Burning a 99-minute, 99-track Compact Disc 💿 Real or fake?

Are "99-minute" recordable CDs just a coaster-creating gimmick, or do they actually work? How much recording time and how many tracks can you even put on a Compact Disc and have it still be playable in standard CD players? Will "overburning" make your computer's optical drive catch on fire? Let's find out!
Web sites referenced:
CD Media World - 99 Minutes CD-R
www.cdmediawor...
Overburning: 100 Minutes of Music on an Audio CD
www.tomshardwa...
Uses video clips from:
Jack Martin on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire Part 3/4 2001-01-17
• Jack Martin on Who Wan...
Sony CD Player ad
• Sony CD Player ad
Other BlogTV Shows & Random Stuff
• Other BlogTV Shows & R...
PHILIPS COMPACT DISC CD early 80s promotional video
• Early 1980s promotiona...
The "You Are Really Straight" CD
• The "You Are Really St...
#cd #burning #overburn

[@siberx4]

This video answered all my burning questions.

[@JamesTK]

*extinguishes the questions with answers*

[@n.miller907]

Ah, punny you should say that.

[@smuglife64gaming21]

Lmao

[@Ne0ge0X]

Haha, NGL..it took at least 4 seconds for my ape brain to get it 🤣

[@Akkodha-]

GOLD

[@Eyetrauma]

Man that Jetta’s read speed is impressive, it didn’t hunt for the track at all

[@vwestlife]

It helps that each track is only one minute long!

[@nickwallette6201]

If I had to guess, I think it's probably because of data CD-ROM mechanisms. Seek time is important in data applications, and once you have sled servo loops that can find an arbitrary sector on a disc in tens of milliseconds, it's probably just easier to make everything with that, than to keep a slower mech around too. :-) For that matter, most audio CD players now _are_ data ROMs, due to MP3 and all.

[@Kalvinjj]

Indeed, same with my BD drive on the PC. I had a standard DVD-RW one before and it was as normal as it gets, then when I decided to get a BD-RE (for real... why did they change that RW to RE thing??) one, it was weird to me how it played music CDs as if they were files on the HDD. It just seeked to any random track like it was pre-cached entirely.

[@morbidmanmusic]

​@@Kalvinjj when it reads the disc it caches the first bits of audio so it can start faster

[@Kalvinjj]

@@morbidmanmusic Interesting, an initial cache of dunno how many seconds, just enough to get the seek in place seems very clever.

[@Koutsie]

good choice for the last track, almost sounds like a resounding success whenever a player can do 99 minutes 👍

[@nickwallette6201]

The 2-second gap wasn't for the benefit of old CD writers. For one thing, the laser doesn't "cool off" between tracks. The 2-second gap is written-through like any other data. In fact, the index 0 to index 1 span can _contain_ audio data, just the same as any other index. (Fun fact: You can even put audio in the mandatory 2-second lead-in to track 1 -- which is only accessible by ripping the entire disc and playing the resulting audio file, or by searching _backwards_ from 0:00 on track 1.) The gap is there by default because the redbook standard actually requires it. Why, I don't know. I suspect it wasn't really so much for a technical reason, but it _could_ have been to help give early CD players more leeway with locating the beginning of a track, by allowing them to err on the before-zero mark of a track, settling in, clocking the DAC, and unmuting the output, without missing any content that may have started at the exact beginning of the track. Although that's just wild speculation too. Who knows. (Does anyone know? I would love to hear about it.) Obviously, that "obligatory" gap was ignored pretty quickly with commercially pressed discs (particularly live or concept albums), and CD-R as well, once software and burners started using disc-at-once writing mode (as opposed to track-at-once, which _does_ require the gap to allow for some slop when restarting the write process.)

[@BlueNeon81]

If you are mastering a CD using a text editor (cue file), you can make even longer, or shorter pre-gap of the first track. I did a 10 minute long pre-gap with 3 minutes of audio (as a hidden track). It just added extra 10 minutes to the total lenght of the CD. I also have a CD from 1992, which has only 63 frames of pre-gap. And this is also the answer, why the lenght of a 80 min CD is just 79 minutes 57 seconds and 74 frames - extra 2 seconds are for pre-gap - if you are using regular burning software. Btw I like the brand name of that CD-R, which is basically its lenght in minutes, seconds and frames.

[@vwestlife]

@@BlueNeon81 I did a video years ago about a CD with a hidden track in the pre-gap area: kzbin.info/www/bejne/fKO7iHiqhdZ-brM

[@jrcstudios3803]

This was a fun trick of mine. I would put a woman's scream there or something when giving out discs

[@AlyxxTheRat]

A lot of mastered CDs had audio in the pre-gap tracks as a way of adding hidden tracks to the album.

[@freespirit1975]

I always thought the gap was put there artificially in order to mimic the gap between songs on a traditional music album. On vinyl the gaps they put on the record between songs obviously allows you to find the track you want to set the needle down on. On CDs it allows you to split the recording into sections ( the term "track" carried over from the cutting stylus dragging a track on the wax mold) in order to later find the track you want. I have vinyl records that the entire side has no gap. I seem to remember a Cream two-record set that I have squirrelled away somewhere that one entire side is a jam of "Spoonful" with no gap.

[@cosmicrdt]

I would have loved to have seen a law suit if that guy got the 74 minute question "wrong"

[@MrRobarino]

Why? Other then wallowing the in the failure of others, what does that even accomplish for you?

[@JaredConnell]

@@MrRobarino see a guy get vindicated for 'losing' and unwinnable question maybe?

[@kingvill100]

@@MrRobarino who pissed in your wheaties?

[@Shotblur]

@@kingvill100 just getting sick and tired of people being vindictive and rejoicing over the suffering of people they don't like; I can relate

[@jakublulek3261]

Well, they didn't give him an option: "It's a myth"...

[@ocworkshop]

99 min discs offered a storage capacity very close to what GD-ROMs were offering, so they were fairly popular among Dreamcast game release groups. Many 99min versions of Dreamcast games floating around for larger games, not having to downsize much or any at all compared to 80min releases.

[@hicknopunk]

I used to get CDs with a very generous extra space to burn DC games.

[@draggonhedd]

I came here to post this!

[@laynesamba]

"ggrrrvvrrr HSJKHGGGRRRR REEEEEEVVRRRRRR" -Dreamcast playing CD-R games

[@Code7Unltd]

@@laynesamba Have you tried lubing the worm gear? Silences that quite a bit.

[@irtbmtind89]

@@laynesamba RIP my Dreamcast, and my second Dreamcast

[@geekehUK]

The reason Nero threw up an error I believe is because you overburn into the leadout area of the disc, usually if you don't go right up to the limit it's ok because you can squeeze it into the very very outside of the disc which isn't supposed to be written to I believe because of manufacturing tolerances and possibly because CD-Rs can get their coatings chipped off at the edges. I think the only drives that won't play a disc lacking the leadout / being finalised are ones that insist on reading that when you load the disc, you can usually hear a grinding sound from them which is the laser sled shooting all the way to the outside of the disc a couple of seconds after loading.

[@orangeActiondotcom]

the test burn will also simulate writing the leadout, which succeeded, so this isn't the answer.

[@geekehUK]

@@orangeActiondotcom hmmm maybe you can't as reliably heat the dye at the very outer edge of the disc? Sooo you can read it ok when blank but it'll fail a crc check after writing. The simulation is never going to be perfect since the best it can do is check the disc is in a suitable condition to write the amount of data you want to.

[@manolokonosko2868]

I have to say that the more I watch these videos, the more I miss 1990s audio technology.

[@christo930]

Miss it? It's still here. CDs are still mainstream. They're not what they once were, but most stereos include a CD player and new CDs are still made and sold retail. Yes, people like their phones and phones have put a serious dent in CD sales, but CDs are still with us. I just ordered one from Amazon not long ago and it's an old album, so it's not like it's a really popular brand new album.

[@GoldSrc_]

@@christo930 "CDs are still mainstream. They're not what they once were" That contradicts itself lol. How many people do you see carrying a discman, or CDs to listen to music? Smartphones and digital music _is_ what it's mainstream today, not CDs. I'm probably the only weirdo in my friend group (and probably in my entire family), that still owns CDs and CD players. I even have two more players that need fixing, and I'd buy more lol.

[@dlarge6502]

@@GoldSrc_ we play and or rip them at home. Not everyone wants to struggle with trying to stream over today's congested networks while shopping, loads of people keep the CD at home and carry the ripped version on the phone or, my god, a dedicated player device!

[@ag9hj]

Only technology?...

[@manolokonosko2868]

@@ag9hj The clubs, my girlfriends, my simpler life, the optimism, the sense of hope and wonder, less clutter, less possessions, less obligations, less troubles, freedom, the music, my friends, the places I used to hang out at. You're right. It's more than just technology.

[@Pc118Gamer]

From what I've heard, the Beetoven's 9th symphony rumor started from Joop Sinjou, a Phillips engineer who oversaw the 6 meetings between Sony and Phillips. Another engineer has come out and claimed that the 74 minutes was a natural consequence of the CIRC encoding

[@vwestlife]

That's why I consider it a myth -- everybody repeats the story, but nobody can agree upon exactly _which_ person(s) at either Sony or Philips demanded that a CD fit Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: Sony president Norio Ohga, or his wife; Sony chairman Akio Morita, or his wife; conductor Herbert von Karajan; or one or a group of engineers at Philips.

[@summerforever6736]

@@vwestlife or his driver Or his gardener Or his cheff Lol

[@vwestlife]

@@summerforever6736 And according to this web page, the reason was because _the entire Japanese people_ love Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: dutchaudioclassics.nl/The-six-meetings-Philips-Sony-1979-1980-The-Start-of-Digital-Audio/

[@summerforever6736]

@@vwestlife yes i like it too. Thanks for the info!!

[@TheGreatAtario]

@@vwestlife I mean… they do love it: kzbin.info/www/bejne/jmfWZ4yBobmjnNk

[@jasonschubert6828]

The CD has to be one of the most underrated pieces of technology ever created. People have been dissing them from their creation right up to today, but a well recorded disc is cheap, reliable and indistinguishable from other "better" formats for 99% of people. And as you mentioned, most people listen to worse formats now, for both video (sound) and audio! A comparison of the sheer amount of data (for that time), and the many features that weren't even implemented widely such as the various text options, is a must read for anyone who says the format was poorly designed.

[@jhonwask]

The CD is still my second favourite format, with the record being the first.

[@DaveFlash]

very much agree with this, i'm a dutchie and i still take pride in what we were able to accomplish in 1978, a 10-cm cd was fully completed and launched to the dutch press, then philips had the good sense to go to japan and spend the next 3,5 years perfecting the cd with the ppl from sony to make it a universal world standard for digital audio.

[@tookitogo]

Only fools “dissed” the CD. Most people enjoyed them without reservation.

[@kunka592]

The only thing I wish was different for CDs was better error correction for audio tracks. Data CDs have extremely good error detection/correction to the point where it barely matters how scratched the disc is, but for audio CDs, you can have a brand new CD without flaws on it and it still sometimes causes a pop/click in the audio.

[@tookitogo]

@@kunka592 Audio CDs already have error correction that recovers radial scratches up to about 1mm. A new disc should never click/pop (and I’ve never seen that, though I don’t doubt it’s occurred on occasion). What CD isn’t tolerant of is concentric scratches, which is why they always warn to always clean CDs radially (from the middle out) and never by rotating them. The error correction and prevention (EFM and CIRC, respectively) even on audio CDs is, in a sense, miraculously good, insofar as the CD wouldn’t work at all without it!

[@norcal715]

Track 99 sounds like it could have been a soundtrack from an 80's TV sitcom

[@djgreenhornet2892]

I like the music!

[@BICIeCOMPUTERconGabriele]

Let's take a moment to appreciate the beauty and the perfection of the CD, and the great work the engineers did back then, 40 years ago. Even a very not conforming CD will play on any player, also the ones that existed before even the CD-r specification came out. CD is just brilliant! (also dvd obviously)

[@Roxor128]

They do have their limits, though. CD-RW discs, for instance, aren't reflective enough for some older players. The difference between the pits and flats is right, but the total amount reflected is too low. I think the figure was a 60% difference but only 15% overall.

[@EgoShredder]

I bought quite a few 99min CDRs circa 2002. They were surprisingly reliable and worked in most players. * * * EDIT: I still have some blank 99min discs and the brand is Infiniti Professional. They have a nice brushed silver coated finish, which is easy and smooth to write on. The burning side is that very light green tinted colour, that 80min discs normally have.

[@MM.]

That Monodeal player is quite appealing with that smoked cover. Thought it was a digital scale at first, a pleasant departure from the ubiquitous discus shaped designs.

[@albertocabezas282]

I always liked those squared edge CD players.

[@ShokaLion]

I was about to make this exact comment. I thought it was a digital scale. A quick Google reveals that Monodeal still exist and those players are still available.

[@vwestlife]

@@ShokaLion Just one problem with it, the left and right channels are reversed through the headphone output!

[@ShokaLion]

@@vwestlife Ah unfortunate! Would that be fixable internally? Or I guess it's probably all directly board mounted.

[@vwestlife]

@@ShokaLion I informed them about it, so hopefully they'll fix it in a later revision of the design.

[@GarthBeagle]

13:44 "Let's just pick.. track 70" 😀 But seriously, I love videos like this where some tech's purported limitations were fact bendable and rules were broken to squeeze out as much as could be

[@RuffDealer3600]

@GarthBeagle If you listened to the clip carefully according to the time code you posted, that rock sample reminded me of that obscure educational game called "K9.5: The Tail-Wag Tour" on the Sony PlayStation. I also bet @VWestlife did an awesome job of completing the 99 track test.

[@juanignacioaschura9437]

Sounding like a broken record with all the prior comments, but as repeatedly stated, these discs were popular for Dreamcast back-up copies and pirating. In my experience, they were very finicky to work with, especially as the best burning software for Dreamcast games was DiscJuggler, and it was quite unstable. Still, good memories were had here remembering this gray area of optical storage...

[@Kalvinjj]

Oh indeed, GD-ROM capacity levels, wonder how many Dreamcast games needed it all, given most just went with normal CDs right?

[@RoCkShaDoWWaLkEr]

Diskjuggler always worked amazing for me ;but some brands of discs didn't work very good for Dreamcast backups. Pretty sure there was only one brand and type of disc I used because of that ;but that was a long time ago now.

[@TheRetroChannel]

Ahh the Technics SL-PG300, a beautiful player. That peak search function was so handy when recording to tape, and surprisingly fast (although probably slow compared to later players, if any of them had that). Wish I knew what happened to mine, my parents probably tossed it when I moved out and left it behind 😥

[@MartinWolves]

I have a Sony CDP-XE570 which has the very useful peak search feature. I bought it for £20 from a local charity shop. And it has optical out which is great for Minidisc recording,

[@timothy2830]

You took me back. Us kids in the early 2000's needed these discs with the Sega Dreamcast and certain games

[@odius94]

2:51 Now that's an Unexpected Bill.

[@HannuPulli]

Great test track. I remember getting some over 80-minute CD-R discs back in the day just because... Never tested the full capacity though. I remember overburning some other CD-R though.

[@bazzle592]

I want to find some really early 550MB CD-Rs - obviously useless but pretty cool from a historical perspective. Now THOSE conform to the Beethoven's 9th theory, holding 63 minutes.

[@hicknopunk]

My CD-Ms are all 600MB. There is a CD-R with less capacity even though CD-Ms came out first? Heck, CD-Ms still work today over 25 years later.

[@ThexthSurvivor]

Japan has a lot of 63 minute CD-Rs for sale. But why do you want less storage space when an 80 minute or higher CD-R is physically the same size?

[@spencerwelchii573]

John (Monty Python) Cleese as a robot 🤖 is just AWESOME!

[@Fluteboy]

He did a good few adverts for Sony: kzbin.info/www/bejne/o3vFfnWZhZeigJo kzbin.info/www/bejne/naKUn2ichq6JZqs kzbin.info/www/bejne/iWHZi6aibtOioZo

[@nikolayt9350]

I used 90+ CDR's to merge two albums (most often CDs with 45-ish length) into one disk and also put CD-text to identify the artists and albums 🙂

[@nazcaplain]

The MASH decoding on the Technics / JVC units back in the early 90s were a fantastic improvement on all previous 16bit decoders. I loved mine, a night / day difference over everything I'd previously owned.

[@dashcamandy2242]

8:49 - I felt that meme, like a punch to the gut. 19:28 - Not gonna lie, I would have been alllll over that in the 90s. I don't know if displaying the official "Compact Disc Recordable" logo, despite the disc technically not conforming to Orange Book, is such a problem. After all, using the disc without Overburn enabled would burn just fine - and most users would be put off by all the warnings CD burning software throws up about Overburn to attempt it.

[@vwestlife]

The Compact Disc Recordable logo is (still to this day!) trademarked by Philips, so only discs which conform to the Orange Book standards are allowed to use it. However, I'm sure doesn't care much about enforcing that rule anymore.

[@KAPTKipper]

You can also have 99 subtracks, but you need a CD player that supports the display of the subtracks. Example of a album with a subtrack is the OG release of "Full Moon Fever" by Tom Petty. Because a lot of players can't show or support accessing subtracks people think it's a "hidden" track.

[@1Soniccool]

Also Nirvana did a hidden track on their album, even Wired Al did it too.

[@chucku00]

99 minute CD-R were quite easy to get in Europe. There is still new stock available at Nierle's website (named 100 minute CD-R) in Germany for around $8 for a 25 pieces spindle. Not only they needed some specific CD writer, but they often only could be read by the same CD writer (but it's quite possible DVD-Rom readers can read them). You also had to get an appropriate Win XP CD-R burning software like Nero 6 and use the overburning function. The failure rate was way higher than 80 minute discs. Edit : It's surprising to see a box of Micro Application CD-R on an American video, they were mainly selling budget software but they also had a small line of CD-R discs and accessories for CDs. I still have a box of their thin CD paper envelopes. Their website is still selling a few low-tier software but they are only the shadow of what they were in the 90's and early 2000's in France.

[@TheDekalibrierer]

I am fairly confident the Nierle Edition printable CDs are MediaRange, both considering that MediaRange seems to be the only name left associated with 900 MB CDs and also the manufacturer number being MR243. But yes, it seems like there is at least one new-stock option left in the market.

[@thelegalsystem]

Oh, I think I have that exact same sound effect CD. That was a fun cameo.

[@vwestlife]

It's only worth the novelty of having 98 tracks and the last one containing index marks. Many of the sound effects sound like they were taken from old vinyl records and were converted from mono to "stereo" using a very cheesy reverb effect.

[@irtbmtind89]

I don't think I ever saw 99min CD-Rs from one of the major companies like Verbatim or Maxell, they were all from no-name or private label brands. I have to wonder how good the quality control on them actually was.

[@brick6347]

I remember thinking 650mb! What on earth would you do with all that?!

[@manueldi_77]

Back then I've also overburned a 99min Platinum branded CD-R with a Plextor CD burner to the maximum and I can also remember, that writing the lead out failed but the disc was perfectly useable. Fun fact, this disc still works today.

[@olepigeon]

I'd like to see a 99 minute loop recording of _99 Luftballons_ split into 99 tracks.

[@Roxor128]

It'd get hit with a copyright strike in 99 milliseconds.

[@olepigeon]

@@Roxor128 That is 99% likely to happen, yes.

[@Stefan-]

Yes they really knew what they were doing when they created the CD, it covers the full range of the human hearing so there really isnt any need for improvement over that. Although most probably doesnt even use the actual CD itself anymore, i havent really touched my old CD´s for years myself, the standard that was created still lives on at the recording stage were many like myself who write and record music still use the 44.1 KHz sampling frequency. We do use a higher bit depth like 24 bits instead to have more headroom since we dont want any digital distortion though, on CD´s you can utilize the whole dynamic range since the audio is the processed with compressors and brickwall limiters so that you cant get digital klipping, so 16 bits is quite enough for that.

[@AMDRADEONRUBY]

CD RW with 700 mb/80mins is pretty rare too back in the days I overburned like 1 minute maximum normally 30 seconds love your video it's the video you posted on another site doesn't it.? Never see 99 minutes CD but I heard about them

[@mateuszorlinski7334]

Fun-fact: Early Disques Dreyfus releases of Jean Michel Jarre catalog used index tracks. For example, 'Ethnicolor' from'Zoolook' was devided into four parts.

[@JanusCycle]

I love the glitches from going over 100 minutes. The wild west of CD drive tolerances and firmware capability.

[@sersoft_corp]

Amazing video, as always! I especially enjoyed the part at 14:00 which really reminded me of those "trying to play cod4 for ps3 on my car stereo at 3am" videos, but for once the car stereo can actually do what is being asked of it lol.

[@rock-steadi-cam5058]

I once tried to play a routine 82 min overburn on a CD player at a radio station, and the player rejected the disc with an error message. It seems the "professional" player (can't recall the brand) was looking for the "lead-out" before it would accept the disc. Fortunately, I had a two-disc version of the same program, but I had to go back to my car to get it.

[@AFluffyMobius]

Love seeing new CD content, especially from VWestlife I think this channel near single-handedly convinced me to get a new CD player a.la Tascam CD-RW900mkII just so i could grown my own collection through Goodwill trips, maybe inherit some from parents, or burn my own mixes, and make some nice jewel-case art and some good ole' CD-Text to top it all off.

[@Markimark151]

I remember those high capacity CDs during the Dreamcast or Napster era, because CD-Rs were at the height of popularity, my cousin burned music and some music videos on those 850MB CD-Rs from CompUSA and circuit city, they were just expensive and Sony and Maxell didn’t make them, because they wanted quicker and easier optical media production.

[@jayl9387]

The SL-PG300 is the best CD player I have found yet. Mine is consistently more reliable than most other CD players which came after, even others by Technics themselves. The indexing feature is great too, especially for Telarc discs that divided long continuous passages of classical into indexes.

[@summerforever6736]

Sony had some bed ass players I also own technics can't touch them!

[@bxdanny]

I never heard of a 99-minute CD before, but I did buy some 90-minute CDs from eBay a few years ago. The main thing I used it for was to record a musical performance that was slightly over 80 minutes long, namely the original version of Jesus Christ Superstar, which was sold as a 2-CD set whose total length was 80-something minutes.

[@eddiepetrick6222]

That last track sounds like something from an Epcot attraction, circa 1984.

[@Fluteboy]

Now I have that track 99 permanently in my head! I am now imagining some cheesy TV show, possibly a sports quiz, and the voiceover saying: _"Now please welcome your host.... Fearghal Farquhar!"_

[@moki5796]

Considering that Nero didn't break a sweat when testing for 99:57.74, you could have probably surpassed the 100 minute mark as well. Would be curious to know the true capacity of those discs and how your various players would behave when given a 100+ minute disc.

[@gabrielv.4358]

Same. I would love to see them clock 99:99 and go nuts after that

[@BokBarber]

I'd imagine that after hitting the rated 99 minutes, there's variability in exactly how much can be written but some will go probably go over the 100 minute mark.

[@jof4467]

After 99:59, it may do one of three things: 1. Stay at 99:59 until the end. 2. Display 00:00 then count up. 3. Display --:-- until the end.

[@bionyx6368]

Wow. Who knew CD’s could be pushed to hold nearly a GB!

[@planchetflaw]

There was a fun compilation album put out by Fat Wreck Chords called Short Music for Short People which had "101" tracks by 101 bands at around 30s each. I was saddened to find it was 99 tracks with 3 songs on the final track. The total run-time was only 49 odd minutes.

[@AMDXplusplus]

2:00 I guess the CD went bananas when you buy one!

[@Narayan_1996]

It's amazing how you NEVER fail to bring interesting/awesome content for us, it makes me feel very happy for being subscribed to your channel since 2016. Keep up with the amazing job you've been doing! I'll be here always watching you ! ♥ ♥ ♥ P.S: I was hoping until the end of the video for you to show us the back of the CD hahahahaha

[@JacGoudsmit]

Thank you for posting this! Lots of well-researched information. And yes, 99 minute discs are totally real. The 2 second gap wasn't to let the laser cool down or whatever, it was because in track-at-once mode, the recorder would be able to find the 2 second pause at the end of the unfinished disc and would be able to switch the laser and other electronics from reading to writing at exactly the right time. Later on with disc-at-once recording, that wasn't necessary anymore. I'm pretty sure Nero lets you set the pause to a different default value, or lets you select multiple tracks and set the pause on all of them, as long as you're doing a disc-at-once recording. That error that you got while trying to burn the 99 minute disc was totally expected. The program tells the recorder to burn the lead-out but there's not enough space. The lead-out is normally something like 90 seconds and "overburn" means that you're putting data where the lead-out would normally go. As for that mystery with the claim of the 60 minute duration: The CD was originally designed to be 11.5 cm in diameter, and double-sided with a label in the middle on both sides, similar to LP's and singles. The choice for 11.5 cm was based on the size of a cassette, I think, but I don't remember exactly how it's related. The maximum duration was 30 minutes per side, so that's where those 60 minutes came from. Sony persuaded Philips to change the format from double-sided to single-sided and 12 cm diameter, because they found out that Philips was building a factory in Germany to produce CD's for their record company Polygram. Sony didn't have a record company at that time so they were afraid to get out-competed. Nobody remembers how exactly that conversation went, so it's possible that the claim that the 9th Symphony was 74 minutes, didn't come up at all. I think probably Sony's boss simply said that he wanted to have the 9th symphony on a single-sided disc, and the format needed to be changed. Philips may have just gotten an engineer to go over the numbers to calculate how much extra diameter would give, and they calculated that there were only 63 minutes on a single-sided 11.5 cm disc but there would be 74 minutes on a 12 cm disc. Of course Philips had to start over with building the factory, or at least the machines in it. Eventually most factories used machines by ODME (Optical Disk Manufacturing Equipment), another Dutch company; their machines didn't require a clean room; they had their own clean room built in. Another thing Sony did was to change the sample frequency from 40056 (I think) to 44100 and the number of bits from 14 to 16, because they had developed the PCM-16xx encoders which used that format and recorded it on U-Matic videotape. Philips didn't have any way to store and transport digital audio recordings so they agreed. The only problem for Philips was that they already had developed a 14 bit DAC. So they invented 4-times oversampling which turned out to be a great idea: Because of the oversampling, the Nyquist frequency was effectively quadrupled and the anti-aliasing filters in Philips CD players could be much simpler than those in the Sony CD players. The Philips CD players ended up sounding better than others because of the oversampling, and later on, everyone implemented oversampling, up to a point where DACs are now basically just 1 bit with nothing but oversampling to make up for the missing 15 bits. And now I'm going to have to play some music to get your Track 99 out of my head. 🙂

[@elvisburgerking8675]

I remember the golden days of computing when i spent a fortune on a first generation Plextor burner and recorded and copied everything i could get my hands on.

[@hiimemily]

The figure I had heard growing up was that CDs could hold 79 minutes of music - largely because _Lateralus_ came right up to that limit.

[@GeckoTDFarg]

When I was more young in the era of Sega Dreamcast, they use GD-ROM was a CD disk with in theory 1.24 GB but in really was something like 950MB. The console it self don't have any kind of copy protection was the disk it self. But if you where able to get one of this CD-R 99 Minutes you can dump the game, clear all the "filling" sectors that make 1.24 GB "ISO / GDI" and usually the games only take 920 MB or less, so you don't need to RIP the games. And in the era of the Nintendo Gamecube they use Mini-DVD so we buy the standard DVD dual layers, and we cut it with a hot scisor to make it "mini".

[@hicknopunk]

My CDPXA20ES displays index and I am always so happy to see a disc use them.

[@SylvesterAshcroft88]

I bought some discs a while ago which were designed for overburning, but they seemed to be pretty decent quality at the time, although they seem quite rare nowadays.

[@RetroCore]

A little bit of trivia for you. That GE CD player is actually a rebadged Samsung! I had the exact same CD player as a young teenager. I remember buying a few CDs in advance so my parents would buy me a CD player for Christmas.

[@wileyfoxyx]

That's the moment when KZbin recommends me a very great and interesting video. Haven't thpught before what's trhe max record length of a CD could be but thanks to you now I know it can be up to 99mns. Good job on this one dude

[@LanceCampeau]

I remember recording a 97+min disc back in 2005... I still have it somewhere.

[@GP1138]

"Wonder Something" was used in a series of commercials, and I can't remember if they're local or national, but it's driving me nuts. And for some reason, Google has decided that putting quotes around a phrase no longer requires that exact phrase to be part of search results, so I just get lots of Stevie Wonder search results.

[@Musicradio77Network]

I remember getting blank CD-R’s and they are all 80 minutes, but I’ve never had a 99-minute CD-R before. TDK, Maxell, Memorex, Imation, Sony, Verbatim and others never put out 99-minute blank CD-R discs. I did checked on eBay that all they have are CD-R’s that were both 74 and 80 minutes, and no, there is no 99-minute CD-R listed there.

[@CptJistuce]

You put a Gateway drive into a Compaq! I don't know which retired brand is more humiliated.

[@uxwbill]

I never tried these, being as I couldn't find any for sale, nor did I want to potentially trash a CD burner. (Also probably an apocryphal event.) However, I did once make a very halfhearted effort to see if I could put more than 99 tracks on a CD. Nero Burning ROM wouldn't do it and I didn't pursue it further, so I'm not sure if a program exists that might be willing to break that rule. I also tried overburning an 80 minute disc, which failed and was never revisited with more conservative settings. Ford's in-dash CD players (specifically, those seen in the panther platform cars) have only a one-shaped character in the tens-of-minutes position. For tracks longer than 19:59, the display reduces precision by dropping the seconds indication and showing only minutes, giving it the theoretical ability to display more than 99 of them. I suspect anything with MP3-on-CD playback capability might also properly display times longer than 99 minutes. Some of Pioneer's larger CD changers also have an otherwise unused sixteen segment character in the display ahead of the tens value for minutes (and another in the track display area). These probably wouldn't be used even if they "could" be, as it seems Pioneer took great pains to "waste" the nice sixteen segment display elements in most of those players. (Some models had CD Text capability that would use the entire display's capability, though the implementation is extremely basic and those models were soon discontinued. The same display was used in those without the CD Text feature.) (Yes, I'm a big VF display nerd. What gave it away? :-P )

[@johnnymurgatroyd7393]

The Beethoven's 9th story is a myth, but the "myth" originates in Sony's marketing copy. People believed the myth, not because they were morons, but because they had no reason to think Sony was literally just lying out their asses like the corporate scumbags they are. Does anyone remember the album "Miles In Europe"? It was just OVER 80 mins long. I asked about this oddity in a forum back in the day, and someone told me that it is actually quite possible to crush more than 80 mins on a modern CD, just as LPs could actually crush in 60 mins of music, if you didn't mind shit sound.

[@zzyzxRDFwy15]

2:45 I liked the uxwBill and Fur Head retro cameo appearance in your video.

[@plan7a]

Really puts to shame those that won't even fit around 70 minutes onto a CD without failing! Or those that have to be so exact and not a few seconds over that some drives and CDs will require! Wow!💿

[@goldenrod1676]

Those high capacity cds are actually very important among the few people who still have a Sega Dreamcast. Many game iso files for that system do not fit on a standard disc

[@BigCar2]

Seeing your Jetta reminded me I couldn't stand having the volume knob in my Golf anything other than fully vertical, to the point I only used the steering wheel controls to adjust the volume!

[@IoSonoPiero]

Man, you unlocked a lot of memories of long time ago! 👍

[@synaesthesia2010]

took one look at the thumbnail and i could tell it was a Technics CD player, had one for about 20 years

[@TitanTed]

Q: "What are you watching?" Me: "Some guy is seeing if those 99 minute blank CDs will really burn with 99 minutes of music." Q: "Why are you watching this?" Me: "I don't know, but it's neato."

[@nice5545]

Here in Italy i used to find Banana Digital cds in chinese stores, and yes, i've also seen 870mb ones

[@IvyANguyen]

I owned a Plextor CD burner in the mid-2000s that could burn CDs at slightly higher density that still was compatible with regular CD players. It had modes for 1.1 to 1.4x capacity. The 1.4x usually was not compatible with most players but 1.2x was close to universal compatibility. Combine that with an 80-minute CD + overburning and you can get very close to 100 minutes of audio on a CD. 99 tracks was always doable if they were short enough. I had a Sony Discman from 1999 that would display a TOC past 99:59 using letters like A0:00 for 100:00, B0:00 for 110:00, etc. (If you attempted to record that much music to the disc you would see this)

[@nickwallette6201]

Oh that's cool! I have a few Plextor burners, and I remember seeing those options, but I never tried pushing the boundaries like that. I was always more concerned with universal readability than squeezing the most space out of a disc. I think the only time I ever enabled overburn was to permit the last (literally) couple megabytes of a Windows installation disc, with other stuff added in. Needless to say, it was completely fine. I've always wondered what would happen if you tried to go beyond 99 min 59 sec 73 frames. I'm not entirely sure how the time is stored in the address subchannel, so I wasn't sure it was even possible to have a 100th minute.

[@IvyANguyen]

@@nickwallette6201 Yep. I had some very lengthy DJ mix sets and so I would only use the extended settings when it would be a single file/track that ran longer than 81 minutes / 700 MiB.

[@vampyrelycan99]

But how about the disc burning quality? Under Nero DiscSpeed, if the graph fluctuates randomly and if the final score falls below 80 then I'd consider the disc burning very bad......

[@ShawnBoyko]

Love seeing CD content. I collect early pressings of CDs and early CD players.

[@MatheusF_Official]

4:26 that reminds me, the Marilyn Manson album (antichrist superstar) have 99 tracks, but from track 17 to 98 is just silence, since track 99 is a hidden track

[@christo930]

I used to use the 99 minute CDs to copy DVD movies in SVCD. Long movies would get split into 2 of the 90 minute discs (I still have some of these blank discs). One thing I found is movie errors would sometimes happen (meaning visible occasional junk on the screen) towards the end of the discs would happen, even though everything would appear fine from WIndows. I'm wondering if the auto-correction of CDDA is masking errors on the disc. Funny enough though, I still have all of those movies put away in my garage somewhere. I was doing this around 2003 maybe (it was obviously after the DVD encoding or decoding key got found), maybe 04. I'll have to see if they still work.

[@Toxis374]

It's crazy that someone even won money for making an urban legend look like a fact.

[@ConcavePgons]

At least they got it "correct". Imagine how frustrating it would be if you got it wrong and found out it was a myth.

[@matheusm9146]

In my experiences, I noticed that laptop drives have greater difficulty overburning because the movement of the optical drive at the external end is used to activate the mechanism that ejects the tray, so it cannot write to the edge

[@brandonupchurch7628]

Technically I believe 63min/550mb CD-Rs were the first but they were generally obsoleted by 74min/650mb CD-Rs by the time drives were affordable enough for the average person, there's one listing on theBay, from France that has Japanese 550MB/63min Taiyo-Yuden made Imation disks that have a 1996 copyright year on the back, other than that I don't think I've ever seen 550mb/63min disks in person.

[@tookitogo]

I have a couple of 63min CD-Rs I burned in 1998.

[@kiwimotion]

love the lil skycorp video at the end! 😆

[@stereophonicstuff]

I’m impressed that the iMac was able to burn that 99 minute CD with the least amount of fuss; I was expecting it to to put up the biggest fight in comparison to doing the same thing in Windows. I haven’t seen your MacBook Pro in any of your recent videos. Did it finally overheat for the last time and get replaced by the iMac?

[@vwestlife]

I still have the MacBook Pro and it still works fine. (I last showed it in my "CD Mistakes" video a few months ago.) I just wanted to upgrade to something bigger and faster.

[@TheTrueVoiceOfReason]

Wow, what a shout out to UXWBill on BlogTV. I think I saw that stream. Glad I was forced to catch up since it's his birthday today, and this is a double bonus. Thanks for the memories.

[@seankkg]

Seeing the 99 pop up is oddly satisfying.

[@ErikZarth]

Amazing, could have really used this back in the day. Great video.

[@ondrejsedlak4935]

I used to use these 99 minute discs exclusively for VCD authoring and while 99 minute audio CDs worked in pretty much everything, 99 minute VCDs had issues in some players. Panasonic VCD players were most compatible.

[@Alexis_Mos]

Track 99: The sound of success!!

[@BubbaBigDude]

This is awesome! I've used 800MB 90-minute CD-R in the past and now I want to get my hands on some of these discs!! Thanks for the great video!!!

[@TechRyze]

I still love my CD collection and CD players. Apple Music gives the option of lossless audio and studio quality nowadays, but you still need to get that high quality audio to your sound system, as well as streaming or downloading it.

[@snugglebunnyhaven7258]

I remember when CDs first come out, reading about them in magazines in grade school. I kinda thought so what. Yes it was cool but I still preferred cassettes and records. After all, cds were so expensive and at the time you couldn't record on them. I got my first player for xmas 1985. I only had 4 or 5 cds. Zip ahead to the 90s when I got into broadcasting the format was used in radio. Feeding those machines for hourly around the clock on air was the common way. That's when I got hooked on them and methods to buy cds and get freebies were more common. Today I still use them as a preferred way of playing to air and having solid copies of music. I am still playing from cdrs burned over 20 years ago. Burning one's own cds didn't become practical until the late 90s and more so into the 2000s. Now days I haven't burned one in probably 5 years or more with the ease of hard drive storage.

[@LdeinerProductions]

I just realized, I think Mark from Classic Game Room used that same collection of royalty free music. I swear I heard that track in one of his videos. Also, this reminds me of the cheap boombox I had as a little kid, which, despite have a two digit display, for some reason couldn’t register any track over 40. After 39 it would just go “-0, -1,-2,” etc.

[@joelcarson9514]

Recently, I captured audio off a VHS HiFi deck with a high quality USB audio interface and Audacity for a neighbor. I messed up and had the sample rate set really low (Like 11.6 rather than 44.1 but the bit rate at 16 bits.) but when I turned it into a CD using Burn Aware it played fine both on his DVD player and his CD player in his truck. It played fine on my DVD drive and standalone DVD player. I'm not really surprised it played on the DVD players and and the DVD burner in my PC, but that it played properly in his vehicle. The file size I finally noticed being so small for almost 45 minutes of music ( Around 135 MB, it should have been closer to 400 at 16/44.1 ) so I re-recorded it, but the low-res version didn't sound all that bad in comparison. While I didn't intend to do this, if most CD players would play it, I could easily get 99 minutes on a CD, though I don't know if I could get 99 separate tracks as well.

[@alextirrellRI]

I was just recently given a couple boxes of these exact CompUSA 99-min CD-Rs. I think I'll use a couple to leave in my car -- MP3 CD's could be an ideal usage if I can get my Mac to use all the data on the disc.

[@stepheng8779]

Used to use overburn a lot back in the day on the 'Now' (UK) compilations, always well over the 80 minutes.

[@dwayne0t]

I love the way you mockingly said "Banana brand" 🍌

[@Livewire91]

It's been a while since i have been watching your new videos. Glad to come back and see things are still rolling the way like they used to. Keep it up :)

[@johnnyc.5979]

I don't know why, but I had to watch this entire video. Now I have to find some 99 min CD's.

[@derekgoss]

Another awesome vwestlife post! Long after being able to easily put 150 mp3's on a cd, which is now rather obsolete, as cars don''t have cd/mp3 players anymore, we are here seeing what we could do with 20 year old tech. Fun, just fun!

[@Andreeeba]

This works only in several Cd-Audio Players. In 99minutes CDR structure of data is diffrent. Sony, Alpine, Yamaha and Becker won't play this without errors.

[@themaritimegirl]

Nice throw to uxwbill on his 40th birthday! Also that Monodeal CD player is surprisingly cool-looking.

[@n.miller907]

I was shocked to see that Technics MASH CD player. That was the first CD player I ever bought. It cost me $400 back in the day. It didn't last very long. I got about four or five years of use out of it. It wasn't compatible with a lot of modern CDs either so it hit the trash can. I kind of miss it. My Blu-ray players have no indicators on the front panel, just black plastic. Kinda boring to use but they work.

[@audioman3017]

Awesome uxwbill clip. That takes me back in time.