T Bone Burnett on ΧΟΔΕ

WNYC's John Schaefer interviewed T Bone Burnett on Soundcheck this Monday.  In addition to discussing T Bone's distinguished musical career and his recent collaboration with Robert Plant and Alison Krauss (who gave a fabulous concert in Boston last week), T Bone described the ΧΟΔΕ (pronounced "Code") project which he started and in which I've been privileged to take part.

ΧΟΔΕ is an effort to create a musical experience for the listener that's as close as possible to what the artist intended but often wasn't heard once the music left the studio and went through the process of digitization, down-sampling, and compression to finally arrive on CD or as a download.  In its first incarnation on the forthcoming John Mellencamp album Life, Death, Love and Freedom, ΧΟΔΕ delivers Mellencamp's music on a DVD with stereo 24 bit/96 kHz uncompressed (Linear PCM) audio tracks.  That's the same format used in the studio to mix and master the music, as opposed to the 16 bit/44.1 kHz files on a CD, which is included in the box, at no extra charge, for backwards compatibility.  And rather than challenge the purchaser to figure out how to rip those files, the DVD also includes a file system with the 24/96 tracks as WAV files that can be played on a computer, and compressed (AAC and MP3 at 256 kbits/sec) files that can be downloaded to portable music players.  Those compressed files are professionally created from the original hi-resolution masters instead of the usual practice of making them after the fact from the CDs.  While all of the above files come in the CD case, those same files can be offered by download sites.

You can hear the complete interview here or read Steve Guttenberg's blog post on CNET.

Note:  ΧΟΔΕ releases are not DVD-Audio, a format that required the purchase of new equipment, were heavily laden with DRM and never saw widespread adoption.  The Mellencamp album is a conventional DVD that will play in any player that supports 24/96 audio, which is almost all of them.  The album is formatted as a video title.  The video is just a still frame, but that's enough to persuade the player to play the audio.  In summary, ΧΟΔΕ is not a new format but makes maximum use of existing formats which have become available since the CD was invented 25 years ago but have not been fully exploited for music until now.

Comments

[Andrew]

Can you tell us more about your involvement with Code?

[Mark Waldrep]

If this is just a regular DVD-Video disc with standard 96 kHz/24-bit PCM audio...then why is it being marketed/promoted as something completely new....with a strange name and lots of mystery. Labels have done this before and many still are...including my label AIX Records.

[Christopher Herot]

Mark, as you point out we have made use of widely available formats, such as regular DVD-Video discs and standard 96/24 PCM audio, but employ them along with aesthetic and ethical choices that use those formats to their full potential. We are not trying to be mysterious. We are in the very beginning stages of this project. Each album release will be customized.

Like any respected brand, ΧΟΔΕ is intended to assure the purchaser that the highest care was taken in the production of the music and that the music is delivered in a set of formats that take the maximum advantage of the listener's equipment. As we deliver more music in ΧΟΔΕ and as we exploit the results of our research into quality music production and delivery, the meaning of the brand should become more apparent.

By the way, I agree wholeheartedly with your article, CDs Are Not HD. It's that same sentiment that motivates our work on ΧΟΔΕ.

[Steve Clay]

Thanks for the clear info on ΧΟΔΕ. Most articles I could find about it made it sound like a new proprietary codec.

By the way, I would hope that, since ΧΟΔΕ already seems based on existing codecs, that the format will not be encumbered by another layer of licensing (above that of mp3s) just to produce similar-structured discs. My hope is that ΧΟΔΕ will become a well-documented de facto guideline for releasing music; one that any label (or artist) could follow to release an album.

As someone who agrees that we need listener-friendly multi-format discs, I'm glad the idea is picking up some steam, and 24/96 DVD is definitely the way to go.

[Ashley]

Thank you for the clear explanation. My question is if you can fit roughly 17 songs on a CD, how many songs will fit on this DVD? What are the file sizes? Are a few songs going to completely fill up my hard drive?

[thrill seeker]

I aqree that ΧΟΔΕ is a musical experience for the listener but I would like to see a few improvements to the clarity.