March 17th, 1998
New Technology Intros Web Interactivity to Music CDs
Newsbytes News Network
By Martin Stone
TORONTO, ONTARIO, CANADA, Have you ever closed your eyes while listening to your favorite CD and tried to visualize the band members actually playing the song you are listening to? Well, now, thanks to new technology unveiled today, you can interact using existing music CDs and your Web browser to add sight to sound.
The Canadian recording phenomenon, The Watchmen, has teamed up with Digital Renaissance, a Toronto-based provider of technology for digital media communications, to create the world's first interactive CD-Web site interface.
Digital Renaissance spokeswoman Karen Sealy told Newsbytes that the new CD-Active format increases the advantages of enhanced CDs ten- fold.
Music enthusiasts can experience CD-Active, Digital's trade name for the new technology, by visiting The Watchmen's site at http://www.silentradar.com , where they will find behind the scenes video footage, private photos, song lyrics not found on the CD, exclusive interviews and a fan contribution area while listening to the band's upcoming album Silent Radar (produced by Adam Kasper of Soundgarden and REM), scheduled to hit stores on March 31.
CD-Active allows fans of The Watchmen to play back the "Silent Radar" CD on a home computer from within a World Wide Web browser, such as Netscape or Internet Explorer, while synchronizing music tracks, such as "Stereo," the first single off the new album, with other cool things on the Web site, the producers say.
Sealy said that a copy of the necessary software is included with the new Watchmen album but that a free download is available from their Web site at http://www.digital-ren.com which will make any CD interact with any specially encoded Web site.
Says Rob Brooks, vice president of marketing and operations at EMI Music Canada, which produced the Silent Radar album: "When a company like Digital Renaissance introduces a new concept like CD-Active, we are thrilled to share in bringing this innovative technology to the music industry. We worked closely with Digital Renaissance to choose the right band to debut CD-Active. The Watchmen, who have continuously led the way and shown commitment to both their fans and new media, were the natural choice. EMI Music Canada has always tried to be at the forefront of new ideas and technological changes within the music business."
Sealy said that with the excitement among music fans generated by enhanced CDs, "I see the music industry now really moving in the direction of CD-Active."
The Watchmen's bass player, Ken Tizzard, says of the new technology: "Even though much of the song Stereo is about a fear of technology, the band has no doubt about embracing it. We believe in using new technologies to help our fans get a fuller experience from our new album and connect with us more easily."
Using Temporal Annotation Generator (T.A.G.) technology, Digital developed CD Audio Editor as the tool for CD-Active. It is the first product to allow the playback of CD audio tracks within a Web browser, while synchronizing the sound tracks with interactive hyperlinks, the company says. An extension of the T.A.G. Editor, T.A.G. CD Audio Editor allows record companies to create the CD-Active content for end-users by fully synchronizing CD audio tracks to any asset on the Web including uniform resource locators (URLs), hypertext markup language (HTML) pages, videos and images.
The architecture separates the media and the hyperlink tags. All the hyperlinks are stored in a network database, and come in the form of push and pull technology, allowing for easy maintenance and updates to the CD-Active Web content without augmenting existing CDs.
Since the music is on the CD and the interactivity is on the Web, there is no cost to the consumer, who has either received the T.A.G. software with the CD album or has downloaded it free from Digital' s site. "And, there's no re-mastering of existing CDs required by record companies," Sealy said.
"The T.A.G. series of products is harnessing the power of non-linear communications to enhance the ways in which people can interact with the Web," said Keith Kocho, president and CEO of Digital Renaissance. "CD-Active is another example of how non-linear interactivity can revolutionize the way we listen to and interact with music."
Silent Radar was recorded in Seattle and is The Watchmen's fourth full-length album and the first for EMI Music Canada. The Watchmen are best known for their dynamic live performances, having played several thousand shows since getting together in 1989. Their hits, which include Boneyard Tree and All Uncovered (from their Platinum album In The Trees) and Incarnate and Shut Up (from their Gold album Brand New Day), are mainstays at Canadian radio while their new single Stereo is already tearing up the Canadian rock charts and, according to EMI, promises to secure them international success.