Cavalier (Lost Version)
Group: Members
Posts: 598
Joined: Nov. 2010 |
 |
Posted: Dec. 14 2011, 21:45 |
 |
Perhaps you are aware of Gracenote and the music-recognition services they supply. http://www.gracenote.com/
I honestly can't say I did until a holiday at a family house last year. I made a curious observation back in March and I've had time to investigate this visit.
The device in question is a Panasonic satellite tuner and its in-built disc recorder. Upon inserting a CD, a "Powered by Gracenote" logo appears as the display says it is searching for suggestions for the album title. Some discs are not recognised - the current Universal releases for an example - and I assume from their website and the Wikipedia page that this could be due to no one voluntarily submitting details of contents. I only wonder as I've tested the Panasonic with all sorts of CD's lying around here and every one of them (and this includes cheapo compilations and newspaper giveaways) have featured both artist information and the album title. Other admirable characteristics include picking out French and English alternatives for the 1997 release of J-MJ's Images - tracks 03, Chants Magnétiques/Magnetic Fields (part 2) and 08 L'Orchestre Sous La Pluie/Band In The Rain
These and other examples do highlight mistakes and inconsistencies on the part of whoever does supply the details. I didn't bring a complete range of Mike Oldfield discs to experiment with (there's no Warner era unfortunately and I'm missing some of my Virgin 2000 collection - and that was meant to be the whole point) but what I've got shows a little of this.
The display has the format of:
No Track Name Artist
so where we have Exposed (Disc 2), we get:
01 Tubular Bells Part 1 Mike Oldfield
02 Tubular Bells Part 2 Mike Oldfield
03 Guilty Mike Oldfield
The complications come when Gracenote finds more than one suggestion for the title of the disc it's reading. So the other part of that set comes up with three suggestions...
Exposed
01 Incantations Part 1 2 Mike Oldfield
02 Incantations Part 3 4 Mike Oldfield
Exposed (Disc 1)
01 Incantations (Parts 1-2) Mike Oldfield
02 Incantations (Parts 3-4) Mike Oldfield
Not applicable
no track listings
Elsewhere, it's slightly interesting to see that the tracks on Light are by Mike Oldfield, but Shade is by Oldfield, Mike... but we are sitting in the Amarok section for a good reason. Three suggestions? Pah! The 2000 re-issue gets eleven of them 
So, representing the Suggestions menu, and then what subsequently appears for the disc's single track and its artitst, we have:
No. Album Name Track Artist
01 Lightning, Thunder and Rain Lightning, Thunder and Rain Tranquil Moods
02 Releasing the River Amarok Bill Lackie
03 Amarok Amarok Mike Oldfield
04 Amarok Amarok Mike Oldfield
05 Tropical Rain Forest Tropical Rain Forest Nature Sound Music
06 Ocean Sounds Ocean Sounds Nature's Sounds
07 Nature's Relaxing Sound Tropical Rain Forest Tropical Rain Forest
08 Ocean Surf 4a-7a Golden Pond Various Artists
09 Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Die! Die! Death Metal Symphony in Deep C Death Metal Symphony Waltari
10 XFM Sessions Mountain Streams Various Artists
11 Not applicable
If you have a guess as to why so all this information has been encrypted - if that's the right word - onto this one release, by all means speak up! I doubt it's because this individual disc has had previous uses, but I don't have the technological say-so to rule it out. The 2000 remasters state that they were made in the EU; this could well mean Gemany, which might help explain where one of these references come from. I've had some good old internet searches to identify the titles you see above. A few of them probably fall under a category of mood sounds and music. Where I've found descriptions or reviews of them, we apparently have examples of both untreated natural recordings and ones where they are enhanced ( or not - some reviewers are not fans! ) by added music. Where you see names, I've had the following results;
Bill Lackie would appear to be an American gentleman of a religious persuasion, who has a CD teaching course called Releasing the River. Perhaps the word "Amarok" is within, but here endeth my research into that...
XFM is most probably the British radio station specialising in alternative and indie music, but there are others around the world
Waltari are a Finnish band, whose 1996 album is titled merely Yeah! Yeah! Die! Die! Death Metal Symphony in Deep C. It wasn't even released in the UK, but was in Germany (and Austria and Finland) so maybe there was a bit of cross-contamination there when it came to writing up disc details.
And that would be that... if I hadn't been breaking my rule of not listening to entire albums on YouTube during these investigations. This is not the first time that one of these suggestions has been brought to our attention here at Tubular Net http://tubular.net/forums....;t=1070 - you're looking for the contribution made by Gj. I'm not sure about a top 20 just yet, but I'm prepared to say that I've found Waltari's album to be rather brilliant. Death metal discussions have been had whilst I've been here, and it's far from my favourite genre. I'm not immune to its charms though - occasionally admiring the musicianship but despairing at the vocals. Here it's sufficiently broken up by the classical and other passages for me to able to concentrate on it more positively. I say again - it's really rather fab.
So, in a manner of speaking, here's the first part of Amarok 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICZ9kbwE9mA&feature=related
--------------
"Who was that?"
"That was Venger - the force of Evil! I am Dungeon Master - your guide in the realm of Dungeons & Dragons!"
|
