roy

What fucking song is this karaoke for?

the title of the disc is 'Lekker Lezen over Huisdieren' which roughly translates to 'Fun Reading about Pets'¹

update: i found a disc image and extracted the songs

anyway i can't find a disc image but i did find two mentions in the October 1995 and June 1996 issues of CD Interactief, a Dutch CD-i magazine.

looks like it's got a bunch of selected stories, at various reading levels, that all feature pets/animals. they probably picked that to fit with the theme of Dutch Children's Book Week 1995 ('Beestenbende' -- basically meaning 'animals'). and then it had songs, and a karaoke mode for those songs.

this seems to have been marketed to schools as another way to motivate kids to read more. because of course cd-i players were real fuckin' expensive. i don't know how successful they were -- by the time i was in elementary school, we mostly had old windows 3.11 machines for our edutainment software.

if someone finds a disc image of this, hmu, i wrote some tools to decode cd-i disc images and extracting audio from them is fairly trivial²

1. the word 'lekker' is kinda hard to translate because it can mean anything from 'tasty' to 'attractive' to 'relaxing'

2. pictures are slightly harder because there isn't really a standard picture format, so you need to either emulate or statically analyze the actual software to extract the decoder parameters (well, or guessing works sometimes). i should polish up/document these tools so i can release usable versions of them

somehow it wasn't showing up on my archive.org searches, but it did show up on google with site:archive.org?

anyway, downloading now, please stand by

[full transcript below the fold, in case anyone cares]

yeah, it's literally called "Children's book week CD-i" internally lol. the abstract says it's intended for educational use for children ages 9 to 13, without requiring the assistance of an adult.

from the credits it seems like this is sort of a glorified book catalog with some excerpts and minigames and songs. strangely, there is also a veterinarian credited??

it turned out to be even easier to decode -- the songs are just CDDA audio. probably so it works in a CD player as well. i just had to figure out how to reencode the raw samples with ffmpeg¹ and mess with the weird way cd-i ready images work (all the data is in the track1 pregap i think).

so now we have the answer to Montrith's question: track 1 here is the fucking song this is karaoke for. it's about two flies in a restaurant. i didn't listen to the whole thing but it seems to primarily be based around the joke that a euphemistic term for a cow turd is a koeienvlaai. like making a pun on 'cow patty' / 'hamburger patty' in English i guess.

look, this was budget edutainment media made for 9 to 13 year olds. it's not very sophisticated.

anyway if anyone wants me to decode the other audio tracks (presumably narrated excerpts from books or something) or maybe even the pictures, let me know. i'll have a look later this week.

1. ffmpeg -f s16le -sample_rate 44100 -channels 2 -i track.bin track.flac