Category Archives: Music

Lightscribe demo music CD

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On a friends advice, I ordered a Lightscribe DVD writer and 50 blank Lightscribe disks on Saturday morning. The bundle was a snip at £30 including postage. They arrived yesterday and I began work on making many demo CDs for Steven’s band, Cuttin’ Edge.

Nero worked perfectly, it detected the Lightscribe drive and enabled the options in the Cover Designer. To be fair, I did download and install the Lightscribe Control Panel before running Nero, so perhaps that gave Nero the information it required.

Below is a scan of the final disk. It features the Cuttin’ Edge logo that was drawn by Jon Haward, which is perfect for CDs. To ‘print’ the label side of the Lightscribe CD, takes about 15 minutes, by the way.

Cuttin' Edge demo CD Lightscribed

Cuttin' Edge demo CD Lightscribed

We’re very pleased how the disk has turned out and is an improvement over the first drafts of paper labels. Now Mike has to distribute them to local pubs, which hopefully lead to some more gigs appearing at the Cuttin’ Edge website.

Oh and thanks Ant, I’d forgotten all about Lightscribe. ;)

Electric guitars and no fade outs

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This morning we finally got time to listen to Big Whiskey and the Groogrux King. The Dave Matthews Band are back on course, after a serious hiccup with Stand Up. Having said that You Might Die Trying was featured in the second episode of the new season of House the other night. Initially I was convinced the song was from Some Devil because it sounded so good, but I was surprised to find it was from Stand Up. :)

The main thing I noticed on first listen is that electric guitars pop up all over the place… a good addition. Secondly, no fade outs on any track. It feels like the tracks are written and performed by the band so natural endings are the norm. And those drums… Carter is really high in the mix and sounding great.

And best of all, this CD is not a victim of the Loudness War.. look at the extract of the Audacity sample picture… peaks and troughs, dynamic range. At last these bands are waking up to the fact that less is more and we all have a volume control.

Mmmm, dynamic range!

Mmmm, dynamic range!

Listening through again as I write this confirms my initial thoughts. It’s going to be a fine CD. Like most of my favourite CDs, the songs are coming through over time. Lying In the Hands Of God (with a burst of one of my favourite sounds, acoustic slide guitar), Why I Am, Squirm and You & Me have leapt forward so far. I’m sure others will follow.

Oh and Steven informs me Seven is actually in 7/4 time. I’ll take his word for that, my technical music knowledge is limited to say the least. :)

Isn’t it typical, new CDs are turning up like number nine buses now, Chickenfoot arrived this morning. It’s going to have to wait a bit. ;)

It’s been posted!

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Yesterday an email informed me the new Dave Matthews Band CD has been posted… fingers crossed it’ll be with us tomorrow.

Every now and again there are new CDs that arrive in our household that demand a proper sit down and listen in their entirety on our 5.1 system, instead of via iTunes on our computers. Fear Of A Blank Planet was one that springs to mind (a true classic, especially in 5.1) and Experiments in Mass Appeal was probably the last one. Big Whiskey And The GrooGrux King is going to be the next one… my first opinions will follow in a few days. ;)

New Dave Matthews Band CD on the way

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Big Whiskey And The Groogrux King is the title of the new upcoming Dave Matthews Band CD. Please let it be a vast improvement on the last one, Stand Up.

Having followed DMB for many years, Stand Up was a real low point for my tastes. Apart from a couple of songs, it washed over me without any real lasting gems.

The free taster track, Funny the Way It Is, indicates that they’re back on track. Great lyrics and even… a guitar solo! :)

Roll on the 2nd June .

An interesting program to combat the Loudness War

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Steven sent me an instant message today, pointing me to this thread on the Mike Portnoy forum…

http://mikeportnoy.com/forum/tm.aspx?m=2167012

In case the site disappears the thread advertises what looks to be a great program to remove the horrible clipping that occurs all too frequently on modern CDs. It reduces the the volume of the WAV file that it is asked to process and trys to repair the peaks that have clipped and been chopped off.

http://www.cutestudio.net/data/products/audio/seedeclip/index.php

We’ll be looking into this program, and possibly ‘fixing’ some of our CDs that are distorted and clipped. We need to do some real tests at home first.