Dual Disc
Jun 09
Posted: under Music, Technology.
The dual disc format is a disc that is a CD on one side and a DVD on the other. I just happened to be on amazon earlier and noticed discs being realeased in this format. They have movies explaining the whole thing…. or rather promoting it.
Apparently this has been in the works for a while and I just never noticed….silly me. From what I can tell it’s fairly new to the market though.
It looks really cool actually. They can put the music on one side and extra content including behind the scene videos and whatnot along with a higher quality version of the album on the other side. I’m really impressed because this is something that actually gives people an incentive to buy CD’s. With something like this, just downloading the disc online doesn’t give you the same experience as buying the actual CD. A lot of people probably won’t care much about the extra content, but it’s more bang for your buck so why not? On the upside as well, this could cause prices to drop on “CD only” versions of albums.
But it all comes at a price….the disc is too thick. In order to fit both formats onto one disc, it was too thick to be usable in slot loading players (like in your car). They comprimised with a thinner disc that is usable in slot loading drives (through from what I gather it’s still thicker than a normal disc and could cause problems) and that holds less data.
The CD side can only hold 60 minutes of music. In some cases, the album might not fit onto the disc! I don’t know what their soloution is to this exactly….they could ship these albums as two seperate discs (one CD and one DVD) at a slightly higher cost to them, or they could just cut out a song or two. It’s the latter that worries me, of course. I’d compare track lists on dual disc format discs with their CD counterparts before I bought one. I hope that no one is choosing that straegy, but you never know…
The DVD side is only a single layer. This limits it to 4.7 gigs of space. A normal DVD that you buy movies on and such are dual layer discs (they don’t have to be but they pretty much always are). The dual layer discs are sometimes refered to as “DVD 9″ while the single layer discs are sometimes refered to as “DVD 5″. Yes, 5 + 5 ≠ 9. It’s a rounding error. What does this mean though? It means they can’t really fit as much content onto the DVD side as they’d probably like, especially after they cram a high quality copy of the album on there to start with.
So it’s not exactly as good as a CD and a DVD, but it’s a better option than either one alone for the most part. This could be a big win all around. I’d just make sure to check out those track listings before laying down any cash (or plastic, if you’re like me).
It says it was last at my site 12 hours ago now, but I haven’t really updated in a couple of days so I can’t confirm that through a search. I do know what my last post has been indexed, which isn’t half bad…