psu_13

PM sent for Lou Donaldson.

The recordings themselves do not have to disappear. All that has to disappear is the license to allow the service to keep the tracks on the service. I've been using Apple Music for a couple of years now and have had 2 or 3 albums just outright become unplayable and have also had various other songs move around or go away mysteriously because the licensing changed. I think 25% might be a high guess, but 10% is not out of the question. IMHO.

PM sent for Curtis Fuller and Johnny Hodges.

The Monk and Coltrane record is great. As has already been mentioned, the Riverside/Prestige stuff is also mostly great. The later Black Lion set that first came back on Mosaic is also great.

The one I remember best is the Mosaic Art Blakey set. This set had some production issues, I gather, that made one or two of the CDs in the set go bad. I have seen multiple copies of this set where disk 1 or 2 is just not readable, including the one I bought back in the day. Luckily I already had a lossless copy of this when I discovered that the disks had gone bad. I've had some other CDs look like the have delaminated or at least changed color on the data side. But they were still readable so I made rips of them that appear to be OK. In general my assumption is that retail CDs will not be that permanent, and having rips and multiple copies of the data is probably a good idea. CD-R is even less so, since it depends on dyes that will certainly fade over time. FWIW there does exist software that attempts to make a "bit perfect" copy of the CD and estimates how well it does using checksums collected on the Internet from other users who ripped copies of the same recordings. You can use this to figure out if old disks that you suspect may have gone bad actually have gone bad. 😃

I've lost much more music because I lost the physical media than I have ever lost music on my various hard drives. I've also had a few CDs (including irreplaceable things, like Mosaic sets) just rot while they sat in a box and become unreadable. Yes you have to have a fairly disciplined scheme for backups and making new copies. But you had to do that anyway if you use computers regularly for anything important. Cloud backup services like Backblaze are also handy. I would advise not thinking of your iTunes cloud catalog as a "backup". Those files only exist as long as Apple has the right licenses, and can disappear unexpectedly if things get pulled.

Kenny Burrell - "Bluesin' Around". Apparently the track names on the original CD and reissues of same are not quite in the right order. That caused some confusion. But an old thread on this web site verified that the first two tracks are switched.

I ordered a couple of the out of print sets (Curtis Fuller, Thad Jones) from bluenotesound on ebay (which I gather is run by one of the Mosaic people). Two essentially brand new boxes with the disks still wrapped showed up in 3 days. Hah. Might get the Beehive stuff later. I'm not sure.

https://www.discogs.com/Toshiko-Akiyoshi-Lew-Tabackin-Big-Band-Salted-Gingko-Nuts/release/3618883

Joe Pass. Which I inexplicably never picked up until now.

Buddy De Franco, Art Blakey (with Clifford Brown), Grant Green, Herbie Nichols, Black Lion Monk

I've been buying records from Mosaic since the original Blue Note Monk set in the early 90s (late 80s?). I will probably buy records from Mosaic until they shut down. Would I like their shipping and logistics to be better? Sure. Do I understand why it's not? Sure. Would they probably be in better shape if somehow they could instantly fix it at no cost in either money or time? Probably. Will this change the fact that I will probably buy records from Mosaic until they shut down? No. Your opinions and milage may vary. I don't really understand why we are still talking about this, except to the extent that a lot of people on Internet Forums need to keep talking until they think that everyone else thinks that they are Right (tm).

Apple Music and iTunes search have a few issues that combine together to be annoying: 1. They are too specific. Often if you look for something that is not in the tagged meta-data but which you know is there, nothing comes up. 2. They are not specific enough. Often if you search for search keywords you will get hits for completely irrelevant keywords that are just a letter or two off. This is obviously an attempt to alleviate (1), but it actually just makes the whole thing seem more broken. 3. The engine won't show you everything that's in the catalog, because the catalog is too big. I'm not sure why they do this. Spotify is better about this. The solution is to combine Apple, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube and Google (you can do a search like 'keywords i want site:itunes.apple.com') until you can narrow down to just the thing you need. It's not ideal. That said, I have a bit of sympathy for the poor engineers who have to build this. Music meta-data is not the easiest thing in the world to index and search through, and natural language text search is a harder problem than we realize after being spoiled by what google does. But what google does will not directly help here, necessarily, because it's a much more specific domain with specific expectations. Oh well.

This is good. https://www.amazon.com/Well-Tempered-Clavier-I-II/dp/B01KIUUL3W/

I had not heard this "Creation" track before. Very cool. I wonder why it was left off of the relatively "recent" (man, 2005) release of the Half Note stuff.