Monday, October 15, 2007

w00t

listen

Bob Ostertag’s new record is out. From the page:

In March of 2006, I put all my recordings to which I owned the rights… up for free download…. w00t is my first release to skip the CD-for-sale stage and go directly to free Internet download…. Please download, copy, send to your friends, remix, mutilate, and mash-up. And please support this attempt to build free culture by sending a link for w00t to your friends. w00t consists of a 50-minute sound collage…. w00t is a free, internet-only release. w00t was composed entirely from fragments of music from… computer games….

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

free yet low (audio) quality culture. please don't let this become the default - I'm all for people choosing to license their music under whatever license they like, but please offer some route to let people who care about the quality of the music by it at a decent quality encoding. I know that it involves a bit more work to get lossless files online, and there is a correspondingly larger hit for the bandwidth cost, but if you charge people bandwidth at cost then the files are still cheap. Once we move onto a purely mp3 distribution model as opposed to mp3 or CD then production qualities are going to become less valued and this will be a shame.

I think that the writing was already on the wall when GMac hired me to put in an load of D&B PA for the Roni Size gig at Manga's birthday party a year or two ago, and all the DJs were playing MP3s off digital mixers and it sounded *dreadful*. I pulled him up about this (who was previously famous for running several of the highest quality clubs soundwise in Edinburgh) and he said that it was what everyone listened to and it was what they expected and he couldn't be bothered with the faff of lossless files (I may be slightly cruelly paraphrasing, but the message is correct).

Large PA systems highlight differences in dynamic and frequency range much more explicitly than (the majority of) home systems, but if that is the future of amplified music then the hifi industry is doomed...

Give us sad folk a *chance* to spend our money on decent quality versions. Please?

Alex