bumper sticker was slapped on Fremer's car: "COMPACT DISCS SUCK."

And thus began a long battle, and thankfully, it seems to have ended happily. Both with the advent of SACDs—which Fremer is a great fan of, proving that he's not hung up on nostalgia—and the greater acceptance and continued life of vinyl, Fremer is a happy man these days. "I'm on top of the world right now. I set out to save vinyl, and we did it."

Because the thing is, Fremer loves music first and foremost. The audiophile I had feared was one who cares far more about the overpriced gadgetry than the actual music. This is not who I ended up meeting. This man listens to music and makes sure it was recorded with the best fidelity, that the intents of the artist have been preserved. And thank God he does, because we certainly don't.

I listen to most of my music on downloaded, compressed, lossy MP3s, and so do you. But even if you can't hear the sound quality, we need someone like Fremer up on that wall, a preservationist of archival recordings and an ombudsman for new recording techniques, because one day you'll want to hear it, and it'll be there because of audiophiles.

These guardians in and outside of the recording industry ensure that, whether it's in a movie theater tomorrow or in your own home listening room on some far off future date, you'll be able always get back to a recording that expresses every frequency, every ounce of warmth and life, of the original performance. Because if you can hear, it, if you ever get to live in that 3D space, you'll be glad Fremer helped defend it.

For more audio goodness, hit up Fremer's own site at musicangle.com

Listening Test: It's music tech week at Gizmodo.

Remember bootleg concert CDs? Record stores in major cities would sell them for insane prices, like $30 for a single disc, and they were always imported from places like Italy. The labels often looked like they were printed on someone's inkjet (which they probably were) and the song titles were usually wrong. But this was before the internet and before CD burners, so getting to hear a concert on a CD that the band hadn't sanctioned was incredible. The quality might not have always been great, but that added an air of authenticity to the recordings. You felt like you were there in the back of the room.

Since it was before the internet, all I knew is that these discs were incredibly rare and I was the only person I knew who had them. They felt like secret glimpses into worlds I wasn't supposed to know about, being too young to go to, say, a Pearl Jam concert (yes, I was a huge Pearl Jam fan when I was younger). These CDs clicked on something inside me that made me want to collect. I wanted to hear more, I wanted to hear every song that hadn't been released and hear every concert. It's a trait I've managed to get under control as I've gotten older, but it's still evident in my 250GB MP3 collection.

I was too young to really see why it was such BS for them to charge so much for an audience recording I could have gotten for free. I later discovered tape trading, which allowed me to fill my urge for new concert recordings on fresh Maxell XLIIs. That helped save me money that was before eagerly handed over to my cousin every time he returned from the city.

And yeah, it's so much better now that you can download shows for free on the internet at places like Archive.org, but I have fond memories of the preciousness that such scarcity gave to those first few discs I had. It's much more convenient now, but through my lens of nostalgia I actually appreciate only having those one or two concerts to listen to over and over again. They carried a weight and a value that no set of .flacs could have delivered. They made me really appreciate every nuance and every note, where I think if I got those same discs today I would find fault with them much faster. There's something about an item being rare and unique that allows you to look over most of its flaws, and for me at age 11, that wasn't a bad thing.

Listening Test: It's music tech week at Gizmodo.

The question is, do these actually work, or is it just a bizarre casing for the real hardware housed inside? Furthermore, if it was a real product, would you actually want one? [Pete Verrando via Boing Boing Gadgets]

In an interview by David Pogue, Dag Spicer, curator of the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, noted that there's no great solution to saving your data other than resaving it again and again. His best advice:

...every five or ten years, you should move it onto a different format, like from VHS tape to DVD. And that's fine, but then DVD is already obsolete, there's Blu-ray, and so what's going to happen in another 10 years?

Making lots of backups is good advice, and on different formats, different places; consider paper as an archival medium...Keeping it on the Web is also not a really great strategy. A very large photo site just went out of business, and they gave people, I think, a month's notice to say, "We've run out of money, get your photos off the site and put them somewhere." Web sites are fine for sharing, but in terms of preserving your data, I wouldn't recommend it.

There's a lot more to the interview, and whether you're a data geek or just a guy who doesn't want to lose his home movies, it's definitely worth a read. [Pogue's Posts and Image by PJP]

Happy birthday! 1979-2009.Thirty years. Pretty amazing that it's been that long since those crazy Dutchmen at Philips spun the technology off of laser discs as part of an optical digital audio disc demo in Eindhoven.

Of course, the CD didn't immediately take off right then and there. It needed a little help from Sony, which worked with Philips to get the format standardized. The standard they named Red Book, which included everything from playing time (initially 60 minutes), to the disc diameter to sampling frequency. Put simply, the collaboration worked out, and Red Book was a success. In the book The Compact Disc Story, Philips reps lauded the task force they established with Sony. The CD that team created was "invented collectively by a large group of people working as a team," Philips said. If only Apple and Microsoft could say the same, no? Oh, the things they could build.

Gushing and my bloviating aside, it wouldn't be until October 1, 1982 that Billy Joel's 52nd Street became the first CD album released. It was conveniently released in Japan alongside Sony's brand new CDP-101 Compact Disc player. The album (and more importantly the medium it was pressed upon) changed history, as more compact disc players were introduced into the market beginning in 1983. The music CD would reach its zenith with The Beatles "1" (30 million in sales), before beginning its eventual and inevitable fall to the Mp3 in the mid-2000's (in 2008, for example, CD sales dropped 20%).

Related to that point on Mp3s is copy protection. Or, to be more accurate, the CD's complete and utter lack of copy protection of any kind.

When the Red Book was finalized, the standard made nary a mention of copy protection. Other than an anti-copy clause in the subcode, there was nothing. In fact, if a company tried to market a copy-protected CD (no ripping, copying, etc), as many did in 2002, Philips said the discs would not bear the official Compact Disc Digital Audio logo. It's great that Philips did this, because as is the case with many "protected" forms of media today, these non-standardized CDs were anti-consumer; they often did not work in a variety of CD-ROM drives or standalone players. And yet Lars Ulrich was silent. Baffling, but true, and definitely an interesting parallel to today's debate about digital rights management and piracy.

As was noted by Blam today in an email to me about this anniversary, Red Book's active attempts to keep copy protection from the spec was incredibly forward thinking at the time. You definitely didn't see it in the infamous anti-consumer Extended Copy Protection (XCP) debacle at Sony Music BMG. Remember that ol' chestnut? Ironic that the creator of the original standard would be somehow involved in one of the most egregious CD-related abuses of consumer trust, no?

But back on point. The CD is 30. It changed tech and gadgetry pretty substantially. Even as it enters the twilight of its existence, we geeks have a lot to be thankful for, and there's still plenty to learn from that copy of What's the Story Morning Glory you have under your coffee mug right now. [Wikipedia]

OK, actually it's sculpture by Jean Shin that's on display at the Manhattan Museum of Arts and Design through February 15. [NYT via Apartment Therapy]

Beyond the fact that CDs are yesterday's news, the idea of paying so much money for a CD player is kind of bananas to begin with. I mean, who needs a belt drive in their CD player? This isn't a record player, it's not like the music plays too fast or too slow on crappier CD players. I'm sure this thing does a great job of stabilizing the disc during the rotation, but you won't notice that when you listen to it.

Really, it's understandable for audiophiles to prefer CDs to digital files just because digital files are usually compressed and sound like crap compared with CDs. But any CD player will read your CDs as good as any other. Save your $7,100 for something more worthwhile. [New Launches]

Apparently so. Weezy's "Tha Carter III," Usher's "Here I Stand" and Mariah Carey's "E=MC2" are all among Pack Central's current best selling tapes. If you're man enough to rock the new Mariah Carey on cassette in the slammer, my hat's off to you—I only feel comfortable singling you out from the safe confines of the internet.

Anyway, CDs are apparently too easy to splinter into a shiv (for disciplining the dude who laughed at your Mariah tapes), and the company even has to remove the metal screws from their tapes before shipping them out to get by the screeners (you guys make a good point below, though—I guess the cassette shivs are not as worrisome). The guy who keeps all those 20-year-old Walkmen in operating condition must be swimming in bartered cigarettes. [NYTimes, image tapedeck.org]