Tag Archives: CD

The ISRC conundrum

Posted on Saturday, 12. February 2022 by hmvh

Furthering the previous article on music metadata, today I’d like to describe my recent observations about ISRCs. It’s a 12-character, alphanumeric code that aims to uniquely identify a sound recording — irrespective whether it’s a song, spoken word, or a music video. According to the official handbook, a song’s album version will have a different ISRC to, for instance, a radio edit or a dance remix. Knowing the ISRC and understanding its implementation can be useful in identifying and differentiating between versions of a song recording. This was important to me last year when I set out to “archive” a batch of CDs (mostly singles and promos). Continue reading →

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More media madness, obviously!

Posted on Saturday, 19. June 2021 by hmvh

Earlier this month I finished my wife’s artist portfolio website. Obviously it includes a store. Obviously you check out the competition while setting up shop, and obviously it doesn’t take long to discover the stranger side of Etsy. Continue reading →

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The legacy of Lou Ottens

Posted on Thursday, 15. April 2021 by hmvh

Lou Ottens, the Dutch inventor of the Compact Cassette as well as the Compact Disc died last month. He was in charge of a team of Philips engineers in Hasselt, Belgium who wanted to develop a portable tape recorder / dictation device and the associated tape cartridges for the home consumer. This was achieved by simplifying, miniaturising and re-imagining several existing concepts and products. Little could he know what legacy his personal frustration with open-reel tapes would leave. Continue reading →

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The eighteen-year scratch

Posted on Thursday, 10. May 2018 by hmvh

Every once in a while you happen across an item that launches an entire avalanche of thoughts and memories. One such artefact is the CD above. This is its story. Continue reading →

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reBuy, revisited

Posted on Friday, 27. October 2017 by hmvh

A few days ago I found more stuff to get rid of. I returned to reBuy. Curiosity got the better of me, so I checked the status of a random item I had sent in the last time. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that this specific CD-single appears to be quite “in demand” today. Continue reading →

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The first experience with reBuy

Posted on Sunday, 4. June 2017 by hmvh

reBuy is a German web-based service that allows you to sell your unwanted media and electronic gadgetry — which spares me the hassle of selling and posting near-worthless stuff as individual items and having to deal with end customers. This could be an interesting little experiment. Even if the items were in good condition, I can suffer their loss if the deal goes sour. Let’s do this. Continue reading →

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(O)CD 2016

Posted on Friday, 3. February 2017 by hmvh

Most of last year was spent listening, scanning, typing, and checking. A certain monster had gotten hungry again, and there were several boxes of morsels stashed away in the basement.
The morsels were my “secondary CD collection”, and the monster is known as discogs.com. All in all I rummaged through some 300 discs, and I also added several records, tapes and downloadables. Once more, I got to explore new music by listening to old recordings. Gratis. Continue reading →

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A thousand contributions

Posted on Saturday, 12. March 2016 by hmvh

Last night I made my 1000th contribution to the Discogs database. It’s a landmark achievement. One thousand new audio entries. It’s also baffling why it took almost 12 years to get to this stage. Continue reading →

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