Despite all the wackiness - which she looks to be more or less past now - Gaga seems to be a class act and a huge talent. I love Bob and Trey's cover. It's rawness makes me happy.
I went to my source for the '76 show I'm raving about above. They have one partial and two full versions of the show. They all say "soundboard" or "pre-FM" and have been digitally doctored for dropouts etc., so, yeah, maybe they are as good as these CDs. I'm downloading the two complete versions now. We will see... If they are as sweet as these CDs I'll never go gray market again. Now that I've read the descriptions for these two downloads, one had to be corrected because it was "one of the worst digital transfers I have seen" and the other has most of the King Biscuit Flower Hour radio ads in it, which I don't want. If anyone cares to help me find a really awesome copy of 7/18/76 please do. I am determined to find out if these CDs are in fact "special." It could be as simple as someone taking all the known sources and creating a "perfect" Frankenstein version of the show and then EQ'ing everything and putting it on CD. I don't know.
I'm a big '89 person, have been for a while. When I first got to this thread, '89 was the only "recent" year I bothered with before I had my 1990 breakthrough.
Well, I am hardly the most savvy with bit torrent sites and whatnot, but I am pretty sure some bootleggers in the UK don't have access to anything the GD taping community doesn't have. That said, if it is much easier and you are willing to spend the money and it gets great music to you that you can enjoy without all that effort, I sure don't mean to rain on any parades... it's a great show and if these recordings are treating you well that is all that really matters. If you get confused..., well, you know the rest!
I hear ya. I might very well have more different copies of the GD self-titled album than any other album in my collection, which is a surprising quirk of release history more than anything else in particular, not that I don't enjoy that album.
But really, I would expect someone here to get to the bottom of all this gray market stuff. Ripoff? Not a ripoff? Enquiring minds want to know. How is it that Amoeba can even sell that kind of thing? Is it legal? It's certainly not the first time I've seen a boot in a legitimate record store, but they had at least three copies of it in the GD section. Why doesn't Dave L. call his "guys" and do a sweep? But having just downloaded two other versions of this show, I look at the files and go "ugh" and realize I hardly ever download shows because of all the metadata work. Ripping CDs is easier by comparison.
You ought to see my "to-edit" folder. It has 140-something shows in it right now, from all different bands. I have gotten pretty good at using the tools in mp3tag and foobar to automate as much as possible. But it takes time. There have been periods in the past where I just said "Screw it, I'm not tagging another file!" and deleted the whole pending folder. Dozens of shows that may have taken weeks to download -- flushed down the drain. Easy come, easy go.
I too have a folder of stuff that needs to be "processed." Collecting--it never ends. But for the past few months I've been mainly listening to what I have because I got a little burnt out on the data input and organizing part. I did do a big external hard drive upgrade recently because I was running out of space. All my Dead and other stuff is digitized.
I thought it was legal in Europe to tape and sell FM broadcasts, especially older than a certain age, and then through a loophole in copyright law they are OK to import to the US, though they'd be illegal to manufacture here. I found this by a user Zod on pearljam.com's forum - not sure whether it's this @*Zod*, (or maybe @Zod) but here it is: "It's a loophole in the copyright law where recordings (once they're something like 20 to 25 years old) can fall in the public domain. It means these little record companies can legally put them on vinyl as long as they pay the applicable royalties. They are unauthorized but they aren't illegal. They can't use official band records/soundboards but they can use fan sources, radio sources, tv sources etc... Stuff the band doesn't own directly. I think it's more of a grey area if importing a completely legal record made in europe is illegal to import into the US." Also he linked to this: The New Explosion of Bootleg Vinyl | Pitchfork "Overseas, a series of legal loopholes (first in the Rome Convention of 1966) put unreleased music into the public domain so long as it was recorded abroad and labels paid all the proper mechanical royalties."
Intellectual property law is quite the quagmire. Today I worked in the yard and listened to the 1990 show from 30 Trips - still in my post-Brent exile until the new stuff comes. Life may be sweeter for this, I don't know, See how it feels in the end.
Another listen of one of my favourite '70 shows - 2 February on Dave's 6. I just love this show. the Dark Star> Saint Stephen> Mason's is stupendous. I love the Dark Star - all of it. It has that mellow, slinky feeling that I adore in Stars (think 28 February '69). I recall archtop recently suggesting that the Stephen> Mason's transition is a clam. I'll concede that it's not perfect but they're right on the edge of the envelope. At 4:22 in Stephen Billy breaks into the Alligator intro. At 4:33 Jerry kicks them back towards Stephen but, rather than going straight back to Stephen, at 4:35 Phil briefly diverts through E minor. Jerry joins him at 4:38 before returning to E major and Stephen. Yeah, it's untidy as they actually hit Mason's but this short interlude is one of my favourite of all Dead moments. Then they belt the $hit of out of it with Mason's. Yep. I really do love this show.
Ripoff. You paid money for burned CD's made from flac files I have sitting on a hard drive. In fact, I am willing to wager they did not even use the new Betamania sources for 30 October 1971, and 7 November 1971, the latter being a significant upgrade to all previous circulating sources.
This is 7/18/76 and whether it's a ripoff or not hasn't been conclusively determined by anything I've seen posted here. I have a version I downloaded last night that might be the same thing but I haven't listened to it yet.
buying a CD of a radio broadcast generally doesn't make sense, unless perhaps the CD is sourced from a pre-FM recording, which is not (in fact can not be) the case with the European "legitimate" CD's
That's an interesting quirk in the law. I doubt anyone (other than us) would be comparing the grey market release to the existing FM and pre-FM sources, but I also doubt that the grey market manufacturer would bother to seek out an upgraded source anyway.
So what exactly is the deal with all these Betamania sources that have now showed up on etree? Like the Sept 91 run... are these really upgrades or just alternatives? I'm a little puzzled about these...
Some are clear upgrades over circulating sources, some are new to circulation, some are alternatives. In general, the older shows have been clear upgrades, the two mentioned above plus the new source from Princeton- 17 April 1971. I have paid less attention to the 80's and 90's material, but I know some of the late 80's boards were new to circulation.
While I cannot speak to the source tapes vis-a-vis previous versions, I'm assuming some cat had a nice collection of shows on the old Sony Beta format. I remember a short period in the 80s when Beta audio was all the audiophile rage.
Well, pretty awesome, of course! Have seen Dylan a handful of times over the years, maybe 10 or 12 times. It's kind of a mixed bag, depending on his mood, etc. But this Warfield show, with Jerry guesting, was one of the better Dylan shows I have seen. Very relaxed. And being that it was Jerry's home away from home, he couldn't have been more comfortable on stage. 2 really big legends on that smallish stage. Awesome.
Well I have never knowingly listened to pre-FM and then post-FM and compared but these 7/18/76 discs do not sound like a broadcast, they sound like you're standing on the stage. I wouldn't feel the need to yammer on about this if the release would just tell me what the source is. Maybe that info is omitted cuz it would reveal illegality. But I always liked Jim Rockford and Columbo as a kid so I'll press on with my amateur detective work and let you guys know what happens. I'm going to start wearing sport coats and living in a trailer by the beach...