Hi,
With regards to the question posed by John Moore on Audio CD or CD/DVD-ROM
format for commercial products.
The CD/DVD-ROM formats have the obvious appeal of more than 99 tracks per CD
as well as throwing a few photographs and some text in as well.
On the down side of CD/DVD-ROM: you have to develop an application. While
Sjoerd's application base is fine and well tested - a lot of people who buy
the products are more computer savy these days and expect a lot more from
the products, like decent distribution maps, a comprehensive list of species
in the region, species descriptions etc. You also have to provide product
support - I've never heard (well, far less frequently anyway) of someone
needing help playing a traditional Audio CD.
In addition, people trying to access the sounds will invariably try and
reverse engineer your software and compromise what (little) copyright
protection that offers.
People instinctively distrust lossy compressions when used in nature sounds
(they tend to remove the upper frequencies which are often the most
important parts of the call, not to mention the problems of re-sampling).
The problem is that most people associate these sorts of compression
algorithms with sounds played through the computer, regardless of the fact
that these problems can be avoided by using a loss-less compression. The
problem of perception remains and many people will feel uncomfortable or
distrust sounds that appear to have been manipulated and played through a
computer.
One also has to be fairly computer savy to create a play-back tape from a
CD-ROM. (I realise and don't even wish to start discussing the ethics of
using play-back never mind the copyright issues, but it happens and people
sell CDs because it happens).
As for quick and easy access to the tracks and identifying the species on an
Audio CD - that can be achieved by publishing a CDDB for the product on one
of the several Internet databases.
Your market for an Audio CD is far, far greater than that of a CD-ROM (think
Windows and Apple Macs here, plus how many people out there actually own a
computer).
I think CD-Audio format is a better choice.
Pieter Wessels
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