History
The publication that would become Polishing of Metal (also known as: POM) took some eight years in total to develop. Its development was a happenstance of circumstances over that period.
First Publication
During 1995 computer programmer and heavy music enthusiast Derek McDonald began research on the origins of Heavy Metal Music as a personal project. Seeing that his McBBS project was winding down he needed a new project to pass his time. The original text that would eventually evolve into Polishing Of Metal, as it later became known, was a set of articles published in an obscure Gothic underground pulp publication named Legends Magazine released by Marcus Pan and his Inferno Publishing in Linden, New Jersey, United States in 1997 from February to December of that year. Pan agreed to release the early text as a form of gathering ratings from its readership. These articles went largely unseen in the larger society but remained popular amongst the magazine readers; the core content of those articles would become the central nucleus for Polishing Of Metal.
McBBS was a Bulletin Board System developed by Derek E. McDonald and distributed by DMCS Technologies between October 30, 1989 and May 30, 2000 and operated over 18 versions.
Linden is a city in southeastern Union County, New Jersey, United States. It is part of the New York Metropolitan Area, located about 13 miles (21 km) southwest of Manhattan and bordering Staten Island, a borough of New York City, across the Arthur Kill. As of the 2010 United States Census, the city's population was 40,499, reflecting an increase of 1,105 (+2.8%) from the 39,394 counted in the 2000 Census, which had in turn increased by 2,693 (+7.3%) from the 36,701 counted in the 1990 Census.
The original concept was Polishing of Metal would be printed book format but no publisher showed interest in what would be a specialty textbook on this form of music, and the cost of self-publishing proved to be prohibitive, so the project was set aside.
Technological & Commercial Development
The emerging technologies of Compact Discs and Multimedia would be the savior of the project. Soon after he set the project aside, McDonald decided to close up his computer company DMCS Technologies and start a new firm: Emperor Multimedia Corporation in 1998. The first publication of this venture was a CD dubbed The Alliance in 1999. The Alliance gave only a hint of what was to come for it contained a hidden track featuring biographical texts and photographs of the acts featured on the compilation disc. The software was primitive even to the standards of 1999 but the disc managed to chart and receive commercial air play, most specifically on Toronto’s Q-107 (CILQ-FM). The Alliance, along with the massive database of musical artists he had obtained through his business activities surrounding it, gave McDonald a huge advantage over competitors with unprecedented access to independent musicians with fresh talent loyal to his efforts.
Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the most populous city in Canada, with a population of 2,731,571 in 2016. Current to 2016, the Toronto census metropolitan area (CMA), of which the majority is within the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), held a population of 5,928,040, making it Canada's most populous CMA. The city is the anchor of the Golden Horseshoe, an urban agglomeration of 9,245,438 people surrounding the western end of Lake Ontario. Toronto is an international centre of business, finance, arts, and culture, and is recognized as one of the most multicultural and cosmopolitan cities in the world.
CILQ-FM is a Canadian radio station, broadcasting at 107.1 FM in Toronto, Ontario. The station broadcasts an active rock format branded as Q107 and is also available through streaming audio and on Bell TV channel 954. The station is owned by Corus Entertainment. CILQ's studios are located at the Corus Quay building on Dockside Drive at Toronto's Harbourfront neighbourhood, while its transmitter is located atop the CN Tower, with backup facilities located atop First Canadian Place.
After working on several private CD production contracts and software development, McDonald would resurrect the Polishing of Metal documents. The cost of CD production was plummeting and his access to the artists and technology now made it affordable to create complex multimedia projects for CD distribution. His first attempt at this was in the form of Recorded History, released December 31, 2002. In an attempt to attract a wider audience the disc centered more on the history of Rock Music in general, with the discussions on Heavy Metal maintaining a significant part of the over-all project. The multimedia presentation featured PDF encoded text, with 500 artist biographies, 900 album reviews and some 100 photographs. It featured a single music video by Robert Jackson and 14 audio tracks in MP3 format. Although the disc was a true multimedia production it lacked what the consumers were looking for and it fell short of popular demand.
The Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format developed by Adobe in the 1990s to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. Based on the PostScript language, each PDF file encapsulates a complete description of a fixed-layout flat document, including the text, fonts, vector graphics, raster images and other information needed to display it. PDF was standardized as ISO 32000 in 2008, and no longer requires any royalties for its implementation.
MP3 is a coding format for digital audio. Originally defined as the third audio format of the MPEG-1 standard, it was retained and further extended—defining additional bit-rates and support for more audio channels—as the third audio format of the subsequent MPEG-2 standard. A third version, known as MPEG 2.5—extended to better support lower bit rates—is commonly implemented, but is not a recognized standard.
Completion
McDonald took a couple of years to research the contents and improve the technology to rework the formula and return in 2006 with the modern day Polishing of Metal. Now centering purely on the life and times of Heavy Metal, Polishing of Metal managed to impress both the industry and music fans alike. Except for the graphic arts, music & video conversions, the entire Polishing of Metal project was written and conceived by Derek McDonald. The elements that made Recorded History a true interactive multimedia experience were still there but they were augmented with the glitz of entertainment. This time featuring some 19 music videos, 5 and a half hours of music in both MP3 and standard audio format allowing the disc promotion on radio, some 5000 pages of PDF & HTML encoded text, Internet links and 1304 artist biographies with some 900 album reviews. The cover art was updated to feature a new rendition of long-time mascot Skel (Skel has appeared on the cover of all of McDonald’s projects) and was drawn by Barry Waddell of Florida, USA act Seasons Of The Wolf.
Florida is the southernmost contiguous state in the United States. The state is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the northwest by Alabama, to the north by Georgia, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, and to the south by the Straits of Florida. Florida is the 22nd-most extensive, the 3rd-most populous, and the 8th-most densely populated of the U.S. states. Jacksonville is the most populous municipality in the state and the largest city by area in the contiguous United States. The Miami metropolitan area is Florida's most populous urban area. Tallahassee is the state's capital.
The Internet links component was an added bonus as it allowed the CD-ROM to interface directly with the RRCA (Rock Record Collector’s Association) artist biography database known as the Music Knowledge Base, effectively extending the CD-ROM’s shelf-life by allowing purchaser of the disc to augment the CD's permanent listings with new information with a click of the mouse and free of charge. Indeed, the RRCA’s database provided much of the biographical and review commentary seen on the CD-ROM, several specially made applications were developed during the creation of the project with the sole purpose of converting the data the RRCA contained. Coupled with this feature was another link system that allowed connection to albums featured in the document that were also on sale at Diskery, McDonald's own on-line music store; not to mention the links to artist websites.
Polishing of Metal was cleverly engineered as there was a large amount of "hidden technology" behind the operation of it. This technology was featured from the start where a special program was on the disc that allowed the CD-ROM to bootstrap all the needed applications at start-up instead of the single application start provided by Windows; the application could also detect and stop disc execution if the needed support software was not in the computer. Although the data on the disc can be viewed on several OS platforms, this special autostart program only worked on Windows. Other OSes must start the disc manually; instructions were provided. This limitation was later overcome.
As an added feature the disc also had an extensive interactive help database/user manual programmed onto it, as well as a dictionary of industry and Heavy Metal cultural terminology called the "Metalopedia". Each genuine copy of Polishing of Metal was custom engraved with the text: EMPEROR MULTIMEDIA POLISHING OF METAL CD-ROM ERC4-EB etched into the reflection hub band of the CDs. The entire capacity of the 2 CDs is used, leaving only about 1MB of free space on each, left as a buffer to allow for copy errors during the duplication process.
Termination
For all of its advancements, Polishing of Metal suffered a major handicap: It was expensive to produce. Completed during a sort of economic boom to its publishing company, Emperor Multimedia, by 2013 the tide had changed. Money was not as easy to come by and the market for Compact Discs was faltering. Unable to gain financing for a follow-up, the project was terminated. Emperor Multimedia Corporation ended all compact disc manufacture and production shortly after. On March 17, 2013 the last shipment of CDs were shipped for commercial sale, the remaining inventory was given to charity. The date was carefully chosen as it coincided with the release date of the firm's first production, The Alliance of March 17, 1999. McDonald purchased all rights to the intellectual properties held by Emperor Multimedia to that date so he could continue production in the digital realm on a potential future website called 'The Diskery Music Archives' to take the place of his defunct music on-line retail shop The Diskery and the RRCA Music Archives.
Significance
The legacy of Polishing of Metal was not so much the story of its author, its technology, or any artist featured on it, but the statement it made to the recording industry. During the early part of the 21st century recording companies were suffering financial blows due to the encroachment of the computer industry and the wide availability of the Internet allowing consumers to download audio tracks or wholesale copy music in digital format anywhere on Earth. Indeed, many computer companies such as Apple Inc. with their successful iPod product quietly but indirectly encouraged this behavior to boost their profits. The cost of distribution of the now 25-year-old Compact Disc technology was becoming prohibitive.
McDonald’s approach was a simple one, "if you can’t beat them then join them. Use that same technology to impress the customer enough they will want to buy the compact disc", as he once said in a famous radio interview. He used the music to sell his technology and not the reverse that tended to be normal operation, and to keep costs low he distributed the disc exclusively via his own company and restricted sales only to on-line (internet) retailers. This approach may have slowed the sales of the project, but it allowed a more profitable distribution and manufacturing model. Polishing of Metal was, for its time, the most advanced E-book ever made and the first on this subject matter. It showcased many unknown acts while demonstrating some of the latest techniques in publishing and multimedia technology. It once and for all sealed the gap between the entertainment and electronics industries. On August 12, 2007 it was inducted into the UNESCO Great Library of Alexandria (Bibliotheca Alexandrina).
Many people believe that the creation of Alliance, Recorded History and Polishing of Metal form a sort of deliberately developed trilogy. Fact is they do not. The projects are mutually exclusive of each other.
Compact disc (CD) is a digital optical disc data storage format that was co-developed by Philips and Sony and released in 1982. The format was originally developed to store and play only sound recordings (CD-DA) but was later adapted for storage of data (CD-ROM). Several other formats were further derived from these, including write-once audio and data storage (CD-R), rewritable media (CD-RW), Video Compact Disc (VCD), Super Video Compact Disc (SVCD), Photo CD, PictureCD, Compact Disc-Interactive (CD-i), and Enhanced Music CD. The first commercially available audio CD player, the Sony CDP-101, was released October 1982 in Japan.
Multimedia is content that uses a combination of different content forms such as text, audio, images, animations, video and interactive content. Multimedia contrasts with media that use only rudimentary computer displays such as text-only or traditional forms of printed or hand-produced material.
The Compact Disc-Interactive is a digital optical disc data storage format that was mostly developed and marketed by Dutch company Philips. It was created as an extension of CDDA and CD-ROM and specified in the Green Book, co-developed by Philips and Sony, to combine audio, text and graphics. The two companies initially expected to impact the education/training, point of sale, and home entertainment industries, but CD-i eventually became best known for its video games.
In computing and optical disc recording technologies, an optical disc (OD) is a flat, usually circular disc which encodes binary data (bits) in the form of pits and lands on a special material on one of its flat surfaces. The encoding material sits atop a thicker substrate which makes up the bulk of the disc and forms a dust defocusing layer. The encoding pattern follows a continuous, spiral path covering the entire disc surface and extending from the innermost track to the outermost track. The data is stored on the disc with a laser or stamping machine, and can be accessed when the data path is illuminated with a laser diode in an optical disc drive which spins the disc at speeds of about 200 to 4,000 RPM or more, depending on the drive type, disc format, and the distance of the read head from the center of the disc. Most optical discs exhibit a characteristic iridescence as a result of the diffraction grating formed by its grooves. This side of the disc contains the actual data and is typically coated with a transparent material, usually lacquer. The reverse side of an optical disc usually has a printed label, sometimes made of paper but often printed or stamped onto the disc itself. Unlike the 31⁄2-inch floppy disk, most optical discs do not have an integrated protective casing and are therefore susceptible to data transfer problems due to scratches, fingerprints, and other environmental problems.
Compact Disc Digital Audio, also known as Audio CD, is the standard format for audio compact discs. The standard is defined in the Red Book, one of a series of "Rainbow Books" that contain the technical specifications for all CD formats.
A CD ripper, CD grabber, or CD extractor is software that converts tracks on a Compact Disc to standard computer sound files, such as WAV, MP3, or Ogg Vorbis.
Enhanced CD is a certification mark of the Recording Industry Association of America for various technologies that combine audio and computer data for use in both Compact Disc and CD-ROM players.
In computing, an optical disc drive (ODD) is a disc drive that uses laser light or electromagnetic waves within or near the visible light spectrum as part of the process of reading or writing data to or from optical discs. Some drives can only read from certain discs, but recent drives can both read and record, also called burners or writers. Compact discs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs are common types of optical media which can be read and recorded by such drives. Optical disc drives that are no longer in production include CD-ROM drive, CD writer drive, combo (CD-RW/DVD-ROM) drive, and DVD writer drive supporting certain recordable and rewritable DVD formats. As of 2015, DVD writer drive supporting all existing recordable and rewritable DVD formats is the most common for desktop PCs and laptops. There are also the DVD-ROM drive, BD-ROM drive, Blu-ray Disc combo (BD-ROM/DVD±RW/CD-RW) drive, and Blu-ray Disc writer drive.
The LaserActive is a converged device and fourth-generation home video game console capable of playing Laserdiscs, Compact Discs, console games, and LD-G karaoke discs. It was released by Pioneer Corporation in 1993. In addition to LaserActive games, separately sold add-on modules accept Mega Drive/Genesis and PC Engine/TurboGrafx 16 ROM cartridges and CD-ROMs.
Gaston Bastiaens is a Belgian engineer and businessman. As a vice president of Philips Electronics, he was responsible for the Compact Disc as well as for CD-i, CD-ROM, Philips' contributions to the MPEG standard and the foundations for the DVD.
GD-ROM is a proprietary optical disc format originally used for the Dreamcast video game console, as well as its arcade counterpart, the Sega NAOMI and select Triforce arcade board titles. It was developed by Yamaha to curb piracy common to standard compact discs and to offer increased storage capacity without the expense of the fledgling DVD-ROM. It is similar to the standard CD-ROM except that the pits on the disc are packed more closely together, resulting in a higher storage capacity of 1 gigabyte, a 42% increase over a conventional CD's capacity of 700 megabytes.
key2audio is a copy restriction system for Audio CDs, developed by Sony DADC. The system gained notoriety after it was discovered that one can effectively disable the system by tracing the outer edge of a CD with a felt-tip marker.
Digital Video Interactive (DVI) was the first multimedia desktop video standard for IBM-compatible personal computers. It enabled full-screen, full motion video, as well as stereo audio, still images, and graphics to be presented on a DOS-based desktop computer using a special compression chipset. The scope of Digital Video Interactive encompasses a file format, including a digital container format, a number of video and audio compression formats, as well as hardware associated with the file format.
MIL-CD or Music Interactive Live CD is a compact disc format created by the video game company Sega in 1999.
A ROM cartridge, usually referred to simply as a cartridge or cart, is a removable memory card containing ROM designed to be connected to a consumer electronics device such as a home computer, video game console or, to a lesser extent, electronic musical instruments. ROM cartridges can be used to load software such as video games or other application programs.
Although research into optical data storage has been ongoing for many decades, the first popular system was the Compact Disc, introduced in 1982, adapted from audio (CD-DA) to data storage with the 1985 Yellow Book, and re-adapted as the first mass market optical storage medium with CD-R and CD-RW in 1988. Compact Disc is still the de facto standard for audio recordings, although its place for other multimedia recordings and optical data storage has largely been superseded by DVD.
Nero Burning ROM, commonly called Nero, is an optical disc authoring program from Nero AG. The software is part of the Nero Multimedia Suite but is also available as a stand-alone product. It is used for burning and copying optical discs such as CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays. The program also supports label printing technologies LightScribe and LabelFlash and can be used to convert audio files into other audio formats.
LV-ROM is an optical disc format developed by Philips Electronics to integrate analog video and computer software for interactive multimedia. The LV-ROM is a specialized variation of the CAV Laserdisc. LV-ROM is an initialism for "LaserVision Read-Only Memory".
