Scott Colburn

It’s funny when people you work with are really excited about some new audio tech and then you listen to it and find out it’s smoke and mirrors or just barely acceptable.

Case in point is this Dolby Atmos demo. check out Prince – “When Doves Cry”. First off, the stereo version seems like it’s from a 128k or less mp3. That made me listen to the vinyl version to see if it was indeed a remix.

It is…

BUT,

If you are to believe the visualizer, this mix is mostly forward facing. Come on man! Is this the best you can do? You were there with this songs tracks in front of you and all you could conceive was placing all the sounds in the front, but throwing us a bone when a keyboard goes around your head toward the end of the song.

I mean, it’s a spatial music mix which has the ability to place sound anywhere is a 360 degree sphere, so first you decide Atmos is best, (which limited you to the upper hemisphere). So you decide to first negate HALF of the available space, THEN you put everything in front. You negate another 25% of useable real estate.

Your grand vision for spatial audio is to use 25% of what is available. I ordered a 4 course meal, but you decide that I should only get the soup served in a spoon? Please.

Does this qualify as poor customer service?

I was preparing a Jabon – Wheel of the Year “box” set that would include all 8 holiday albums. Each album is 13 songs or a total of 104 pieces. I found CD Babies track limit to be 50 and i ask how to submit it if there were more than 50 tracks. Here’s what I wrote in nov 2021

Nov 20, 2021, 4:57 PM PST

The uploader is limited to 50 tracks. The websites suggests I send Cd in for a set over 50 tracks, but asks for retail ready CD’s and 5 of them. This is a digital, streaming only release. the CD as a retail product doesn’t exist, if I already have the music in streaming form, it’s just not efficient to send CD-r’s to you to have them ripped and then uploaded. Why not allow the uploader to accept the number of tracks on the release? Why limit it to 50? It’s just a matter of changing the index.

Then, 4 MONTH LATER, I get this.

Apr 3, 2022, 4:29 PM PDT Hi, Scott.

Thanks for getting in touch with us.

The maximum number of tracks per submission is 100. However, albums with more than 50 songs can become problematic when correcting, encoding, and delivering, especially if the tracks are long. If you’d like to upload your audio files from within your artist account, the maximum number of tracks you can upload will be 50. If you have 50-100 tracks, you will need to send in a physical disc or discs.

You will want to consider what your customer can reasonably download. Total runtime of any individual release cannot exceed 5 hours. However, albums longer than 2-3 hours may result in the customer experiencing issues when downloading the album, or experiencing an especially long download time.

Each individual track must be longer than 3 seconds, and no longer than 60 minutes. Tracks longer than 30 minutes may experience difficulty in uploading, and may need to be split into multiple tracks. Each individual track on the project needs to be able to fit in entirety onto a physical disc when in WAV format, so the runtime of each track cannot exceed disc capacity.

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So basically, like Google Play, CD baby is dictating how my art is displayed. Download times? I mean, high speed internet does exist you know and besides that, this is for streaming services. I also just don’t see why I would compromise the quality of my masters by burning it onto a CD-Rand allowing a company, that takes 4 months to respond to a question to make a digitally identical copy of the files that already exist on my hard drive.

I was glad to receive a rating questionnaire though so i could express my dissatisfaction. But when i clicked on the survey, I got this.

Thanks CD Baby, you were very helpful helping me remember why I left the music business so many years ago.