I went through and cataloged all my freaking CDs this weekend (I know how to party!) and to my shock I found two discs that are not only worth a ton of money that I actually am okay with selling. (Usually the only stuff I have that’s worth any money is the stuff I never want to get rid of).

So if anyone wants a limited edition Day Of The Dead Soundtrack CD (limited to just 3,000 copies) or a gold-pressed copy of Use Your Illusion II by Guns N’ Roses, send me an offer! Give me money to buy more records! We all win.

Foo Fighters
Doll (Live Acoustic)
See You (Live Acoustic)
For All The Cows (Live Acoustic)
Everlong (Live Acoustic)
As a near-psychotic collector of recorded music, I own quite a bit of concert DVDs. While I love them, they can be kind of a pain. Going to a concert and rocking out is a lot of fun. Sitting on your couch and watching a concert? Not as much fun. With rare exception (Nirvana’s Live At Reading, Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense), I find it hard to watch a concert movie in its entirety – I’ll take a live CD over a live DVD any day.

But I like the music on them, so I finally decided to try to rip all the audio from all my concert DVDs. I’ve been using a combination of DVD Decrypter, Audacity and Format Factory to do it (a good starter guide to this process can be found at Doom9), and as you can tell from those acoustic Foo Fighter tracks (taken from their excellent 2003 live DVD Everywhere But Home), it seems to be working pretty well.

When I rip the audio from the DVD to my computer, it’s usually in the AC3 audio format, which can easily be converted to MP3 using Format Factory or Audacity. However, there’s one problem with converting audio to MP3, that problem being the MP3 format itself.

The MP3 file format is really popular, it also really kind of sucks. This suckage is especially notable when converting AC3 or WAV audio to MP3. When you convert to MP3, a small fraction of a second silence is added at the beginning and the end of the audio track. This is almost never a problem, unless you are converting a live concert or DJ mix, then those microseconds of silence are a fucking nightmare that ruin the whole cohesion of the recording!

And there is almost no way to get rid of them. In most programs, if I delete them they just pop right back after I close them. I can mostly eliminate them in Audacity, but a vestige still remains.

And don’t go recommending WMA or AAC audio as a solution, they do it as well. The only compressed audio format I found that doesn’t add a bit of silence when being converted from WAV was OGG, but since I can’t get OGG files to play on my iPod easily, that’s not an option.

So please, don’t point out the gaps in the audio if you download these tracks. Trust me, they annoy me far more than they annoy you.

David Bowie
Let’s Dance (Bollyclub Mix)
Another DVD rip. This one was taken from the DVD that came with some versions of the Best of Bowie compilation from a few years back. Nearly every other mix from that DVD has since been released and can be found on the Club Bowie 12″ Mixes that you can get on iTunes and Amazon, so I’m not including them here. This particular mix of “Let’s Dance” still hasn’t had a digital release though, so it’s fair game to me.

If more Bollywood music sounded like this I think I’d watch more of those movies.

Flesh For Lulu
I Go Crazy (Dynamix)
I Go Crazy (Instrumental)
These are not DVD rips, just regular old vinyl rips, taken from a 12″ single. I think my obsession with getting every single John Hughes movie-related release (this is from the Some Kind of Wonderful soundtrack) went a bit too far with this one. It’s still a fun track though.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 31st, 2011 at 12:49 am and is filed under David Bowie, Foo Fighters, live, remixes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.