Live from Austin!

The Beatles have released the original mono mixes of 11 of their albums on CD (plus a compilation of singles) for the first time. The mono mixes were the only ones actually supervised by The Beatles and George Martin, and often differ from the stereo mixes (done by some namesless studio engineer as an afterthought). General fan opinion is that the mono versions are better.

So that’s the good news. The bad news is, you can only buy the mono releases as a boxed set. Worse, the MSRP is $298.98, an eye-watering $25 per album. Worse still, they are only making a single run of copies available, and they’re already sold out many places.

But they’ll still act outraged when the set gets heavily pirated, won’t they?

Florian Schneider gets back together with Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flür. Freed from Ralf Hütter’s obsessive perfectionism, they find themselves able to release a new album every few years.

About 7 or 8 years ago I ripped all our CDs to MP3 and stuck all the music on a house media server.

I used what was, at the time, a good MP3 encoder: LAME, with the --r3mix preset that had been tweaked by the members of an online forum for MP3 enthusiasts.

MP3 encoder quality has made some strong progress since then, and disk space has become even less of an issue. Accordingly, I’m re-encoding my favorite stuff using the latest copy of LAME and --preset standard --vbr-new. Even on my office Cambridge Soundworks speakers, the difference is noticeable. I figure this will be the last time I do this, in a couple of years I’ll just rip everything lossless.

iTunes also got much better at encoding with version 7. So if you ripped your favorite album to MP3 some years ago, it might be worth re-doing it and giving yourself a free audio upgrade.

(To my ears, LAME encodings still sound better than iTunes, but iTunes 7 is way better than earlier versions. That said, there’s a free friendly Mac audio ripper/encoder front end called Max that will call LAME for the encoding.)

Last night I dreamed that I met Bev Bevan. I tried not to be a fanboy. I mentioned that I really didn’t like "Discovery", except for the final track–which of course is dominated by his drumming. He replied that the album had been a difficult time for the band, and that that one track had been the one where it actually seemed like they were working together again. I wanted to ask about whether he had patched things up with Jeff Lynne, but knew that would be a bad idea. In the end he autographed my copy of "Out of the Blue". And then I woke up.

Back in reality, the dream was obviously the result of my finally buying the remastered limited edition release of "Out of the Blue". I had held off for a long time, because I didn’t think there was anything wrong with the previous CD. Then a 40% off coupon at Border’s tempted me… and I was wrong. The remastered edition is far better than the previous remastering, which was in turn better than the original 2 CD release… which, of course, was better than my vinyl copy.

So yeah, I’ve bought this album four times now. That’s a new personal record, beating the three official releases and one bootleg of New Musik’s "Warp". And apparently there’s a $25 Japanese 2CD release that sounds even better…

For anyone who doesn’t know, Delia Derbyshire is the woman who created the original Dr Who theme. Last week, the BBC revealed that she had kept an archive of 267 tapes in her attic; archivists are now analyzing them.

Amongst the recordings is a piece from the late 60s, which sounds exactly like it was taken from a recent Aphex Twin album–preceded by the comment "Ah, forget about this, it’s for interest only."

Amazing. If it wasn’t the BBC reporting, I’d think it was a hoax.

Today I was listening to "Every Man Got Dreaming" by Sandoz (aka Richard H. Kirk). At some point I noticed that each time the rhythm loop went around, Chester the parakeet was tweeting at the same point. I listened more carefully. Not only was he tweeting with the music, he was alternating between "cheep" and "cheep cheep".

A few days back I was listening to The Beatles’ "Abbey Road". All was quiet until Paul McCartney started singing on "Maxwell’s Silver Hammer", and then suddenly there was an angry sounding squawking. Things calmed down again after Paul shut up and Ringo took over for "Octopus’s Garden". At the time I thought it was coincidence, but maybe not.

The bird also seems to like King Crimson.

We went out in search of some music on Saturday night.

8bitpeoples were having a label party at Molotov’s on 6th. When we got there, it became readily apparent that the best sound was available by standing on the sidewalk outside the venue, and looking through their open windows. We had a pretty good view of the stage too.

Later we went in search of Chris de Luca vs Phon.o, the former being half of Funkstörung. Sadly, it appeared that they had canceled or changed the date to 3 days earlier or something, and the venue denied all knowledge of them.

Until he mentioned it in an interview, it had never occurred to me that Ira Glass might be related to Philip Glass.

Pete Green: “I don’t have a MySpace, because MySpace fucking sucks.” ADLTS obviously.

I just picked up some more Christmas music from the Amazon MP3 store. For all that I like the iTunes Music Store, the Amazon MP3 store is better in every way.

First off, the selection is far, far better. I say that because I don’t buy DRM I can’t easily remove, so the iTMS’s rather anemic selection of “iTunes Plus” albums compares badly to Amazon’s library.

Secondly, there’s the format issue. For all that 256kbps AAC is theoretically better than 256kbps MP3, in practice I tend to encode with LAME’s standard preset, which averages less than 256kbps and is practically indistinguishable from CD in my personal testing. I think it’s easy to be too picky about digital audio. If I could approach my vinyl-buying self of 1983 and offer him his record library in 160kbps MP3s on an iPod, he’d leap at the chance. So given that the quality is good enough, I’d rather have MP3s I can play anywhere than AAC files I can only play most places.

Amazon have the convenience angle sorted too. In fact, it’s a little bit too convenient–it’s one click to buy an album once you install their downloader. The downloader automatically files everything neatly in folders by artist and album, and adds the tracks to iTunes when it’s done.

But enough about the technical jiggery-pokery. The actual music is what counts. First of all I picked up the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s album of music from A Charlie Brown Christmas. I’m not a jazz fan, and I’m not a big fan of the TV adaptation of Peanuts either, but somehow the soundtrack is perfect.

Next I picked up a couple of Cocteau Twins Christmas singles from a compilation. This is where digital downloads really shine–I can buy two songs for 89¢ each rather than a 4-CD compilation I don’t want.

I then went looking for quirky Christmas music, and found Tis The Season For Los Straitjackets.  I already have a Tijuana Brass Christmas album and a two different Moog Christmas albums. I’m kinda disappointed that Señor Coconut hasn’t tried his hand at a Kraftwerk Christmas album yet.  Ah well, at least there’s the 8bits of Christmas.

Also in my collection are Mark Mothersbaugh’s Joyeux Mutato, and the Illegal Art A MUTATED CHRISTMAS release. Plus, of course, a hefty dose of bootleg/mashup Christmas tracks downloaded from the web.

If anyone has any other recommendations for quirky but listenable Christmas albums, please post ‘em.