Disco

Disco is a genre of dance music containing elements of funk, soul, pop, and salsa that was most popular in the mid to late 1970s, though it has had brief resurgences. Its initial audiences were club-goers from the gay, African American, Italian American,Latino, and psychedelic communities in Philadelphia and then later New York City during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Disco also was a reaction against both the domination of rock music and the stigmatization of dance music by the counterculture during this period. Women embraced disco as well, and the music eventually expanded to several other marginalized communities of the time.

The disco sound has soaring vocals over a steady "four-on-the-floor" beat, an eighth note (quaver) or 16th note (semi-quaver) hi-hat pattern with an open hi-hat on the off-beat, and a prominent, syncopated electric bass line. In most disco tracks, strings, horns, electric pianos, and electric guitars create a lush background sound. Orchestral instruments such as the flute are often used for solo melodies, and lead guitar is less frequently used in disco than in rock. Many disco songs use electronic synthesizers.

Disco (software)

Disco is an application for Mac OS X developed by Austin Sarner, Jasper Hauser and Jason Harris.

The software is an optical disc authoring utility, which allows users to burn CDs and DVDs with multisession support, disc duplication, burning VIDEO_TS folders, disc spanning as well as a searchable disc index, dubbed Discography. Disco also features an interactive "3D smoke" animation which is visible when burning. This smoke responds to microphone input, as well as mouse input, causing perturbations in the smoke effect.

Disco was designed as a low-cost alternative to the popular Mac OS X optical disc authoring application, Roxio Toast.

Since its launch in 2007, Disco was available as shareware, requiring users to purchase a license after burning seven discs with it on a single computer. In July 2011, a free license code to activate the application was published on its official website, effectively making the application available as freeware.

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Disco (album)

Disco is the second album by the British synthpop duo Pet Shop Boys. It was released by Parlophone on 17 November 1986 (1986-11-17).

Disco was not an original studio album, but rather a collection of remixes of tracks from their first album, Please, and its respective B-sides. Many fans of 1980s synthpop view the mixes on this album as some of the best examples of the extended dance mix, and this album includes remixes by Arthur Baker, Shep Pettibone and Pet Shop Boys themselves.

Background

It is difficult to say where the Pet Shop Boys saw this album fitting in among their other albums when they released it. In 2001, when they re-released what they deemed their first six albums, Disco was not included.

In addition, Pet Shop Boys would later release the remix albums Disco 2, Disco 3 and Disco 4, although the concepts of these compilations differ greatly from the original Disco album: Disco 2 is a continuous mega-mix of dance remixes, Disco 3 is a mixture of remixes and new songs and Disco 4 consists exclusively of tracks remixed by the Pet Shop Boys, mainly by other artists.