With a company CD the question of how many tracks usually comes up last, when it ought to come up first. It decides whether the recording can be listened through, whether the set will survive a year in a venue and how much room is left on the inlay.
The reflex is always the same: the carrier holds a lot, so let us fill it. An audio disc has a physical limit on its length, in practice close to eighty minutes, and the temptation to use all of it is strong. It rarely leads to a good release.
The number of tracks does not follow from capacity but from what the disc is meant to do. Below we take that apart into two completely different situations.
- The job first, the number second - a gift to be played once and a set that plays in the background for a year are different releases.
- On a gift, more does not help - nobody listens through two hours of music from a company.
- A short disc in a venue can be worse than none, because the loop wears out the staff, not the customer.
- The running order matters - the first track decides whether anybody stays by the player.
- The track listing has to fit, so a long list genuinely reduces the type size on the inlay.
The job first, the number second
Before you start choosing tracks, answer one question: what is this disc supposed to do once handed over. There are usually two answers, and they lead to entirely different numbers.
The first: a self-contained release that somebody plays once or twice, mostly out of curiosity. The second: a disc that goes to a venue, a reception desk or a treatment room and plays in the background for months. Two different objects that merely look the same.
A gift to be played once
Here a rule applies that runs against intuition: the less there is, the better it is remembered. The recipient gives this release as much attention as anybody gives a first impression: a quarter of an hour in the car or at work. Two hours of material will simply vanish.
A shorter, carefully chosen release has the advantage of being listenable from beginning to end. And only a recording heard all the way through stays in the memory as one coherent thing rather than as a folder somebody may return to one day.
There is a practical argument as well: a shorter set is far easier to keep at a consistent level. You choose every track deliberately instead of padding the list with whatever happens to suit the mood.
A simple exercise helps here. Imagine the recipient putting the disc on while driving from one meeting to the next. How long before they park and take the key out? That is roughly how long your release really gets, and that is the length to build it around.
A set that has to play for a year
When the disc is going to sit by the equipment and play every day, everything turns through a hundred and eighty degrees. Length matters now, because what matters is how many times it repeats in a day.
Why a short disc can be worse than none
The key here is simple arithmetic. If a shift lasts eight hours and the disc plays for one, the staff will hear exactly the same set eight times a day, in exactly the same order. The customer never notices, being in the place for a quarter of an hour. The person behind the counter does notice, and after a week it is they who switch the equipment off or put on their own account from a phone.
So with a set meant for playback the length is counted against an employee's shift, not against a guest's visit. If one release is not enough, the natural answer is several discs forming a series rather than cramming everything onto one.
Before you order a set for a venue, ask somebody on the shift how many hours a day the music is actually on. That single question changes the decision more often than any argument about genre, and it costs nothing but a moment.
The running order
The number is one thing, the arrangement another. The first track decides whether anybody stays by the player at all, so it must be neither the longest nor the most demanding. It has to represent the whole and be easy to take in from the opening bars. The second track is almost as important, because it either confirms that first impression or cancels it.
The last track works too, though differently: it closes the impression and leaves behind the mood the listener walks away with. The middle of a disc is the safest place for anything longer and more demanding.
With a set meant for a venue one more condition appears: jumps of mood between neighbouring tracks are far more tiring on the tenth hearing than on the first.
When a disc has two jobs
It happens that one release is meant to be both a gift and a set for playback. That is the hardest case, because the two sets of requirements pull in opposite directions.
In practice it is better to choose the job that lasts longer. If the disc will stay with the recipient and play, design it as a set for playback - a single listen happens anyway, the reverse does not. A compromise halfway usually works badly in both roles.
The track listing and the design of the inlay
This is a constraint people rarely think about, and it is entirely real. The track listing has to fit onto the rear inlay and stay legible. A longer list means a smaller type size, and beyond a certain point the text stops being readable in poor light.
It is worth remembering that a listing is not only titles. Running times, performer names and a short note on where the recordings come from usually join them, so every line is longer than it looks on a working list in a spreadsheet.
When the list grows, the answer is moving from a single inlay to a booklet. The insert comes as 2, 4 or 6 pages, and a stitched booklet runs from 8 to 36 pages, always in multiples of four. Printed in CMYK, meaning the four basic printing inks. The listing then gets a page of its own and stops fighting the rest of the content for space.
- Settle the job of the disc - a one-off release or a set for daily playback.
- Set the length from that job rather than from the capacity of the carrier.
- Choose the tracks, guarding the level instead of padding the list.
- Arrange the running order, starting with the decision about the first and the last track.
- Check that the listing fits on the inlay at a legible type size.
- Match the run and the technology - on larger series replicated CDs, meaning replication from a master, can be worthwhile.
The number of tracks is a decision about how much attention you will realistically get and how long your disc will survive in somebody else's equipment. It is worth taking early, because it drags the design of the inlay and the choice of packaging along behind it. You can look through the whole category in the CD discs section, and if you would rather discuss it on a specific example, write to us through the contact form. When building the whole release our piece on building a company music album will help, as will the post on a relaxation music CD for treatment rooms and hotels.
