Austrian Black metal Ainur Summoning finished their upcoming album according to a post on their official Facebook page.
The band is submitting their record’s master to Napalm Records as a CD-R instead of digitally. The band also submitted a bonus CD for special editions of the upcoming record.
And so it is done …
… as you can see on the photograph, no master files but rather old-fashioned master discs were passed on to Napalm Records. One for the new full-length album, the other comprises of additional material for special editions.
When the year approaches its end, all details will be revealed.If you wonder why a new Summoning facebook page all of a sudden appeared, the answer is quiet simple. The former site was just semi-official, which means we could post there for some time, but originally, it was a fan page and belonged to someone else.
That cooperation is over now and hereby Summoning and Napalm Records both present this new page as an outlet for all coming news concerning the band and its releases.
Please understand that Protector and Silenius won´t be available to answer each request or communicate frequently with the Summoning army out there, but we will use this medium sparsely to inform you when something worthwhile happens under the fiery eye. In any case, it is here where you will be informed first.
Tags: Austria, Black Metal, Napalm Records, news, Summoning, upcoming album, upcoming release
So, what’s the difference?
CDs are still digital files… so… they just did not send them over by email…
They can just copy the files from the CD, and do whatever they would have done with the “digital files they didn’t send”.
Fucking dumb.
The difference is that an audio CD (which I presume this is) is a special data format which is not a collection of files. Among other things, this enables controlling the content of pauses between tracks (to some degree).
If you rip a CD-R, burn a CD-R from that rip, rip the newly burned CD-R, and continue going, you will eventually affect the sound audibly or the process will just stop working due to the mechanical limitations of CD-R media (dye vs physical pits) when read and written compared to a normal pressed CD. If you were alive and sharing music physically in late 90s and the early 2000s for quality better than crappy MP3s, you would know this.
CD-Rs cannot be ripped securely with checksums a dozen times and have it come out exactly the same. That’s the limit of the technology versus normal CD. Summoning submitting it mechanically this way is actually worse than digital files but it probably won’t matter for the sound you perceive (if the rip fails, Summoning can always send another CD-R master). For Summoning, CD created from that CD-R master will not be exactly the same as the CD-R but all CDs created from that master and all truly secure rips of intact copies of that CD will be the same digital information as each other.
That’s the whole reason Exact Audio Copy exists. Test & Copy, and better, publishing checksums with AccurateRip and CTDB help detect when the data start failing.
But FLAC files come with an internal checksum so it’s simply much better.
This is obviously correct but misses the point: A ‘red book’/ CDDA CD is not a collection of files. It’s a certain arrangment of audio data on a storage medium. If the band puts its stuff into a CDDA, they control this arrangment down to the last detail, eg, pregrap contents. Otherwise, whoever turns the collection of files into a CDDA does that.
NB: I don’t know whether or not Summoning took advantage of this. It should also be possible to distribute the same information contained in the CDDA image digitally somehow without involving physical CD-Rs (never done that, though).
Boy would like to get my hands on one of those ancient master discs
I’ll just have to wait half a year until the actual release
In the meantime I’m going to end up wondering from time to time what it sounds like
How it differs from the last one etc.
Last one was really good actually
Time warp to Minas Morgul
Did they just mis-spelled their own band name ?
SUMMONIG
HAHAHAHAHAHA
SUP MUH NIGGA
Deutsche Grammaphon 1981
First compact disc launched at the Salzburg Easter Festival by its co-developers, Sony and Philips, and PolyGram, its first European producer. http://www.deutschegrammophon.com/en/album/discover/dg-history.html
Go Compact Disc! Sending a physical copy is kvlt vndergrovnd.