I'm glad to see this mentioned. This was first thought I had as I progressed through this thread. I'm surprised this isn't a popular, supported standard already.

Nested chapters can work for index markers, especially if a player supports them right.

I mean: As mentioned, these have almost never been usable with real CD players in the wild. Maybe not much is lost there. (But the format must still accept these things, and allow them to be usable! An archival format must respect all aspects of the item being archived, including those that are unpopular or disused. I am willing to die on this hill.)

What of things like CD+G? Here in 2024, they're very simple graphics using 35+-year-old tech, and they should be archived neatly, precisely, and without interpretation, to be rendered client-side at a later point. I think I've mentioned it, but we literally have pocket supercomputers in common use today. If we can make the complexities of MAME work for the past couple of decades, and do it with direct ROM dumps, we can do this for CD+G.

But the CD+G must be rendered synchronously with CD audio data on playback. This applies whether it is my Goldilocks example of an Information Society album, or whether it is a CD+G karaoke disk with Garbage's I'm only happy when it rains (and twelve other crowd pleasers from that month of 1995).

How will that work with MKA?

And how will pregaps work?

(Maybe MKA isn't an ideal container if it does not already include avenues that lead to this kind of functionality in ways that are compatible with the original article.)

Interesting point about CD+G. I think whatever format was used needs to take this into account.

There were also a ton of Audio CDs that were not CD+G but had a data track with the music video etc on them.

I worked on a horrible one for Sony, one of those ones with all the anti-rip protection on it, where I was tasked to build a binary blob for a web site that detected if the specific audio CD was in your drive and let you into the web site. What were those things called, ActiveX?

Sony had plenty of awful stuff at different times for audio CDs, despite being a co-developer of this wildly-successful and long-lasting format.

I think you're referring to ActiveX, yes. It's the only thing I can think of where "web" stuff and "hardware" stuff commingled back then in a semi-transparent way.

And famously, as you surely know yourself, Sony once published some rootkitted audio CDs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_compact_discs_sold_wit...

Anyway, I'll just assume that you aren't the rootkit guy -- or even if you are, that your heart is in the right place.

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And yes, CD+G is is important. As are the mixed-mode releases with video. All things CD audio are important if we are to talk about an ideal archival (and playback!) format for audio CDs, and archiving an audio CD is not always quite as simple as ripping a folder of FLACs -- there's a ton of diversity here that FLAC (and cue) can't accurately embody.

We're fortunate that we still have so many CDs right now, and that they're still being sold today. This will change. (It must change. It can't not change.)

The good folks working on the Domesday Duplicator have a relatively uphill battle for the often-older (and often rotting) LaserDisc media that they're working on tools to properly preserve.

It would be good to get ahead of the curve and get something with a practical workflow working sooner instead of later.