Muzak Sunglasses Hut International/Watch Station December 1999 custom CD-I 17SW 12.99 HOLIDAY

This little quickie isolated Muzak programme was recently discovered on an online sale. It was played instore at Sunglasses Hut and Watch Station shoppes for the 1999 Christmas shopping season. This is a custom "audio image" disc which contains in-store advertising to encourage more merry Yuletide spending.

The disc's labelling includes an early example of the Muzak "circle M" logotype. It also predates the debut of the Encompass XD by (I think) a couple years. Philips had abandoned support for CD-I in 1998 and had publicly released the specification in the process, so through Plextor, AEI/DMX and Muzak were able to keep it alive for over a decade afterwards (see notes in the Foreground Music One November 2010 page). Although by the end of 1999 CD-I was considered dead as an home multimedia platform (though its VCD offshoot (a.k.a. White Book) is still around, helped by DVD-Video players that included support for it), the format was still very much in its heyday as a professional background music platform.

The cover picture (photograph from sale page) does not portray it accurately due to the lighting used, but the disc is a gold/azo CD-R, not a conventional stamped disc with aluminium reflective layer as it may appear.

Category: Pop/Rock, Holidays, Classic Pop

Library: custom

Client: Sunglass Hut International/Watch Station

Programme number: 17SW 12.99 HOLIDAY

Author: M. Herrera

Production code: 17SW SUNGLASS HUT/WATCH STATION DEC99

Production date: 1999 Oct 22/05:06'57

Released: November 1999 (presumably?)

Programme start:

Expiry: 31 Dec 2038 (well, that's what the "expire" file says...)

Disc type: base case

Audio format: level B-stereo

Programme blocks: 4

Notes

DOWNLOADING

The downsampled 32000 Hz 320 Kb MP3 blocks were manually encoded and uploaded by me, from files derived from the disc's 37800 Hz ADPCM audio. These files were encoded using the "--resample 32000 -q0" option in LAME 3.99.5 (Linux). This is because 37800 Hz is not specified in the MP3 standard, and LAME's default behaviour is to downsample to the nearest valid sample rate. Therefore, the MP3 version is mainly intended for previewing in Archive's built-in Web player. While of acceptable quality, I don't recommend them for optimal listening. Master audio binaries are in 37800 Hz 2-channel ADPCM format.