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psu_13

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Posts posted by psu_13

  1. I've noticed that you can often get a lot of the material that's in the Mosaic boxes at the various download or streaming places if you just want to listen to it and are not so concerned with the other trappings of a Mosaic boxed set. I tend to play everything through my computer anyway, so I only pick up "hard copy" of things that I can't find anywhere else and for which I really want the documentation and what not.

    Apropos of nothing: high quality downloads or streaming combined with LP packaging would be a neat thing.

  2. My dad listened to nothing but classical music. It didn't really connect with me, except subconsciously, as a child. But after college I gradually started to drift into more "serious" music.

    I did not really hook up to jazz until graduate school. I don't remember what started it, but I found a book about the "101 Best Jazz Albums" which was really a short jazz history. Discovered Ellington and then the Monk set at Mosaic and that was that.

    I'm not sure my interest in either area are that connected except to the extent that both Jazz and Classical allow you to explore more complicated forms and structures, and my intellectually snobbish engineer brain likes that.

    I never played an instrument seriously. A bit of piano, a little clarinet in school band. I didn't like to practice.
  3. re: scratches and such

    I had a CD come to me from Mosaic (Artie Shaw, I think) that had a pinhole divot in it. iTunes would not rip the disk, so I took it out of the machine to have a look, and there was essentially a small hole in the surface. It wasn't that large, but it was deep enough to ruin any chance of error recovery.

    I've also had a few old CDs delaminate to the point where they would not play. Strangely, one of them was in my old Mosaic Art Blakey box. Luckily I already had a lossless backup of the set at the time.

    Unrelated digression:

    While I understand why CDs took over the LP at the time, in retrospect they seem like a horrible compromise format. They have a cleaner sound, but you can get that from downloads now. They are a more portable size, but not as good as a phone that holds all your music. And, as a physical object they have little to recommend them (tiny tiny booklets are the worst). They are also of questionable permanence if you just store them.

    It's too bad that back in the day we could not have jumped directly to downloads + LP.

  4. I like boxes with larger books. The tiny little CD books are the worst thing to happen to music sold at retail, since, well, maybe ever.

    OTOH, I'd love for Mosaic to start doing boxed sets as regular hard cover books for notes and with a USB stick or download code inside. Ripping 15CD sets is tedious.

    LP + download also has a lot of potential.

  5. That piece was OK as far as it went, but the discussion of compressed formats was a bit painful. They talk about the "higher quality" iTunes Plus as if it's a new thing, when really it's been around since 2007.

    The part at the beginning when the host mixed up audio compression (of dynamic range) with data compression also made me nuts, but then I'm a grump.

    Anyway, in a few (maybe zero) years lossless will be just as "portable" as 128K MP3 used to be earlier, just because of the growth in bandwidth and storage capacity.

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