Weird Product Mistakes

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Catspaw
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Weird Product Mistakes

Post by Catspaw »

A while ago I bought an audiobook for a book called "The Headmistress of Rosemere" by Sarah Ladd. I have already read the book, but I spend lots of time commuting for work, so I put the disc in a few days ago in my car. Track 1 was great: Chapter 1. Then it switched to track 2, which started with the announcment: Chapter 10. Umm, what? I checked the box again to confirm that there was only one disc in the case, and that it did indeed state that it was unabridged. Even an abridged version probably shouldn't skip chapters 2 through 9. ;) So I skipped through the tracks until finally it said Chapter 2 and kept listening. Then it happened again later on. I finally figured out (some of you smarter-than-me folks may have already figured out the problem here) that they must have done the track listing wrong, so that it played 1, then 10 through 19, then chapter 2, then 20-29, then chapter 3, then 30-36. I was really glad that each track was the start of a new chapter, and that the chapter numbers were the first things read on the track. Otherwise that might have been a real nightmare, instead of just annoying. There was one other little glitch where the first 30 seconds or so a new chapter was read at the end of the preceding track, and then repeated when the next track started. Considering the fact that I had bought a new, professionally made production, I was a little surprised to see that such a silly mistake like doing the track listings incorrectly had been made.

Has anybody else had stuff like that happen? And did you complain about it? I haven't bothered to write an official review or do anything up to this point. I'm trying to decide whether I should warn people or if I can possibly assume that the company may have fixed this already, since I had purchased my copy very early and just didn't listen to it for months.
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The Top Crusader
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Post by The Top Crusader »

Randomly one of the DVDs in season 3 of Friends was a copy of the disc before it, but was labeled to be whatever was supposed to be in the slot. Those episodes are forever lost to me because I'm not buying it again unless Chandler was the only person in them. :(
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Post by bookworm »

I doubt it was a problem with your actual disc Catspaw, but rather a strange preference by your player. Instead of playing the tracks in the usual numeric order it’s choosing a quasi-numeric one where it divides the number twice, putting the tracks into groupings based only on the first digit instead of the whole number. You figured it out, look at your list:
Catspaw wrote:it played 1, then 10 through 19, then chapter 2, then 20-29, then chapter 3, then 30-36.
It is playing them in order, just not the right order.
1, 10, 11, 12, etc.
2, 20, 21, 22, etc.
3, 30, 31, 32, etc.
It starts with everything starting with 1, and plays those in numeric order. So after the initial 1 it skips 2-9 because it sees track 10 also starts with 1 and thinks it should go next. When it finishes with all the 1’s (track 19) it starts over with the 2’s.

One of my players did this once, interestingly also with an audio book, but I don’t remember if I figured out a way to fix it.

Edit:

You should try the disc in a regular cd player to see for sure. Those can’t ‘think’ about what the right order should be, they just play tracks the way they are on the disc. Then you will know if the cd itself in in fact put together wrong, or if it’s just your audio player developing a mind of its own.
Last edited by bookworm on Fri Sep 26, 2014 1:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by ~JCGJ~ »

bookworm wrote:I doubt it was a problem with your actual disc Catspaw, but rather a strange preference by your player. Instead of playing the tracks in the usual numeric order it’s choosing a quasi-numeric one where it divides the number twice, putting the tracks into groupings based only on the first digit instead of the whole number. You figured it out, look at your list:
Catspaw wrote:it played 1, then 10 through 19, then chapter 2, then 20-29, then chapter 3, then 30-36.
It is playing them in order, just not the right order.
1, 10, 11, 12, etc.
2, 20, 21, 22, etc.
3, 30, 31, 32, etc.
It starts with everything starting with 1, and plays those in numeric order. So after the initial 1 it skips 2-9 because it sees track 10 also starts with 1 and thinks it should go next. When it finishes with all the 1’s (track 19) it starts over with the 2’s.

One of my players did this once, interestingly also with an audio book, but I don’t remember if I figured out a way to fix it.
Yeah, my computer does that whenever I try to transfer CDs to my MP3 player, but I'm able to manually upload each track individually, so it's not hard to reset the order.
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Post by Catspaw »

I have never, ever had an issue with that before, but I guess I've only played so many CD's in my new car to compare with. None of the other ones that I have played have done that, however. It was playing the tracks in order, just not the chapters. I will try it on a different player, since I am curious now to see if it would play differently, but it seems really odd that something like that would happen randomly on one CD and not anything else.

Top's post reminded me that I had an issue like that with my Blu-ray set of Indiana Jones movies a year or so ago. Luckily I watched through the movies not too long after I got my nice Blu-ray packaged set, because I ended up with two Temple of Doom discs and no Last Crusade. I maybe could have lived with it if things were the other way around ;) but keeping it was not an option! I'm tyring to remember now, but I think the artwork/labeling might even have been for the right movie, but the actual content was not what it was supposed to be. I couldn't say that for sure right now, because I can't quite remember, but I feel like it was a harder to catch mistake than just looking like a duplicate. Fortunately, I was able to send the defective set back and Amazon sent me another one.
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