Ryyudo

That "I Fucked Up!" guy

  • He/They

That Twitch dot tv dot com streamer. That once FGC commentator and memer with some bangers.

On the front cover of The Lara-Su Chronicles Beginnings by Ken Penders (top-right)

Avatar by @drdubz
Header by @whohostedthis


Bsky
ryyudo.bsky.social

dog
@dog

Oh my god. Oh my god. I've made an unimportant discovery that's upended everything I ever knew.

So Muzak. Maybe you know the name. The elevator music people. You know, vaguely relaxing, inoffensive background music you hear in stores. That kinda thing. I knew they'd been around forever and they'd distributed it on a bunch of formats, so I figured, by the 90s - it's CD now, right? Like, they sent you looping background CDs or something.

It looks like it wasn't normal CDs. (Now that I look up some of the track list and realize they had hours of music on one CD, I should have realized that wasn't possible.) Well, maybe it's a PC CD or something like that. A little embedded PC with a CD program that plays music. It's not that either.

It's CD-i. They were distributing background music for stores on CD-i. And I've found a CD-i Muzak disc from 2010 that they made, probably one of the last. Until now I thought CD-i died off in the early 2000s, ca 2002/2003. Looks like I was off by an entire decade.

Here's a link with info on the format and a photo of the very weird-looking CD-BGM player:


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in reply to @dog's post:

i believe when i was still working at starbucks in around 2010 we had one of these machines and corporate was still sending special CDs into the stores every couple months for use on the machine

I guess it makes sense knowing Starbucks is probably the kind of company that wants total control over the "experience"? So just supply all the stores with the same special CDs

🦝oh yea, worked at a place that used these and did notice that they were CD-i disks, and have just been holding on to that knowledge. I think it also had like, the time at which the disk would "expire" and after that the player wouldn't play it anymore (assuming it depended on the player clock? which updated from the internet I think)

I just remember because one time they sent one and the music was awful and we all agreed to just put the old one back in, but after a little while it stopped working and we had to put the awful one back in

🦝I kinda wonder if they could only secure like, very temporary licenses. That, or they just wanted to make sure you got the next one and couldn't just use the same one forever. Most likely though it was just some kind of subscription enforcement like, you have to buy the next one or you get nothing

🦨they were probably doing it the same way for like a couple decades, and corporate business types are like, they expect it to work that way, so that's just how it is. changing the operation in any way costs money