Sarah's Interactive CD

["Karen L. Newcombe" <kln@crl.com>]

For those of you who are Sarah fans, I have looked at the new multi-media 
CDROM and find it to be an interesting glimpse into the future of music 
CDs.  It contains original drafts (i.e. demo versions) of 7 or 8 tracks 
from Fumbling Towards Ecstasy which can be played on regular CD, along 
with a multimedia program that has Sarah speaking about her various 
albums, very twitchy copies of a few videos, a catalogue for ordering 
some snazzy merchandise, etc.  It is graphically appealing, 
well-organized, a lot of fun to hear Sarah talk about the evolution of 
her work and various particular songs.

Even on my fairly powerful system the video is, well, twitchy.  Tends to 
skip sections, freeze up, etc.  I would have to diddle around for a few 
minutes turning off all TSR programs and changing various configurations 
to probably get the best video.  Seems like too much work that would then 
need to be undone.  But the idea is good.

The multimedia section can apparently be run on either PC or Mac, and 
comes with a new copy of QuickTime, so you get a little software as well.

The most interesting aspect of this thing is that it is a taste of what 
is going to soon be an avalanche in the music industry.  It makes me 
wonder what Kate might be capable of in this medium, considering her 
genius with music and images.

Gosh, I remember reviewing Sarah's first and second albums way back when, 
and now she's doing multimedia!  

Karen  kln@crl.com