atari2600land's Blog

The original CD spec had a provision for "chapters" within tracks. (So you could hit next chapter in addition to next track.) IFAIK very few CDs used chapters, and most CD players don't even acknowledge their existance. (Yeah, I got into CD very early so had players which knew about chapters.)

 

The problem with a 40 minute track is you can't skip ahead. On Tubular Bells there are some parts I really like, but I'd hate to have to listen from the beginning every time and fast forward through 30 minutes. My Phantom of the Opera CD is like that - one track per CD. Very annoying.

 

So maybe if chapters had caught on then you'd see more 40 minute tracks.

 

(I once made MP3s of the commentary tracks from the Lord of the Rings DVDs to listen to on my daily commute. I broke them up into 10 minute songs so I didn't have to search as far to get back to where I left off the previous day.)

How interesting! This makes me wonder why DVDs have chapters. Did someone look at an early CD when creating DVDs, and say "You know, maybe we should add chapters to our new invention"? Of course, I have weird theories about everything, like why VCRs have record buttons. There weren't camcorders back then, so I figured it would be so people could videotape themselves playing video games. But then, that would mean that people could tape TV as well. I have a newscast from '83 which addresses the problem of people taping copyrighted programs on VCRs and whether it's a crime or not. How ironic is that?

Although there may be some relationship between CD and DVD tracks & chapters (actually, I was looking at Wikipedia, and they were officially known as indexes), but I suspect there's nothing more than a casual causal relationship.

 

Consumer VCRs were always meant for recording broadcast TV.