| The Beach; The MP3s; a spiffy pictah |
[Jul. 31st, 2005|03:07 pm] |
| [ | Spirits |
| |  artistic | ] |
| [ | Voices |
| | John Mayer - 3X5 | ] |
Huhm, what? I fell asleep sometime yesterday afternoon and still managed to sleep past 1 in the afternoon TODAY. I really don't understand.
Yesterday Dad, Paula and I (we never seem to do anything with Mom. Actually, I never do. Dad and Paula do plenty with her at church, I guess.) went to the Beach for Dad's company picnic. It was pretty comical going in... We're used to going to the local theme park, King's Island, which has its own waterpark connected to it, and everything's really huge and pretty. The Beach's sign had a small announcement sign underneath it like all the fast food restaurants have, and if you'd blink you would miss the entrance. Inside it was nicer though.
We all had fun. I think I got sunburn on my scalp and the tops of my feet, but I managed to slather the rest of me in sunscreen as a precautionary measure.
So now I actually do have some freckles. Tons on my arms, but none on my face. Huh.
I was running on about 3 hours of sleep through this whole thing. I was rather pleased with myself because, as is evident from my first paragraph, my body usually prefers its sleeping time in massive, schedule-wrecking chunks. I've found that being more active (running around in huge swimming pools, dancing, what have you) neutralizes my typical amount of sloth. That I've just figured this out after 5 years of living in a bit of a tired daze is a testament to just how much time I spend at the computer.
Oh, I listened to part of the TMBG show on the car rides to and from The Beach. I kept giggling and feeling the need to stomp and scream while listening to the recording. It was great, it really was.
I'd be interested in knowing how the decide which speaker to connect with which channel on the recording...like, there were two mics to pick up the audience: one on (from audience perspective) the left, [where I was standing], and one on the right. The download makes use of this, so you get distinct screams from both the left and right headphones.
So basically, one could choose to switch these two channels around in accordance to either audience perspective or band perspective. Just curious.
So, the TMBG show was my first ever experience with paid downloading (though certainly not my first expecrience with legal downloading - there's a difference. Many of the smaller bands I listen to, and some of the larger ones, offer free mp3s of their music on their websites.)
My opinion:
-Ease of use - The TMBG download service was extremely easy to use; you just signed up with an email address and password, input your address and a few other things, and your credit card number, and you were good to go. Then you were taken to a page with links to all of the files, as well as an option to download them all as a set.
The 'download all' option did not work for me, and the help guide on the site said in a nutshell "IE sucks, go get Firefox." However, the single-file downloads worked fine.
-Quality of files - All of the mp3s are 256kbps quality, and sound great on my headphones as well as computer speakers. The recordings are obviously much better than amateurly recorded live shows I've listened to before, and listening to the show on headphones made things sound much clearer than I heard them when we were at the actual show. The prominence of the audience noise is not as stong as I would have liked (I consider the crowd cheering, screaming things out, and singing along with the band one of the neater aspects of live recordings), but it varies by track.
Interesting to note that the places where the tracks break sucks. The show is unedited as far as I can tell, so it would have been fine as one huge mp3 (if very unmanageable). The tracks generally break after the commentary about the next song (which leaves the listener very confused if they listen to the songs individually), but sometimes break right while Flans (or Linnell) is speaking. This is very distracting.
Also I forgot to take out the 2-second pause between each song on my CD-burning program, so that's my fault.
-To compare with a CD - This is the first and foremost reason that I have never paid for downloads before: I like CDs! I like having a hard copy and a booklet and shiny, glossy cover art and a sturdy jewel case and disc art and the whole thing. I'd rather pay $15 for a CD I can hold in my hand than $10 for an album that might be whisked away at my computer's convenience when it sporadically goes on a deleting spree.
TMBG downloads are available for 2 or 3 days after you download the first file, which worries me a little bit. I'd prefer a service where you can always download the files you've already paid for.
My TMBG purchase, of course, is unavailable on CD and its uniqueness (and personal significance) is the reason I bought it. Included is some sparse art in a PDF, with a tracklisting and a couple credits about the recording. I printed it out and it completely fails to fit in my thin CD-R jewelcase, but that's all right.
I generally associate the slim jewelcases and the CD-R faces and all of this amateur-looking stuff as something that some random guy has done, and also with illegal music - It all just looks so less special than an album, that you've gone to the record store and bought.
I do not download music because there's something special about the downloading part in itself. I don't download music because I don't want to go to the store and buy an album - I download music because it's free, and usually because it's not worth it to me to buy an album for one song. If I wanted an album, and it's easily accessible for me to find and buy at a reasonable price (<$20), I will buy it.
For all these reasons, I do not think I will use an online pay-download service for albums I can just as easily buy as an actual CD. However, I may and probably will buy a TMBG live show or exclusive album from their download store every once in a while when I have some extra money. The process is simple enough, I'm supporting a band I love, and the files are simple, unDRM'd as far as I can tell, mp3s with no limits.
Bottom line:
~Joy needs to re-learn how to draw sometime. |
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loved
geeky
chipper
crazy
moody
giggly
amused
