CD (or other media) software activated pause.

I actually thought of this back in the very early 90's, and it's a real shame that it isn't part of the standard for CD's, DVD's, and, in fact, any modern entertainment storage software. Although, I suspect DVD's are capable of it, since they do control the machine.

Anyway, the reason for this is pretty simple. Often, classical music comes with several disparate pieces on one disc. They might be planned to segue well, but usually they are put together to give better value, or for almost any imaginable reason they have something (or not) in common. If you only want to let, say, the Moonlight Sonata wash over you, and then sit in blissful silence without interacting with a machine, you would turn "on" the software activated pause, press play. As long as the disc or source has a pause encoded after the piece, it goes into pause when it gets there. This would also be nice if you wanted to listen to those three Mozart symphonies, but let your mind rest for a few minutes in between - again, without having to grabt he remote and press pause immediately one ends.

A similar situation comes up in pop music two ways. One is when a record that was originally planned out as two sides of an LP plays as two twenty minute or so pieces, with an "ending" on both sides. The other is when "bonus tracks" are added, which don't necessarily belong at the end of the original presentation.

This would have allowed the Beatles lp's, when released on CD, to have the contemporary singles appended, without making it a pain to play the original carefully sequenced album. For instance, who really knows where Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane should be in the Sgt. Pepper album (maybe Paul McC. and George M. should figure this one out for us!), but if they were at the end, you might need a rest after A Day in the Life before playing them.

DVD's pretty much allow this with "play chapters" and "play all" options, but I don't see the world's music being remastered onto DVD's like this anytime soon.

8/9/01