Post Description

A lot of effort has been put into the preparation of this CD-ROM.
11 audio CDs had to be made fit on just one CD-ROM, including
complete documentation and players.

Various compression methods exist but they all suffer from a loss
in sound quality.

However, the fact that all these historic recordings are only monophonic
made it possible to use a trick. Instead of a proposed 1:11 compression,
which would have made everything fit onto just one CD-ROM, a much better 1:5.5
compression was applied. The method is MPEG Layer II audio compression
which is virtually without loss in quality for a compression of 1:5.5
(whereas the results would have been notably worse for a 1:11 compression).

All the CDs have been extracted digitally onto harddisk.
In a second step, a tool (which was made specifically for this project) was
used to convert the digital stereo data from the CD into a mono file, reducing
it's size by 50 percent.
Then, MPEG L2 audio compression was applied. The bitrate used is 128Kbps,
which made it possible to keep the music "CD quality". (Note: This corresponds
with a CD-quality bitrate of 256Kbps for stereophonic recordings)

When you compare the compressed files to the original CDs, you will find them
to be totally equal in sound quality (assuming you have a good soundcard).

Of course the these programmes were broadcast on AM radio back then.
So the sound quality basically varies from very bad to 
excellent (the latter in case studio tapes could be found).


Endless hours have been put into the preparation of the HTML versions of the 
books and booklets that came with the original CDs and boxed set.
If you compare the Great Dane book with the HTML version you will find that
the complicated multicolumn layout closely matches the layout of the original
deluxe book. The scanned images are of excellent quality and high resolution.

In order to further enhance the Great Dane book, hyperlinks have been introduced. 
Considerable time and effort have been put into the correction of most of the 
many hundreds of misspellings, factual errors, and grammatical errors of 
the original book.
(Great Dane is located in Italy and the author of the original book wasn't too
good in the English language).

If you find any additional errors, please post them under the Subject
"BBC CD-ROM" into the international Usenet newsgroup "rec.music.beatles" so
that future pressings can have these errors corrected!


(c) 1997 LQE Productions