Warner Music Group have announced that from the 26th of October, two albums on DualDiscs will be released followed by another two on November 23rd. The first two albums include "still Not Getting Any..." by Simple Plan and "Gold Medal" by The Donnas. The next discs from Warner Music Group include "American Beauty" by Grateful Dead and one from Trapt's sell-titled album. For those who are not familiar with DualDiscs, a DualDisc is a double sided disc containing an audio CD on one side and a hybrid DVD-Audio/Video on the other side.
Unlike Enhanced CD's and albums consisting of a music CD and video DVD, A DualDisc allows the artist to offer the consumer complete audio and features on a single disc which can be played back on the majority of consumer equipment including standard CD players, DVD players, DVD-Audio players, PCs and pretty much everything else than can play a CD or DVD.
The most likely content to be placed on the DVD side includes 5.1 surround sound, Hi fidelity DVD-Audio, music videos, live performances, lyrics, making of the tracks and/or picture gallery much like with a DVD movie. These albums from Warner Music Group will mainly feature high quality 5.1 surround sound on the DVD side.
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Unlike Enhanced CD's and albums consisting of two discs, A DualDisc allows the artist to offer the consumer complete audio and features which can be played back on the majority of consumer equipment including standard CD players, DVD players, DVD-Audio players, PCs and pretty much everything else than can play a CD or DVD. The most likely content to be placed on the DVD side includes 5.1 surround sound, Hi fidelity DVD-Audio, music videos, live performances, lyrics, making of the tracks and/or picture gallery much like with a DVD movie. --- Further down the article --- DualDisc Offers Fans A Multi-Media Experience Simple Plan's "Still Not Getting Any..." DualDisc (Lava Records) will include the entire album on the CD side while the DVD side provides 20 minutes of exclusive, behind-the-scenes "making of the album" footage, photo galleries of the band, lyrics, bonus material as well as the entire album available in enhanced sound (5.1 Surround Sound and/or DVD-Audio or LPCM stereo). In addition to the full album on the CD side of Atlantic Records' The Donnas' "Gold Medal" DualDisc, the DVD side features each track available in 5.1 Surround Sound and high-resolution stereo. It also features The Donnas' "Fall Behind Me" music video in Surround Sound, a 15-minute "making of the video" piece and a lyrics section for the album. Included on the DVD side of Trapt's DualDisc (Warner Bros. Records) are seven music videos from their debut album "Trapt" for the following songs: "Headstrong," "Still Frame," "Echo," "Made of Glass" (live performance version), "Stories" (live performance version), "Headstrong" (live performance version), "Echo" (live performance version). The Grateful Dead's DualDisc (Rhino Records) contains two recent, exclusive video interviews on the DVD side. The first never-before-seen interview is with Bob Weir, who discusses his inspiration for writing the song "Sugar Magnolia." The second is with Mickey Hart who offers fans a look into how the album was mixed into Surround Sound. The DualDisc also includes song lyrics and a picture gallery of the band. Read the full article here. |
DualDiscs look to be the best way forward after the CD compared with DVD-Audio, Super Audio CD and other proposed music based discs. Super Audio CDs do offer legacy CD playback, however they totally lack PC and DVD playability and require rather expensive playback equipment just to get any sort of high-fidelity sound, although they are working on a hybrid solution also. While DVD-Audio on the other hand does require a DVD-Audio compatible player for its highest resolution uncompressed audio, there is already software available for PC playback and DVD-Audio supports a DVD-Video session for (lossy compressed) hi-fidelity surround sound playback in current DVD players. DualDisc just takes the features of DVD-Audio further by adding a CD player to add support for existing CD players.
So far, pretty much every other music disc not offering legacy CD/DVD playback not only put off consumers by requiring new playback hardware, but made strong use of DRM, which we know seems to be the kiss-of-death for new hardware.
Once a wider selection of DualDiscs hit the shops, it will be interesting to see if consumers will choose these over music videos or regular CDs. While album sales may have fallen up until recently, music video sales have made a sharp rise early this year which may indicate that consumers are starting to make the switch from CD to music videos and not pure piracy as the music industry sees it.
Source: Yahoo Financial News
