Stompin at the Savoy

That last picture is a good example. The picture is there, but degraded. The picture doesn't cut off half way. There are bits of missing data spotted throughout. Q.E.D.

I'm afraid you are incorrect about this, Kevin. If you do a google image search on the phrase "distortions caused by corrupted photo files" you will see it is so.

Yes. Static, muting, skips and seize up/crashes. He may have perceived static as loss of sound stage. There is no accounting for how degraded signal is perceived - it's subjective. But the point is a significant amount of dirt does affect playback and sound quality. This was the way several disks from Wes Montgomery Riverside box - which I got at an amazing low price - looked. That's not a couple missing bits.

A good sized cloudy area on the surface of a cd is not a couple of misread bits.

I'm sorry but I disagree. I've had noticeable static, muting, skips etc from dirt which were fixed by cleaning.

If the file of a picture of the statue of L is corrupted, you don't get the Eiffel Tower but you do get a different version of the statue picture. If enough is corrupted you will see degradation of the image. Same is true of audio files. Yeah, it might be the same tune but if there is enough corruption, there will be static and signal degradation. Still more corruption and it becomes unplayable and the playback seizes up. You are thinking it will take jillions of corruptions to affect the sound so it won't really be affected. The problem is some drops of soda allowed to dry on a cd will affect jillions of spots!

There are a couple of problems with this. Unless a file is a random access file organization, typically it is a sequential access organization. That means the file is read sequentially. This includes .doc files. Buffering is simply a way to read and hold some rows of the file (almost never all at once) in computer memory rather than go back to the disk for each line of data. Buffering is something the operating system does transparently - you basically don't need to consider that as different from sequential read. It's just a more sophisticated form of sequential read which is actually used in virtually all sequential reads. Buffering also takes place on reads from a cd. It has to in order to prevent variations in device/system read speed from affecting playback. If some data bits are blocked by dirt on the disk, the byte those bits are part of becomes corrupted and possibly unreadable. In some cases error correction can use checksum numbers - the sum total of the value of all the bytes for some 'block' or unit of the data - to figure out the corrupted bytes. Often if there is enough missing the operating system cannot come up with a unique correction. Mike Weil is correct in saying that if you can clean off some dirt and make missing bytes resolvable, the resulting output is different.

Ugh!

Listen here while hunting: https://archive.org/details/CompleteRouletteRecordingsoftheMaynardFergusonOrchestra_201904

Those are going to be pretty tough to work with. I suppose the best you can do is try to rip the disk as soon as you get it and keep backups in case of sticker failure...

Well, washing is not indicated if you have something with a glued on sticker - it will come off and screw up the reflective layer. Most cds and dvds you get are not like that. Washing is ok for most cds if they don't play, IMO.

Table of Contents for the new book Preamble. How This Book Came About Introduction. Bob Weinstock and Prestige 1. Postwar Independent Jazz Record Labels 2. Weinstock's Beginnings. New Jazz 3. Early Artists on New Jazz 4. The Birth of the Prestige Label 5. The First Jazz on LP 6. Wardell Gray, James Moody and King Pleasure 7. Miles Davis 8. Thelonious Monk 9. Enter Rudy Van Gelder and Recording More Monk 10. The Modern Jazz Quartet 11. Cover Art, and a Dual Role for Esmond Edwards 12. Sonny Rollins 13. Miles Davis Back and Ready to Work. the Contractual Marathon 14. Changing Times and Technologies at Prestige 15. Other '50s-era Prestige Recording Artists 16. Miles's Sidemen and John Coltrane 17. Mose Allison and Yusef Lateef 18. A New Era. Soul Jazz 19. Prestige's Satellite Labels 20. Soul Jazz Organists 21. Moving On. Free Jazz and Eric Dolphy 22. Dolphy's Peers at Prestige 23. Booker Ervin 24. Stars of the Early '60s 25. Final Days Epilogue Acknowledgments Works Cited Index

From the table of contents on the SUNY page and the samples on Amazon of vols 1-4, seems like this new book is more like a book of essays on notable artists and groups at Prestige, while vols 1-4 chronologically display discog info for each recording session along with anecdotes and analysis. The kindle editions of vols 1-4 are pretty inexpensive; I will probably buy them.

Sometimes you can get them to play by washing them with warm water and dish-washing soap in the sink. I get a drop of liquid soap on wet hands and rub together then gently rub the cd between hands for a minute, rinse thoroughly and dry with microfiber cloth. This will often fix a cd that had glue (or soda, etc) spilled on the groove side, which you can sometimes detect visually as cloudy areas. It's surprising how often a little soap and water will fix it. Of course if you can rip it, you're home free, just create another disk. A couple of times I've been totally unable to get one or two tracks to play and have been able to buy a cd quality download of just those tracks. Create a new disk and bob's your uncle.

Things have a way of happening if data resides on a single cd. It gets broken or lost or stolen or deteriorates, or burns up in a fire, etc. 1 TB micro-sd cards are a good way to prevent cd loss. Rip the files and copy them to the sd card. That size card will handle most people's collection. OK maybe not some people here... They go for $70 to $100 now that some genius slapped big tariffs on them but they are still pretty cheap insurance.

It's a great set. I've had it since it came out and still listen to it often. Album index: BLP 5066 The Hank Mobley Quartet (J)CJ28-5128 CD reissue of above BLP 1540 Hank Mobley Sextet BLP 1544 Hank Mobley And His All-Stars BLP 1550 Hank Mobley Quintet B2-46816 CD reissue of above BLP 1560 Hank BLP 1568 Hank Mobley (J) BN 61006 Curtain Call (J) GXF 3066 Poppin' BLP 1574 Peckin' Time B2-81574 CD stereo reissue of above

Yes, I suppose you are right in that there are different sorts of streams. Some are like a radio show and probably can't be downloaded or are coming from analog sources. Most things available on Spotify are also available somewhere to download.

Not sure I follow your logic here. Yes, the fact that an album is available for streaming today does not ensure it will be available tomorrow. But if it is streaming, it's almost certainly also available for download too. Which makes it exactly the same as a cd: get it while you can because it may go out of print at any time.

I'm looking forward to this release. Yes it's probably all available in various public domain and commercial releases but a lot of that is pretty chaotic and I despair of obtaining all the discographical details on some of those things. Mosaic does a good job of finding the best sources, cleaning up the sound and organizing the discography in a consistent manner.

An older friend of mine has a collection of LPs and a pretty decent turntable, amp and speakers. He was interested in playing some cds he had been given so I found a Sony DVD player which also plays cds and got it for him. The player cost $33 in 2021 and now goes for $44. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007F9XHBI . It's not a top quality device but it worked pretty well; this indicates that the cost of entry for working with cds is pretty low. Most PCs will play CDs no problem...

I also burned disks of downloads at first, thinking of them as the long term backup for the files I was playing. But as my collection of ripped and downloaded files grew I moved toward a fully digital way of thinking and began backing up all my music to portable hard drives and lately multiple copies at more than one location of 1 TB micro sd cards. One advantage of this arrangement is I can instantly dial up any record I own on multiple devices and also instantly bring up photos of the album covers and booklets. This is particularly helpful in my case because visual disabilities make it near impossible for me to read most cd covers and booklets but I can read the photos when I blow them up on a good sized monitor.

Originally I didn't like downloads much and was particularly puzzled by the habit younger people have of downloading single songs. Having grown up on 78s, 45s, and albums the single download seemed like a step backward. Not to mention the loss of album front and back cover. I was also turned off after a while by mp3s. It's probably all in my head but I fancy I can tell the difference between cd quality (and better) and mp3s. But then a number of things changed my mind about downloads. First of all, I have a lot of cds and box sets and I'm having trouble storing it all. I live in a tiny cabin at the moment. They end up residing in a storage unit and I play the files ripped from them. Another thing that happened is the advent of widely available cd qual or better downloads and the simultaneous proliferation of music database sites such as Discogs, MusicBrainz, AllMusic, Internet Archive, etc. The discography and often photos of album covers is now available electronically and for free for most releases. So I was already listening to lossless files I ripped from my cds and keeping photos of their covers and booklets. It occurred to me that commercially available cd quality (and above) downloads combined with digital photos of the covers and booklets available online were exactly the same formats I was using at home! Why not just buy the cheaper downloads and quit storing hard copies in a storage unit?

Qobuz is running a nice sale on HighNote label. This includes quite a few Woody Shaw releases. CD quality downloads of Woody Shaw Live Vol. 1 - 4 are dirt cheap, $2.95 or $3.70, as are the two volumes of The Tour: $4.44 each.

And even if you do get dementia, it'll swing.

Show biz churns up a lot of strange stuff!