Remember how classical music stations were 15 years ago? They announce "We will now listen to Brahms's symphony #1 in C major." Then they'd play *the whole symphony!*, then you'd eagerly listen for the announcement of what you'd just listened to, and there it would be: "That was a performance of Brahms's first symphony in C major, by the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy."
Now, classical stations play only 3 minutes of music at a time -- never a whole composition, just an excerpt -- as befits the attention span of today's generation.
This depressing change had us classical music buffs running for the record stores, hoping to amass a great enough music collection that we could listen - in our cars - to whatever piece of classical music we wanted. Randomizers, built into the CD's, would give that "spontaneity" characteristic that we used to enjoy when we listened to the radio.
Now I'm again feeling nostalgic. For even if I had 100 CD's in my car and my CD player could randomize all of them, I still miss that comforting deep voice that comes on at the end, telling me the details of what I had just listened to.
What I would like is a classical CD that has "announcement tracks" between each piece. Someone should start a service, where you mail in your favorite classical CD, and they copy it and add in announcement tracks (the service can make up its own "station name" for the announcements), then mails back to me the "radioized" CD.
Then I pop it in, and -- no more squinting to read the back of the CD while I'm driving, either -- and I've got my classical radio station again, just as it once was.
Would also work great for pop/rock CD's.-- phundug, Mar 26 2004 kenwood music keg http://www.kenwoodu....jsp?productId=2373 [MikeOliver, Oct 04 2004] I believe the kenwood music keg stores 20gb (or something like that) of mp3 files which can be played on your car stereo, and with the track names being read out in a robotic voice. I know its not quite the same, but might do the trick if you are wanting to avoid looking up track names on the cd box.-- MikeOliver, Mar 26 2004 Yeah, just like having steven hawking doing it... Maybe kenwood even hired him to do the voice...-- MikeOliver, Mar 26 2004 Good idea, but probably better done with a bit of software that adds them onto the end of the MP3's.... (If you don't have an MP3 Player in your car go and buy one now.... have you gone yet??? NOW!)-- CasaLoco, Mar 26 2004 I recently saw a patent (or patent application) for using a text-to-speech system combined with an MP3 decoder to read out track information.-- kropotkin, Mar 26 2004 Back in the Pliocene, or thereabouts, we had some LPs which had announcements on them along these lines. I think they came from Readers' Digest. Either way, it was profoundly irritating (perhaps because the announcer had a broad Midwestern accent rather than a silky Bostonian one).-- DrCurry, Mar 26 2004 random, halfbakery