Daniel A

Four rather obvious choices: Chick Corea Herbie Hancock Hank Jones Martial Solal and then: Renee Rosnes I can seriously recommend those not familiar with Renee to check out some of her Blue Note albums (alas, the best ones are deleted).

The program gives me a choice between "Actual" speed, and then a bunch of speeds from 4x to 24x. Should I choose "actual" or 24x? Also, how should I set the extraction/compression priority and error recovery settings? They're both set to "medium" now, but I wasn't sure if that was the default. "Actual" for some reason seems to mean "The speed you picked last time, whatever that is", so if you've selected a lower speed for a problematic disc earlier, just switch back to highest possible speed, which in this case is 24x. Regarding the extraction/compression and error recovery settings, just put the cursor over the respective drop-down menu, and a fairly explanatory info box will appear. I'd say that "medium" should be a good setting in most cases.

How did you make a copy without having to rip the CD first? On compact cassette?

Ahmad Jamal 'Tranquility' (ABC quadrophonic pressing...)

Those are the worst for playback too. A CD player reads at constant speed, much like the CDR drive does in "Burst mode". If the data stream is broken - a few samples are perhaps not readable due to a scratch - the CD player may mask the errors so well that you can't hear anything wrong. However, if you want to create a copy of the CD (or make an MP3 file) you must have a continuous data stream. In secure mode the software tries to get the missing samples again and again, causing - in the worst case - infinite extraction time. Burst mode will make the CDR drive work more like a CD player, except that there is no hardware error correction. Scratches along the radius are much more likely to cause problems than other scratches, even for a audio CD player, because they may make several samples in a row unreadable, whereas a diagonal scratch only damages a few each turn of the disc.

If it's only that disc which is causing problems, try the extraction method called "Burst mode". Go to the menu EAC, choose Extraction Method and then select"Burst mode". Because this will just let the drive rip at maximum speed you'll perhaps want to limit the maximum extraction speed somewhat. Go to EAC>Offet/Speed and change "Speed selection" to, say, 8.0 X. This will speed up the general extaction, while sometimes producing OK results, if scratches are not major. Because this disables the error correction, be sure to turn back to "Secure mode" after having finished the problematic disc, though. While it may seem tempting, I wouldn't set Burst mode as default, because then you'll perhaps end up with click sounds here and there, and will have to re-rip everything. When restoring the Secure mode, also be sure change "Speed selection" back to top speed again.

Yes, it will. As long as you're happy with the results, that's one way to go. But I recommend anyone who's about to do large scale MP3ing to do some A/B testing before the final settings are decided upon. I think the issue I mentioned gets less important with higher bitrates. I'm only using VBR, but if would be pressed to come up with a mono equivalent for 320 kbps joint stereo, I'd say 160 kbps mono anyway. 192 kbps mono would in my opinion be overkill, especially since mono recordings typically are not as demanding (older recordings - more limited acoustical bandwidth). I would still say 80 kbps CBR mono as alternative to 128 kbps CBR stereo, though. Another thing on mono encoding: while an album may indicate "Mono" in the liners, sometimes the two channels are not identical. I have not encountered this myself, but others have (presumably this is more common for non-jazz recordings, which were more often still done in mono in the 60s). The album may be mastered with different EQ between the channels, and downmixing to mono during encoding might give strange (and bad-sounding) results. In these cases plain joint stereo would be the best bet. But as I said, this problem does not seem very common for jazz recordings. When encoding mono LPs, using one of the channels (I suppose most of you have got stereo turntables) would give the best results. Check both channels separately and choose the best one.

A CD player and a computer CD-ROM driver work somewhat differently. While the CD player has built-in error correction, the computer drive has to take help of the ripping software, which sometimes has no other choice than re-reading the data several times, often with dubious results. It's all up to the combination of software, CD-ROM drive and the CD itself. The EAC software has a setting which is calles "burst mode". For hopeless cases it can be a last solution. The drive is forced to continue, how erroneous the data stream may seem. Sometimes the disruption in the stream is small enough not to be heard. It takes some processing to compress audio without too much loss of quality. Quicker compression unfortunately often equals worse results. There are completely different compression formats (like MPC) which because the way they are designed both gives bette quality per bit, and work much faster. However, hardware support is mostly nonexistent, even though the OGG format looked like it might break through for a while.

When we're at it, I could as well recommend a setting for encoding recordings from stereo FM radio as well, which would be: --alt-preset standard --lowpass 15 This setting will only encode information up to 15 kHz. Because of the way the FM stereo system is designed (with something which I think is called a pilot tone at 19 kHz for separating the two audio channels) nothing but noise will be found over 15 kHz. By letting the encoder concentrate on the audio information some bits may be saved, and the quality may even be somewhat better because it won't be distracted by disturbing, useless noise which is typically hard to encode.

Jeff, I'm happy to hear that you think it's an improvement! One additional note about mono encoding, which is one of the few aspects of MP3 encoding which gets scant coverage at the Hydrogen Audio forum. If you've settled for the commandline "--alt-preset standard" I'd recommend this setting for mono encoding: --alt-preset standard -mm -b 80 The "-mm" sets the encoding to mono. The "-b 80" sets the lowest bitrate for any frame to 80 kbps. If you've noticed that the VBR alt-preset standard stereo setting has 128 kbps as minimum bitrate you'll perhaps wonder "why not 64 kbps for mono, since half the space should be needed compared to stereo?". My answer is this: The VBR system is designed to use the amount of bits needed at every instance for maintaining a given sound quality level. Because the way the encoding algorithms are set up, there is a small risk that the encoder would use a slightly too low a bitrate for the frames which are assigned the very lowest possible bitrates, given the setting. Therefore a bottom limit is set up; 128 kbps. The encoder then won't need to bother with deciding - it can't go lower than 128 kbps anyway. The obvious choice for mono, which would only seem to need half the bitrate, would be 64 kbps. But the default setting (and which is also recommended) for stereo encoding is a mode called joint stereo. In short, it's able to save some space when the two channels are similar, by processing on one hand the information which is the same, on the other hand the differences between the channels. The bits which are saved by this procedure can be used for improving the overall quality instead. When the information is already mono, there are no bits to save by looking at similarities between two channels, because there is only one channel. Thus, slightly more than half the stereo bitrate will typically be needed for mono. 64 kbs mono will consequently give very, very slightly lesser quality than 128 kbps joint stereo. So while the difference will probably be inaudible, I'm using "-b 80" rather than "-b 64" just to be sure that I will never risk getting less good results for mono.

Track two sounds like "Sugar Plum".

It seems like some of the participating musiscians do not think it's worthy of release. But what would they know? Have a look here, too; disregard the mention of Zavinul: http://forums.allaboutjazz.com/showthread.php?t=7992

When you think of it today, isn't it remarkable that the old BNBB with all its software bugs and lousy maintenance actually managed to stay online almost all of the time?

The huge Friedrich Gulda LP set "Musician Of Our Time: Midlife Harvest", originally released on 9 LPs by MPS in the 70s, is said to be reissued on CD later this year. I've tried to find information about this set on the web, but without success, and a look in (an old) Bruyninckx at the library was not helpful. Does anyone here know if it's made up from Gulda's MPS albums, or if it does include other material as well? I'm not too enthusiastic about Gulda's small group work, but the little I've heard of his Eurojazz Orchestra has been more interesting.

How are the writing credits distributed on the Moon release?

How about these two sessions? They are listed among "Unreleased recordings" at Dusko Gojkovic's web site. The track timings do not match any of the tracks on "Art Worker", but that doesn't necessarily mean anything when it comes to unreleased and bootleg recordings I guess. The 1969 session is listed as the Gojkovic & Kleinschuster Sextet, but lists seven people, none of which is Kleinschuster. The instrumentation on "Art Worker" seems to consist of either trumpet/trombone/alto sax, trumpet/trombone/tenor sax, or on one or two tracks possibly two trumpets/trombone/unidentified saxophone. The timings for "Art Worker" is: Delphine (4:23) Stars (4:13) Erwägung (4:39) Orientierung (4:02) Eau Sovage (5:00) Gratuliere (4:31) Ala Nova (4:36)

Universal does. There is some useful information in this thread at AAJ: http://forums.allaboutjazz.com/showthread.php?t=540 and possibly even in some older threads over here.

Does anyone have a rough view on their overseas shipping charges? The "Shipping calculator" link on their FAQ page is broken.

I just listened to an illegitimate copy of the Moon album. I was thinking that I should try to find the real source, but I realize that may prove difficult after a glance at this thread. I'm also uncertain Art Farmer is even present at the session, since the trumpet soloist does not exactly sound like him. The dubbed-in applause (quite evindently from a poorly recorded pre-war concert) is not even faded in, but created by someone lazily starting a reel-to-reel tape, or even an LP, during the final chord of each tune. [Edit for syntax]

Actually the "Three Originals" 2CD set was all MPS, it included: I Love the Blues, She Heard My Cry (MPS 15459), 1974 The Aura Will Prevail (MPS 15448), 1975 Liberated Fantasies (MPS 15474), 1976 Unfortunately, it has been OOP for some time. Someone's offering it on amazon for the ridiculous price of $236.99, but there are sound clips for those interested: * Link to amazon.com *

Hutcherson with Chick Corea. A pity there were not more collaborations between them.

Atlantic (1968) Music significally better than cover.

The AL 1002 release says: (P) & © 1975 Arista Records Inc Distrubuted by Arista Records Inc. N.Y. N.Y. owner of the trademark Arista Record Licenced from Black Lion Ltd. owner of the trademark Freedom.

Thanks for the heads-up! Incidentally, the recent programs listed on the "Archives" page have 2004 instead of 2005 given as the date.