Note: The following posts were imported from my previous blogs.

Toy Story, DVDUsers, Whitlams  #
Thursday, 22 Feb 2001 10:57AM
The Whitlams
Despite having pretty screwed up ideas about MP3, The Whitlams get a point from me today. I noticed in a Chaosmusic search that they have now made all of their previous singles available for purchase. If they were to just re-release 'Stupor Ego' everything The Whitlams have ever done would be available for purchase. BUT I recently heard bits of Stupor Ego and it is awful. Terrible. Bad. Bad. Bad. So Tim, don't ever release it, and damn good call for deleting it. Unfortunately not one fan out there will believe you until they hear it.... around around we go.

Pre_Shrunk
Pre_Shrunk start their "2001 A Bass Odessey" tour very soon, sponsored by Triple J. Their new single, "Frogga Boogaga" is out in stores now (at least, it's listed at ChaosMusic and hmv.com). It includes 'Crash' (hopefully different to the album version but I doubt it) and their Bee Gees cover 'You Should Be Dancin'.

CDDB fun
Interesting to see what is and what isn't in the CDDB database. I'm not surprised at all that my The Truth singles arn't in there as I think I'm the only surviving fan of 'The Truth' (renamed 'Truth' near the end of their career) left on this green/blue earth. But I'm continually freaked to see 'Caligula' coming up every time. And Supergroove. Aussie bands are a touch and go thing I suppose. I wonder how The Sharp will go...

CD Database
After seeing how damn easy it was to enter all my DVDs into the DVD Profiler database (five minutes) I wanted a similar program for CDs. I can't find one. I did find a nice CD database from collectorz.com but nothing free. After much searching and finding and deciding against I discovered I have exactly what I want already. Easy Audio Copy extracts info from CDDB, stores it in a database AND it does what most other CDDB software won't do... extracts to a text file. All for free. The text file isn't as useful as some but it wouldn't be hard for me to write a script up to convert it to something useful. I was afraid I was goind to have a write a ripper from CDDB myself (the CDDB search pages have all the required info in hidden fields rip for the ripping). Yay!

DVDUserGroup
DVD User Group is the first DVD webpage I remember seeing (advertising in JB HiFi helped a fair bit). I joined up as a member (shudder) recently to see what they had. Not much, but what they do have it pretty interesting, mainly the interviews with distributors and chat sessions with relevant people. The very interesting recent chat on R4 DVD releases is worth reading if you're wondering if your favourite program/movie is to be released (Simpsons in Sept). Some interesting comments from some distributors on why the Region coding is there (none of them any good, but interesting to see their delusions).

WARNING : Their security system is awful. I wouldn't use a password you care about.

Toy Story Ultimate Boxset
It ain't so Ultimate apparently. The R4 release misses out of a massive chunk of extras including commentaries and 50 short special Toy Story skits. I'm mainly getting the set for the DVDs, but given the bad reviews the extra disc has got I might have gone for the R1 single discs had I known.

I wonder how long it's going to take before people start rioting over how badly Australia is being treated with DVD releases.