[What music did you buy today?]

Found discs 3-6 of the Nat King Cole Mosaic to add to the partial set I bought last year.

Where the hell do you go to get bits of Mosaic sets?

MG

I've seen random Mosaic disk at Half Priced Books, of all places.

[will.i.am: The music industry is dead.]

Does anybody make money off youtube?

http://online.wsj.com/articles/youtube-star-plays-videogames-earns-4-million-a-year-1402939896

[Death of the album?]

Relatively small markets supporting a seemingly large number of releases is nothing new.

Classical CDs are if anything an even smaller market than Jazz (maybe, maybe not), but there are thousands of releases every year. To prove it you can subscribe to (say) American Record Guide and read 300 pages of reviews every two months. I've never quite understood it.

At least these days it's pretty easy to *find* the stuff reviewed in the magazine though. Back in the day you had to drive to Tower Records in a major city (or equivalent) to have any chance at all.

[Sal Nistico: HEAVYWEIGHTS]

The title of this thread tickled a long lost memory in the back of my head. Then I remembered that I bought an LP by this guy more than 20 years ago based on a review in Cadence (I think) or just by picking albums at random from the Cadence list. Then I was happy to find that the album I had bought is available for download...and on spotify. What an interesting world.

[Is streaming technology saving the music industry?]

So what you mean is that you have other hardware that takes digital inputs that are not USB (e.g. coax or optical) and you want a converter to go from USB to those inputs that does not involve another D->A->D stage.

[Is streaming technology saving the music industry?]

The ones in the HDMI cable are also subject to HDCP.

USB can be annoying if you want long cable runs and no one seems to be able to make the power over USB reliable. But I see no reason why it's not sufficient to feed a DAC. Personally though, I use AirPlay.

[Is streaming technology saving the music industry?]

Of course, people might disagree...

http://properdiscord.com/2014/07/22/scott-timberg-ive-got-a-bone-to-pick-with-you/

Heh.

[Is streaming technology saving the music industry?]

FWIW, I liked the piece because it complained about the terrible state of the metadata in the online stores, especially on Jazz and Classical recordings and most especially in the back catalog.

I don't really like CDs ... but I like having my own copy of all the digital files. So downloads+ streaming for spot checks is my ideal. Especially if the session info and notes are in a nice PDF file.

[What music did you buy today?]

Back in the day I bought the Bruckner 7th by Eichhorn and the Linz Orchestra. I could only afford one at the time and never managed to get any more and now they have now been out of print for a long time. Fantastic recording though.

So I wonder if this is a lie or not, but I hope it isn't.

http://www.cdjapan.co.jp/product/CMCD-10008

Anyway, had to order it to find out.

[Is streaming technology saving the music industry?]

A few good points here

http://www.salon.com/2014/07/20/its_not_just_david_byrne_and_radiohead_spotify_pandora_and_how_streaming_music_kills_jazz_and_classical/

[Which Jazz box set are you grooving to right now?]

http://www.mosaicrecords.com/discography.asp?number=MS-033&pric..

Mosaic Select: Toshiko Akiyoshi/Lew Tabackin (MS-033)

[Advice on new laptop: MacBook or other?]

FWIW, I did not mean to imply that photos and media don't look better on the retina screen. They do. I just personally find the effect to be more subtle than with text, and mostly about color depth vs. raw resolution. I think it has to do with how images get scaled from a fixed resolution whereas fonts are stored as curves and rendered at as high a resolution as you want. But I'm not sure.

In any case, it's always a shock to go back to my plain old large screen at work after starting at a retina laptop all weekend.

[Advice on new laptop: MacBook or other?]

Actually, retina isn't a huge difference for photos and other media (although the color is much better).

The biggest difference is actually in the quality of the *text* display.

[Is streaming technology saving the music industry?]

I keep two or three drives at home. Plus this as a backstop

http://www.backblaze.com

[FS: OOP Mosaic CD sets]

I got the Rivers today. It looks almost new to me. Thanks!

[Is streaming technology saving the music industry?]

Here is a relevant quote from the Byrne book, fwiw:

“What is called the music business today, however, is nothing like what I researched before signing that first contract. In fact, the music business is hardly even in the business of producing music anymore. At some point, it became primarily the business of selling objects—LPs, cassettes, CDs in plastic cases—and that business will soon be over.”

The chapter then goes on to discuss the nature of music and music retailing in a social and historical context. Recommended.

[Is streaming technology saving the music industry?]

I won't address the larger philosophical questions relating to common culture because I'm not really qualified to do so.

I do have a certain amount of ambivalence about the current state of music retailing. This is one reason I won't use streaming as the sole way listen to music that interests me. I'll stream it once or twice, and if I'm going to do more than that I'll buy the disk or at least the download. I feel for people who are trying to make a living in "content creation" in the modern age, since the content is the first thing that is made into a cheap commodity that can no longer pay a living wage except to the very lucky.

On the other hand, I don't feel a lot of sympathy (necessarily) to the large media companies. I can't count the number of times I would have liked to buy record A, B or C only to have it be out of print, or only available as an expensive import, or even only available for download in (say) France but not the U.S., all for seemingly arbitrary reasons. I wonder what the real overhead is to the companies that own the content to make the digital masters (and pdfs of the liners) available at the various download services. They don't even have to host the files or the network bandwidth. They just need to allow me to pay to download them. And yet things still go "out of print". This confuses me, but I figure I just must not understand something about how the industry works.

[Is streaming technology saving the music industry?]

I still have most of my physical media around, but I never use it. I play things primarily out of iTunes after ripping the stuff there. I'm also mixing in some Spotify to try things I'm not sure about.

The only physical media I really feel like I need to keep are the Mosaics, but only because of the booklets. I've had multiple old Mosaic CDs actually bit-rot, one to the point where it became un-rippable. This tells me that CDs are not meant to last more than around 20 years, so if you really care about your music, you will rip all of it to a hard disk that you can make copies of every year.

I also don't really hear much of a difference between 256K AAC and lossless rips. I do lossless rips sometimes though just for the sake of keeping irreplaceable media in their "original form" (i.e. CDs from Mosaic sets ).

I should set the turntable up or the vinyl though. Vinyl is at least fun.

[FS: OOP Mosaic CD sets]

Sent a PM about the Rivers. One can only hold out so long.

[Riverside CDR]

In theory CD-R should be much much less permanent than pressed CDs because while normal CDs store the bits physically in the disk itself, the data on a CD-R is encoded in a dye layer that fades over time.

OTOH, the permanence of even actual CDs is somewhat suspect. I've had at least one disk in a 20 year old Mosaic set (Art Blakey, RIP) become unreadable, and many of my older CDs show strange discolorations and other effects, although the data still seems readable.

I would say that if you are concerned about permanence you should rip every CD you buy and back up the files in at least 2 or 3 places.