The recent expanded set of Dream Syndicate's Days Of Wine And Roses has some rehearsal recordings and clocks in at 80 minutes. Ditto the bonus disc to Elvis Costello's Get Happy Rhino set. As far as actual albums, no bonus tracks, I think the only one I have that cracks the 74 minute mark is the 1996 Tommy MCA CD that I think is the remixed version; I have other long albums like Time Out Of Mind or The Rising but the only one that breaks the limit is Tommy. Actually, I think Dylan's Self Portrait might be 75 as well, but I can't be bothered to check. I've burned a number of my own CD compilations that are packed to the brim. It's always after I burn the CD that I remember how much I hate super long CDs. Still, I don't think I could drop a single track from my R.E.M. compilation if I tried.
If I remember correctly, 86:01 ...from disc 1 of the Sons of the Pioneers/Roy Rogers box set, "Way Out There."
The Bear Family collection Way Out There by The Sons of the Pioneers lives up to its name for the length of its discs, among other reasons. Each of the six discs is at least 83 minutes in duration, as reported by XLD in minutes:seconds:frames. Disc 1: 85:59:06 Disc 2: 87:02:10 Disc 3: 86:35:39 Disc 4: 85:15:11 Disc 5: 85:18:69 Disc 6: 83:09:21 As far as I know, they're all longer than anything else in my collection. I see that another Bear Family disc has already been reported here as clocking in at over 86 minutes, so it's probably worth checking their other titles to find out whether they've ever pushed a disc even closer to 90 minutes. Edit: I see zen posted about this title first. But I'll leave my post as is, because it lists the durations of all six discs.
Bear Family again: Disc 6 of the recent Chuck Berry collection, Rock and Roll Music...The Complete Studio Recordings, clocks in at over 89 minutes.
Is it really true that sound quality dips after 79 mins? I can understand vinyl losing sound quality after about the 20 minute mark per side because of tracking but a CD is digital. Always thought it was inconvenient and silly of Metallica to issue a 77 minute album on 2 discs.
Do all these discs play without problems? my longest Bear Family cd is the second cd from the 3 cds box of Johnny western - Heroes & Cowboys 1993 ( 78:35 )
These seem to be the longest single discs in my collection: Various Artists Totally Re-Wired 12 1997 82:45:00 The Vapors Vaporized 1997 80:21:00
As long as it's 16bit/44.1kHz throughout, there can't be any quality dip (provided that your player can read the entire disc without error).
This CD from the Philips Classics-The Stereo Years box set comes with 3 bonus tracks not listed on the front cover and is 85:37. Apologies if already mentioned. I didn't read the entire thread.
That reminds me of a Brian Eno quote. He said CDs go on for so long that he loses interest. "I realise the reason I like playing records (as opposed to CDs) is that they're short... I want less music." - Brian Eno
I don't think I've ever played these with a CD player; I've only ever ripped them to FLAC files. Looking at the logs I see that retries were needed in each case in order to read sectors of one or more of the final tracks. However, the disc with the longest duration required the fewest sector retries, in fact just 1. At the time the discs weren't carried in the AccurateRip database, so I don't know whether my rips were identical to anyone else's. Everything sounds fine when I listen to the FLAC files; if read errors did occur, they didn't result in digital artifacts that I've been able to detect under normal listening conditions.
Always found it interesting how certain Bear Family titles didn't fill each disc to maximal capacity and spread it out over more discs. Guess it depends on who handled the mastering?
Conventional wisdom would have us program our CD players or chop-off songs in file-based formats. However, we audio fans are typically not "conventional". It's interesting how the decision to "bloat" an album can taint the album experience.
