Recordable CD News
By Jon Iverson August 30, 1998 — Recordable CD machines are nothing new these days, especially those aimed at the PC market. Those machines that find their way into Desktop PCs can end up doing everything from backing up corporate financial data to mastering CD-ROM titles. Many are used for recording music CDs as well, and so a new CD-Recorder from Smart and Friendly has a couple of features thrown in just to excite the audio folk.

Working with Tracer Technologies, Inc., Smart and Friendly will be including a full-scale version of Tracer's Diamond Cut Audio Restoration Tools 32 with the new CD Rocket 8x CD-Recorder. Diamond Cut is an audio restoration package for Windows PCs that provides noise reduction, and a waveform editor for use in general audio applications.

According to Tracer, users can clean up old 78s, 45s, and LPs, and quickly write enhanced CDs. Diamond Cut can also process the audio with its built-in digital compressor, expander, Paragraphic EQ, and even a Tube Warmth Simulator. The software is available separately for $199.

The recorder is able to burn a full 72-minute audio CD in 9 minutes using 8x-compatible CD media, which will then run on most consumer CD players.

But if you don't want to assemble those music CDs at home, why not head down to your local Music Point kiosk? CD World plans on hooking up 400 of its interactive kiosks to a large-scale digital music warehousing and distribution system called the Music Works Bank via a private, secure, and dedicated worldwide communications network.

For the price of a regular CD, consumers will be able to make their own "Personal CD" (LP or Single format) from hundreds of thousands of music tracks that are centrally stored in the Music Works Bank. To make all of this happen in a timely manner, CD World is using Sprint's high-speed Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) network infrastructure, combined with a fiberoptic backbone, to send the audio bits "instantaneously and transparently" to each location. An integrated copyright management system keeps track of what is downloaded, generating automatic payment of royalties.

The MusicPoint kiosks are planned for retail stores in Los Angeles and New York in early 1999. Initially, CD World plans for the kiosks to be installed at 400 US locations. The long-term plan calls for an estimated 2240 kiosks to be available within the next 15-22 months in the US. An additional 4000 kiosks are allocated to other countries worldwide.