Young company revolutionizes CDs
Young company revolutionizes CDs
Rolling Stones, Disney amongst clients to experiment with new mulitmedia format
By Jason Packman
Daily Bruin Contributor
Imagine buying the new Pearl Jam CD. In addition to having Eddie Vedder's new music on your Discman, it has the group's new music video, not shown on MTV. Plus, it allows direct access to an internet site that bypasses Ticketmaster and sells tickets for Pearl Jam's new fall tour.
That is what Mark Waldrep of AIX Entertainment is hoping will be the future of CDs. Waldrep has developed a new technique to store multimedia software on the average audio CD.
"Every (CD) that gets put out contains some number of megabytes less than the maximum available, so you are throwing away space on a CD. Why not fill it up with pictures, graphics, lyrics, multimedia or internet connection software?" says Waldrep, who received his Ph.D. from UCLA's music department in 1986 and is a pioneer in the world of enhanced CDs. He taught at various universities, including UCLA, and some of his students landed jobs at Warner's new media division.
The idea of placing nonaudio software on audio CDs is fairly new.
"They (enhanced CDs) began in the early '90s as an experiment of putting classical pieces of music, as well as a hypercard stack, on the same disc. In those days there wasn't any Quicktime video, and it was in black and white, and things were pretty clunky," he says, "But the idea was planted that it would be pretty cool to augment a traditional audio CD with some kind of multimedia," Waldrep said.
This "pretty cool" idea grew into what is now AIX, a company that has already produced over 40 enhanced CDs in its short year and a half of existence, and is currently working with Disney for a "The Lion King" spin-off CD.
AIX's proudest moment, however, came when it was asked to do the new Rolling Stones album, "Stripped," in an I-trax format.
"We met with those folks (at Virgin Records) and they said, 'Well, if you can get something in our hands, you know, maybe tomorrow, we'll ship it off to see if the Rolling Stones like it.' They saw it and liked it and opted to have us do the full-on production."
The "Stripped" I-trax CD came out of nine photographs and a videotape, and, within a two-week span, AIX created enough software to fill 20 percent of the CD's memory.
"There isn't a lot of opportunity to luxuriate in the time aspect. So, there were couriers picking stuff up (from AIX in Los Angeles) and flying to London (where the Rolling Stones were)," says Waldrep. "Then we'd get on the phone the next day, and they (the Rolling Stones) would say 'Change this and change that,' but essentially all of the creativity and the production of (the enhanced CD) took place in our studio, and they more or less approved it at the end of the process."
In addition to the Rolling Stones CD, AIX has worked on several other projects, most firsts in the field of enhanced CDs.
"We have the first Grammy nominated enhanced CD, the Kitaro project (entitled "An Enchanted Evening"), which we did for Domo Records. We did the first country album with Kate Wallace. We did the first jazz album with Danny Jiosa," Waldrep said.
While AIX continues to produce a number of enhanced CDs, the major record companies, such as Sony and Phillips, and computer companies, such as Microsoft and Apple, continue their attempts to create an industry standard. Called CD Plus, it utilizes a different format than I-trax.
"There are a fair number of steps that we've done as a small company that the large companies have been unwilling to make (even though they've been capable of making them) because they are hung on, 'Gee, we have to make sure that we have 100 percent compliance on every CD-ROM drive,'" he says.
Waldrep is not concerned at the moment with total compatibility because of the price he charges for the extra software on the CD, which is zero, as opposed to higher prices that the bigger companies would like to charge for their enhanced CDs.
"If they can get $22.98 from people, great, but I think that is a mistake. And I don't think the record-buying consumers are willing to pay the $5 more unless they are initiated in this stuff and two years from now there is a huge demand. For now, it's fairly unusual for someone to even know about enhanced CDs," he says.
What matters to Waldrep is that the public becomes aware of the concept of enhanced CDs so that the format will become accepted, rather than allow technical pricing or dreams of an quick profit destroy its chances.
"It will take time to develop into a really great art form, but it will never get the chance if people are required to pay $5 more for each (enhanced CD)," he says.
MUSIC: For more info on I-trax CDs log on to the WWW site at http://www.itrax.com.Comments to webmaster@db.asucla.ucla.edu
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