Stompin at the Savoy

It's a limited preview - only the introduction - unless you create an account. I never knew of this book til now. It's pretty interesting. A surprising number of the entries are compilation albums with various groups. It's way out of date from a discographical point of view and a lot of this material is available now in different formats and combinations. It's gratifying to see that I actually know most of the music recommended!

Volume 7 was supposed to be released today but I see no sign of it. I took a look through Duke discography and I think this volume will contain very little not on the two Mosaic sets. Curious to see what is actually coming out.

I use USB hubs with hard drives. I have found there is a limit with the Dell PCs I use. Four usb hard drives will work sometimes for a while but things go wrong. So I generally only attach 3 or fewer hard drives. If you use more than 1 it has to be a powered hub with its own wall wart.

I listened to the first disk and enjoyed it. There is a sort of air of exploration - some participants are still playing swing as Byas edges into bop. It was very nice to hear from Tiny Grimes and Clyde Hart again, memorably heard on the early Parker Savoys. And Hot Lips Page is fun.

Yippee! Box just arrived.

The thing is whatever music drive you decide on, you kind of need at least two of them. Every once in a while you copy the current drive to its backup, then take the backup offline and store it away somewhere. Otherwise if one day your active drive fails, you are really up a creek. Or you can use a pc hard drive as a backup but that is an active drive and can fail. So you kind of need an extra drive.

The beauty of curating your own collection of digital music is you can access your whole collection or giant big chunks of it - instantly and anywhere. Plus you can store the cds etc in a storage unit and free up space at home. Or even sell them off and dispense with the hard-copies altogether. I haven't quite got there yet but I am thinking about it. The downside is you have to do a lot of curatorial tasks, keep backups, occasionally buy new hardware. Of course if you haven't been ripping your cds all along, inputting your collection could be a really huge task.

Stream what you have? Why bother to have it in the first place, just stream it then. If, of course you are satisfied with the resolution you are getting with streaming. Which I am not. Nor do I want to listen to ads. And why would I pay to not have ads when I already own the freakin' music? Nope, doesn't work for me.

Why? That's the whole point of having 4 TB or more of music files attached to a computer or device: you can instantly call up any album or track you want.

I don't seem to have that problem. If you use pause instead of just getting out of the app it has the same effect. When you return to the app it starts where you left off. At least on my 2 or 3 year old iphone.

Either the My Book external drive has some sort of errant sleep setting or it is simply defective. I have several 4 Terabyte portable hard drives that I use to store digital music and none have this problem. I don't know why you would prefer a large format device like My Book to the small 4 TB devices like My Passport, which works great for me. Seagate Expansion 4 TB is good too. Yes, an iPhone is just as good as an iPod for storing some music. The thing is most phones have fairly limited storage capacity. I use a digital Sony Walkman, which stores music on SD cards, which come in many sizes including 500 G and 1 TB.

Thanks for doing all that! Not being one of the first to receive the box may have a hidden silver lining: the music databases may well be populated with metadata by the time I get my set. I'd hate to think of typing in 9 cds worth of data 🤨

I ordered on October 29, which I think was the first day you could pre-order, and received a shipping notice today. Looking forward to this set!

I got the downloads for all three sets from Qobuz. Their downloader app is a piece of shit, constantly breaking and today I was forced to download each track individually but it's about half the price of the cds. Whenever I can I usually get downloads from Presto rather than Qobuz - their software is better and the online transaction is smoother. Qobuz sucks but tends to have more jazz. I always keep a few backups on portable hard drives which are only turned on now and then to add new albums. A 512 gigabyte sd card in a portable player also functions as a backup to many of the music files I have on my hard drives. A friend had the two earlier sets of cd's and I looked at the liner notes. Nice to read but not all that essential.

I had that same problem. Lack of sleep gets really rough. I found this book useful when a kid was waking us up ALL the time.

I heard an interview with George Benson on the radio many years ago. Might have been American Forces Radio or VOA. I seem to remember him saying something like originally he was mainly a vocalist and only got into the guitar because he thought singing might not be enough for a career for him in music. I don't listen to his stuff much but I like his guitar playing.

That is precisely what I meant by "unless and until adjudicated otherwise, out of print booklets are fair use!" This is the actual, real-life situation: the liner notes for thousands, millions of records are listed in that database and others and have been for years.

Your concept of the law in this area is a bit simplistic, Jim. The truth is there is no definitive answer about the legality of all these liner notes and booklets. It's the sort of thing that has to be tested in court to be fully defined and it has not yet been tested. Most likely because the labels, which own the copyrights, are ok with it for now. I think I once saw one in print booklet up there. I frown on that because it has the possibility at least of stepping on Mosaic's business.

See? You've now come around to my position: unless and until adjudicated otherwise, out of print booklets are fair use!😁 This has a number of benefits. It helps the artists to have these materials online. It helps listeners, particularly people who have paid for a legitimate digital release of material from Blue Note but the company along with all the majors is too cheap to set up digital booklets. In my view it helps Bob Blumenthal too. Given a choice wouldn't it be in his interest to have his notes publicly available rather than buried in 5000 paper booklets? Somebody might read his contributions to a 16 page booklet and get a notion to buy Bob's books.

Well, take a look at the back of any CD jewel case. At the bottom it has a copyright notice. Is posting a photo of that illegal by copyright law? Probably! I'm not a copyright lawyer. At the end of every Mosaic booklet is a copyright notice with a date. So it's probably not legal to post that. But if everybody has long been posting these things it becomes a fuzzy area, mainly subject to the copyright owner asserting their rights (which they never do because having people post promotional materials for your artist roster is generally a good thing).

Technically, probably yes. But this is true for virtually all the 'cover art' tabs you find on musicbrainz, not just Mosaic releases (ie damn near every record). And for most of the album cover art you find on the internet.

Nope.

I would definitely buy it. Possibly you haven't really looked at the mosaic booklets on musicbrainz. Even the highest res is not terribly high res. Many or even most of the images are somewhat dark and grainy. They are enough to blow up and read the content and sort of see the pictures. You have a better argument suggesting that the mosaic booklets aren't liner notes than suggesting some sort of copyright absolutism. However the booklets really do look an awful lot like enhanced format liner notes! I regard cover art, liner notes, booklets etc as forms of promotional material for the main item - the music. These all seem to follow a pattern: the contributor is paid at the point of sale (of the artwork, notes, etc) and no residuals are paid. Suppressing liner notes and calling them proprietary information does a disservice to the artists, IMO.

OK so you think musicbrainz is stealing Bob's writing to enhance their web pages. Just as they are 'stealing' from the writers of most liner notes - right, I mean this is not about Bob and Mosaic, this is all liner notes and all liner note writers. But there is another way to look at this: you are advocating suppressing liner note information about Lou Donaldson and preventing the public from reading it. And by extension, not just Lou. You don't want the public to have free access to album covers in general because the artist and photographer won't get paid when we see an album cover on the internet.