They've taken a bit of advice it seems and upgraded to 160kbps but there is a still a bit of wishywashy sound. 192kbps+ or LAME VBR encoding would be better.
The two concerts are one large MP3 file and cost US$2.99 each. At first I thought the one MP3 was annoying but thinking about it it's better. When cutting up live concerts into MP3 there is no way to avoid a pop or slight space between tracks when reburning it to Audio CD due to the way MPEG compression works (packet sizes, always a bit of space at the end). So one MP3 is better, it's not hard to split it into tracks later with CDWAV or something.
If RealVast started selling FLAC or SHN (lossless compression) I'd be really impressed.
See previous quicky review of Vast download service.
New single being released online the same way soon.
ChaosMusic now does books. A quick sniff around the new ChaosMusic Books section didn't impress me much (benchmark on price for me is old Dune books, $18.95 in stores, $22+ in ChaosBooks). But Dave pointed me to their Graphic Novel collection and they seem to be very very cheap, from $26.95 to a low low $17.95 for items usually $30+ in comic stores. Tempted to pick up Grant Morrison's Animal Man after borrowing it from Dave, although how often am I really going to read it? I want a Grant Morrison RSS feed right into my brain.
I once got in huge trouble for calling a friend's mother's Chihuahuas a rat. Turns out I was right. DNA Study Finds Chihuahuas Aren't Dogs [via Chocolate and Vodka]. Apparently they're rodents bred to look like dogs. But how do other dogs bread with Chihuahuas? Do they? Do I care?
The study found that several diminutive breeds had been independently created around the world from a variety of other animals, including the Lhasa apso (Tibetan snow rabbit), Pekingese (Chinese water rat), Shih Tzu (stoat), and Yorkshire Terrier (pigeon).
Sounds like a joke to me but the truth often does.
A minidisc drive, connected via SCSI (old school) to the computer and reads the discs at 5 speed. Originally intended to take over floppydiscs and ZIP drives they hold about 150Meg. They're also capable with a bit of hacking and some software of reading Minidisc data discs without recompression/decompression of the stored audio.
* Nerd note: Minidisc audio is compressed. Original format was about five times compression ATRAC. Newer versions can compress more or less I believe.
The MDH-10 are still available second hand now but cost around US$800. It's an official Sony product but it's been deleted. Probably because CD burners killed Zip drives and all of their copies but Sony wouldn't want this sort of product around anyway, they don't want you copying Minidiscs. Ever. Even with audio you recorded.
Something that copied MD's onto the copy, probably via a USB 2.0 cable or Firewire at 5 speed would save me hundreds of hours each year and would be worth $800 I think. I'd buy something like that before I ever bought another Minidisc recorder.
In a moment of madness we did a temp redesign of the WALKEN website, waiting for the full redesign in a couple of weeks. New bio and promo photos and a bit more info. MP3 available here. Now available online at Missing Link and Rare Records.