Kevin Bresnahan

A system re-install is often the best option for a Windows PC that starts crawling but not necessarily for one that isn't booting quickly. Only certain things can mess with your boot sequence. Sure, a rebuild might stop that, but there are enough ways to check that it might be a bit overkill. I'd also add that no matter how particular I've been at backing up my data, there's always something I forget and by the time I do, it's gone.

http://www.cdjapan.co.jp/person/700620128 Now I'm in a quandry... I would actually prefer these CDs to the LP box. Hmm...

He does not seem to stutter much in this video. I wonder if it became more pronounced later on?

If they are scratched, you could always find a place to buff them out or you could buy an inexpensive buffer and do it yourself.

Yes, an RL Led Zeppelin II is an original pressing. I have one and don't know why the Hoffman forum denizens go crazy over it but they do. Someone says it's great so its value shoots up. Same thing happened with a few other recordings over there. What cracks me up is when they do this for a common title like LZ II. They pressed hundreds of thousands of that first edition of LZ II and yet they're paying big bucks for it. I found mine for $15. It was worth $15. The reason they think it is rare is because it was supposedly recalled because it was "cut too hot" and caused Ahmet Ertegun's daughter's record player to skip. I was a youngster when this was issued but I never heard of any recalls of any Zep LPs and I was enough into audio back then that I would have.

I always considered the Four Freshmen set to be Mosaic's Norah Jones. It sold like hot cakes and kept the money coming so they could release the real sets.

They had very good sonics because they lifted the audio from released CDs. Several of them were digital copies of TOCJ CDs, which were out of print and hard to find. I still have a few of these.

Check your copy of Led Zeppelin II. If it's got "RL" in the deadwax, it's probably got some value these days. Check closely because this "RL" is tiny and it's one of many initials inscribed there if you have this pressing.

How much of this set will be new to CD? I'm guessing that it's not much. After this set, are there any Armstrong recordings that Mosaic hasn't released?

My only guess is that some Windows 8 update added some sort of security scan to any external media to prevent auto-loading of viruses. I simply left the external drive connected and switched off and it booted fine. I only turned it on after boot and only when I needed to access it. After I upgraded to Windows 10, I tried leaving it attached during a boot and it was fine. It was definitely something that started after a Windows 8 update.

But as Ken said, and he is a voter, the critics have not even heard all of the top picks. So basically, the latest "hot choice" is a poll leader. Helps explain Cecile McLorin Salvant's standing here, as she is certainly a flavor of the month in Jazz today.

There was a short time that my desktop PC took forever to boot and it was related to an external drive I had hooked up via USB. It was doing some kind of scan every time I booted and it took a long time. This particular PC was running Windows 8 and it was only after one of their updates, so it may be related to your issue. I unplugged that hard drive and it booted quickly thereafter. FWIW - this was my first PC with a small (16 GB) SSD "boot drive", which was supposed to dramatically speed up the boot process. Ha ha ha. Also, once I migrated to Windows 10, the problem went away. Other annoyances showed up with 10 but at least now I can boot the PC with the hard drive attached.

If that were true, how to explain: 13. Miles Okazaki, Work: The Complete Compositions of Thelonious Monk, Vols. 1-6 (self-released)

His last pre-1985-rebirth BN recording as a leader was January 27, 1966 ("Mode For Joe") and his next date as a leader was for Milestone on August 10th 1967, so he may have been between labels in September of 1966.

The NPR critics top 50 does not have one Smoke Sessions CD listed. Really? How can the #1 spun CD of the year (according to JazzWeek: https://www.jazzweek.com/year-end/), Eddie Henderson's "Be Cool", not show up in the top 50?

If this CD-R is from 2000 and it fails to play, the CD-R itself may simply have failed. I've had a few CD-Rs fail on me. Once these junky CD-Rs failed, I could not find any way to get the music off of them. All were bought as regular CDs so I never determined if it was the CD-R manufacturer but that would be my guess. For my own burns, I always used Mitsui or Taiyo-Yuden CD-R blanks. I have burns that are almost 24 years old now (I bought my first burner in 1995) and I've never had one fail. FWIW, if I ever (accidentally) buy a CD-R these days, the first thing I would do is extract the .WAV files to my PC for permanent back-up and then burn a back-up CD-R version using a well-made blank. I still have a 50 or 60 left from the old days.

Someone here did a nice summary of these bonus tracks back when this series was announced. There were quite a few alternates issued that aren't in the Cuscuna discography. I bought several of these because of these bonus tracks. They sound great to my ears.

Do you have Exact Audio Copy on your PC? I have been able to "see" music using EAC but it is not the most forgiving for ripping damaged CDs. For those, I use CD-EX. FYI - you can't use a copy tool to copy audio off of an audio CD. You'll only get .cda files, which a re useless for playback. With the disc in your PC drive, try opening File Explorer (right mouse-click the start button and select File Explorer), find the drive with the disc (D: likely) and right-mouse click it. Look at the Properties. See what it says. Next, see if you can click "Copy disc". As mentioned above, sometimes a copy will play where the original wouldn't.

Quite a few of the extra tracks in the SHM reissue series don't appear in Cuscuna's discography. It makes you wonder if they've uncovered tapes through the years. Steve Hoffman has often claimed that there are several "master tapes" for many of these Blue Note dates. He says that there is some detective work needed on some of them. Then there's the story that someone went through the tapes in the 70's, copied them with Dolby A, and then through out the original or marked it "Do Not Use" or in some cases, chucked them.

Although a good night of Jazz, it was not as good as the last time they came through. Something just seemed off a bit. Pianist Wonsey was the star. His solos were varied yet touching on Horace Silver's style in the right places. I really dug one of his solos a lot. Nelson (purposefully?) seemed to be behind the beat on most of his solos. They did a cover of "Up, Up & Away, My Beautiful Balloon" that came off better than I thought it would but it was still schmaltz and I couldn't warm to it. The worst thing was the noisy crowd. There were two guys at the bar who talked, make that shout-talked, throughout the whole set. The bartender was even laughing at one of their jokes during one of Hayes' drum solos. I was expecting someone to go over and tell them to lower the volume a bit but no one did. They were not the only ones either. There was a row of tables at the back of front section and they mostly seemed to be there to eat dinner and socialize. They rarely watched the band (one guy even had his seat pointing away from the stage) and many of them spent more time on their phones than listening.

Louis Hayes is returning to Scullers in Boston tonight. He's bringing back the very good band I saw him with in July of 2017: Abraham Burton, sax, Steve Nelson, vibes and Dezron L Douglas, bass. An added bonus is Anthony Wonsey on piano, who i haven't seen in a very long time. For an 81 year old guy, Hayes can still play. Well worth seeing if he comes your way.

I've said it before and I'll say it again - my wish is that Mosaic would pay Steve Hoffman to master one set, preferably releasing it using SACD hybrid discs, and see how well it sells. No matter if you like his forums or not, his name on the set will attract buyers who would otherwise never even think about it. So pick any of these suggestions (but my vote is with Jim on Bill Barron), contract Hoffman to remaster it, and see what happens. It can't really hurt sales.

If Gary Bartz had any say in it, I doubt he'd want his Milestone dates reissued by Mosaic. I once tried to get him to sign one of them and he refused, saying something along the lines of "I never made a dime from them".

Happy birthday! At least the rain stopped for you.

Sonny Stitt - Blows The Blues (Verve/Classic Records)