13:30
Birkbeck, University of London
October 30
Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street
When: — Venue: Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street
Dr Eamonn Bell (Durham, UK)
The MP3 moment is well understood as a decisive episode in the history of digital multimedia (Sterne 2012), as it engendered radical changes in how music was distributed and consumed. However, with limited exceptions (Witt 2015, Eve 2021), scant attention has been paid to the ways users reformatted compact disc (CD) media so that their content could be distributed as compressed audio using peer-to-peer file-sharing. In this paper, I retell the quest for the “perfect rip”: a bit-for-bit capture of audio data from CDs (a.k.a. digital audio extraction, or DAE), drawing on archival Internet sources dating from the 1990s. By placing these sources in the large context of other subsequent developments in the CD-ripping software ecosystem, the practice of DAE is revealed to be a complex, time-critical media operation (Ernst 2013). It requires active maintenance and co-operation between users (Mulvin 2017) to remain viable in the face of not just the industry’s attempts to minimise unauthorised copying but also the recondite character of the CD format itself. I describe how the DAE community leveraged the internet to propagate knowledge about the properties of known-good hardware and software through the network, authenticating specific CD rips as faithful to the original physical medium. The class of temporal errors relating to digital media this community aimed to eradicate - jitter - has a particular capacity to escalate from a highly technical domain to describing the character of particular social arrangements (Marshall 2019): an opportunity for the socially minded digital historian of media.
Contact name: Rebekah Cupitt
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