Author: DOuG pRATt

All is Lost

A corrupt president with criminal immunity to everything but impeachment, as granted by the Supreme Court. ICE thugs in Minneapolis and an unwarranted attack on Jerome Powell that threatens the integrity of the Federal Reserve Bank. Not to mention Venezuela, Greenland, Ukraine and Gaza. With whatever is in the Epstein files yet to be revealed. Under the circumstances, this is the movie for me.

Stalled Sunny Songs

This superbly produced single was released on April 12, 1969. Opening like a Four Seasons song, it should have been a top ten hit on Billboard, but it peaked at #32. Sisters Bonnie and Pat Lamdin provide the glorious vocals.

Here’s one, from 1966, that didn’t even chart on Billboard. Sincerely, this was how it felt being young in Christian Fellowship.

Never Before

I have LaserDiscs that suffer from laser rot and burned CDs with more errors than music. But I’ve never before had trouble with a manufactured CD. Until Never Before, a gift from a couple of not-so-secret Santas at work back in ’89.

I popped that Byrds disc into the Panasonic DVD player I use for CDs. Spin and click, spin and click, without reading the table of contents. Uh, oh. The deck is over 20 years old, so is it starting to fail?

In the Sony Blu-ray player, that’s only a few years old, the CD did the same thing. Spin and click with no playback. One more test in the DVD/CD drive of the old Dell tower PC confirmed the problem must be with the disc.

The album is on Lyrion Music Server in lossless WMA format. I was thinking of ripping it again into lossless FLAC. Would I have to resort to using FFMPEG to convert the files? What about trying the Samsung USB DVD/CD drive I bought twelve years ago for $30?

Success! Never Before played and ripped. What was the trouble it gave the other players? I put it back in the Panasonic DVD deck and… it played fine.

I left the CD in the player, turned it off and, 24 hours later, turned it back on. The player spun the disc and clicked.

Back into the Samsung it went. It played, I skipped around the disc a bit, took it out, then put it back in the Panasonic. No problem with playback.

So, what the heck is going on? Is the heat of the laser in the player that’s able to get past the starting point doing something to the reflective aluminum surface to flip bits, so they stay correct long enough for transplant to the other player?