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It was way too hot to stealth last night, so I only taped the first band. It wouldn’t have been so hot but the only clean jacket I had (in which to stuff my gear) was a heavy Carhartt one which made it unbearable to stealth. Add this to the fact that I’m sort of burned out on taping shows just to tape them and you come up with me being a total pussy.

So last night was Tapes ‘n Tapes with openers Cold War Kids and The Figurines, respectively. I taped Cold War Kids for my boss at Suicide Squeeze because she was raving about them all week and I thought she’d appreciate a recording. By the end of their set I was sweating balls and not feeling well, so the lady and I ditched and went home. I’ll just tell people I’m so indie that I buy tickets to sold out buzz-band shows and then leave after the opener plays. Shit yeah.

Cold War Kids – 2006-06-19 Crocodile Cafe – Seattle, WA
Download: cwk2006-06-19.at943.flac16.zip
MP3 Sample: cwk2006-06-19sample.mp3

Third night blazin’ through your modem. For the third night, BTS brought out Mess With Time and Sidewalk as newcomers to the setlist. Other than that, it’s the same jams you heard the first two nights. They also brought the Calvin Johnson skit back for this set.

The real downer of this show was the fact that the crowd was full of drunk assholes (moreso than the second night). It got so bad during Brett’s opening set that he stopped before his last song and bitched the crowd out for being so rude while he was playing. I was pretty much in agreement with him… concerts aren’t about the people in attendance; they’re about the people on the stage. That’s my stance at least.

Built To Spill – 2006-06-15 The Showbox – Seattle, WA
Download: bts2006-06-15.akgc1000s.flac16.zip
MP3 Sample: bts2006-06-15sample.mp3

EDIT: Removed opening sets to make space on the server.

Second night comin’ atcha. Opened and closed with the same tunes but the middle is where the creamy goodness lies. For the second night, BTS blessed Seattle with Liar, Life’s A Dream, Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss, and Gone.

The Calvin Johnson skit is missing from this night but they played two more songs total. Overall, the sound is a lot nicer and the band played tighter. The diginoise that I experienced on Tuesday night popped up again during Helvetia’s set but not during the other two bands. I’m going to sit down and figure out where the problem is (and I might run the JB3 as a backup if it is, in fact, the S/PDIF cable that is culprit).

Built To Spill – 2006-06-14 The Showbox – Seattle, WA
Download: bts2006-06-14.akgc1000s.flac16.zip
MP3 Sample: bts2006-06-14sample.mp3

EDIT: Removed opening sets to make space on the server.

What a night. Last night was the first time I’d ever taped with another taper and it was an all-around good time. I actually hadn’t planned on going to these BTS shows but a fellow taper had an extra ticket for Tuesday and Wednesday so I came along (seems like this happens a lot lately). So myself and this guy ran a stand from the bar and it was the most enjoyable taping experience I’ve ever had. We had chairs to sit in, a perfect view of the stage and we pretty much had a jovial time.

Last night was also the first time I’d ever dealt with a patcher. For the uninformed, a patcher is someone who goes to a show in hopes that a taper will be there so they can “patch out” of their deck and get an auxiliary feed from the mics. I really don’t have a problem with it and I think it’s a smart, inexpensive way for people who want to guarantee that they’ll get a copy of the show. What I didn’t like was that this guy was drunk, loud and expected me to run his Minidisc deck for him.

Patcher: HAY! Are you the ‘purveyor of the microphones’?
Me: Sure, I guess.
Patcher: Do you have a headphone out I could use?!
Me: Uh, yeah sure. You’re going to need a 1/4″ adapter
Patcher: Yeah I got that covered, man!
Me: Ok, yeah. Here you go.
Patcher: ALRIGHT! I’ve got levels and I’m good to go! So when the band starts just hit this button and then this button and when it’s done hit the button again. THANKS DUDE!
Me: Uh, sure.

Minidisc players aren’t rocket science so I could handle it, but it was a little rude of him to presume that I would want to. He stopped by later to make sure everything was going well by giving me a “thumbs up” coupled with a questioning look in his eyes. I returned the gesture to let him know that everything was ok (or I thought it was, I still don’t know if his MD got a proper recording).

At the end of the night I still had his deck and the guy was nowhere to be found. I was about to just leave his deck at the bar when some guy came up to me to retrieve it, but it wasn’t the original drunky. The guy informed me that he was picking up the deck because the guy who owned it had been kicked out of the venue. To quote my fellow taper: “Imagine that. We definitely didn’t see that one coming.”

So that’s my story that you probably don’t care about. Concerning the actual music: it was an alright show. The openers were decent, if a little on the subdued side and Built To Spill blew me away as they always do. Doug opened with Car and that pretty much sold it for me. They could have played noodly jams the rest of the night for all I cared because that song is pretty much the best BTS song ever.

The recordings turned out fairly clear and decent, but not as good as I had hoped/expected. It was nice that we had our mics at the bar because it’s on a 3′ platform. This made it possible to fly our mics 11′ up (plus everyone around the mics was sitting down). For some reason, Bret Netson’s set has some weird crackling in the waveform and I don’t know why. I saw it happening during the recording because the MT’s peak lights were going off at times when there is no possible way the audio would be clipping. I think it’s time to invest in a better S/PDIF cable.

Built To Spill – 2006-06-13 The Showbox – Seattle, WA
Download: bts2006-06-13.akgc1000s.flac16.zip
MP3 Sample: bts2006-06-13sample.mp3

EDIT: Removed opening sets to make space on the server.

Within the taper community the mantra is Quality is king!. Tapers pride themselves on getting a quality recording and most are insulted at the thought of raping their waveform with a lossy codec like MP3, and rightly so.

See, when you encode a WAV to MP3 a lot of information is left out. MP3 leaves out everything above ~15kHz because the average person (and even most audiophiles I’d wager) can’t hear those frequencies anyway. So who cares? Well, a lot of people, and here is why.

1) Once it’s gone it’s gone.

See, when you encode a WAV to an MP3 and it loses that data, you can’t get that data back. That’s not a huge deal in regards to albums because people can always go out and buy the CD if they want to hear the original files. With live recordings however, they’re not as easy to locate and sometimes the source recording is lost forever if a taper loses his source recording or if he just disappears from the scene completely. It’s up to the members of the taping community to maintain the integrity of the recordings for everyone.

2) Once it starts, it’s hard to stop it.

Say I post a show of mine in MP3 format and a dozen people download it. Then a few of those people burn the MP3s to a CD for listening on-the-go and their friends want copies. So they take those CDs and rip them to MP3 (using only god knows with which to encode). Now you’ve got MP3 > WAV > MP3 lineage going on and it just keeps going from there. It’s a slippery slope folks.

Even bearing both of those important points in mind, I still understand why people want MP3s instead of FLAC. iPods don’t play FLAC files and most people have those, Winamp doesn’t play FLAC files out of the box and iTunes flat out refuses to play them, and the files are 4-5 times bigger than MP3s. The reasons are varied, but they’re all quite valid. Trust me, I’m on your side on most of the points.

So I’ve given it some thought and decided a compromise is in order. No, I’m not going to start hosting MP3s. That’s crazy talk. What I will do, however, is make it easy for the end-user to convert the FLACs to MP3 with a click, a wish and a prayer. Enter: FLAC2MP3.

Download: FLAC2MP3.zip

Ok so I didn’t write this script, but a buddy of mine sure did when I asked him to because he’s all kinds of crazy cool like that. Written in WSH, FLAC2MP3 will take any set of FLAC files and decompress them to WAV, then encode them to MP3 and delete the remaining WAVs. It even transfers over the metadata!

This way I still get to force the quality of lossless files on the unwashed masses and you get to listen to your filthy MP3s on your lil’ beatbox! Just make sure that when someone asks you for a copy of that smokin’ tape you give them FLACs (or at least a straight audio cd sourced from the FLACs).