An odd thought
Today, I walked into the local Family Dollar, where I was immediately hammered between the eyes by one of the Great Evils of the 20th Century.
Elevator Music.
Apparently, Corporate has now sent down a CD that all of the stores must have playing constantly.
One CD - aka, one hour of music.
Now, it's got some ads interspersed, but ... it's elevator music. The *SAME* elevator music over and over again.
And it's not even being played over the store intercom system - the store doesn't have one, as far as I can tell. It's a boom box sitting on top of the Coke cooler one rack away from the checkout counters. And they couldn't make it all one long track - so the boom box (being a flippin' cheap one) only has "repeat song" - not "repeat disk" - so the poor store clerk actually has to repeatedly hit the button to re-inflict this music on himself!
No, really - it's one of those $10 red boom boxes Family Dollar sells. *CHEAP*.
I suppose Corporate is going to send a new CD every week or so with updated specials, etc. Still, it's a bit of a waste.
More effective would be to hook up the store computers to the intercom system, and have them download an MP3 file of the new music every so often. As well, they could easily send larger files - a 700 MB CD image can also be a 700 MB MP3 file containing about 12+ hours of music & ads, more if they use a slightly lower bitrate on the MP3 file than is the normal.
Or even nicer - they could have large files of natural sounds - 12-15 hours of waterfall, or sea shore, or mountain glen...
And having it not repeating on a regular basis, and being something *OTHER* than bloody elevator music, would mean it's much less likely I'm going to go into my local Family Dollar to find it decorated in exploded store clerk brains. Seriously, that stuff's really enough to make your head explode!
(Down the line, procedural-generated music, where the computer tosses a few random numbers and comes up with new stuff every time, would be the ultimate way to go! The biggest problem is allowing it to be random enough so it doesn't all sound the same, while not falling into annoying noise territory...)
Elevator Music.
Apparently, Corporate has now sent down a CD that all of the stores must have playing constantly.
One CD - aka, one hour of music.
Now, it's got some ads interspersed, but ... it's elevator music. The *SAME* elevator music over and over again.
And it's not even being played over the store intercom system - the store doesn't have one, as far as I can tell. It's a boom box sitting on top of the Coke cooler one rack away from the checkout counters. And they couldn't make it all one long track - so the boom box (being a flippin' cheap one) only has "repeat song" - not "repeat disk" - so the poor store clerk actually has to repeatedly hit the button to re-inflict this music on himself!
No, really - it's one of those $10 red boom boxes Family Dollar sells. *CHEAP*.
I suppose Corporate is going to send a new CD every week or so with updated specials, etc. Still, it's a bit of a waste.
More effective would be to hook up the store computers to the intercom system, and have them download an MP3 file of the new music every so often. As well, they could easily send larger files - a 700 MB CD image can also be a 700 MB MP3 file containing about 12+ hours of music & ads, more if they use a slightly lower bitrate on the MP3 file than is the normal.
Or even nicer - they could have large files of natural sounds - 12-15 hours of waterfall, or sea shore, or mountain glen...
And having it not repeating on a regular basis, and being something *OTHER* than bloody elevator music, would mean it's much less likely I'm going to go into my local Family Dollar to find it decorated in exploded store clerk brains. Seriously, that stuff's really enough to make your head explode!
(Down the line, procedural-generated music, where the computer tosses a few random numbers and comes up with new stuff every time, would be the ultimate way to go! The biggest problem is allowing it to be random enough so it doesn't all sound the same, while not falling into annoying noise territory...)