....At a demo for the device at a sound studio in Manhattan on Tuesday, a New York-based band, Elysian Fields, performed three songs, which were quickly loaded onto the "pen drives" afterward.
Later, at home, the device was inserted into the USB port of a laptop computer and voila! singer Jennifer Charles' smoky, lilting lyrics and Oren Bloedow's reverbed-out, brooding guitar lines filled the living room.
Charles called the new technology "a beautiful thing."
"I'm very excited to be a part of this incredible and sexy technology," she said between songs. "It makes us feel very James Bond. You can have your little pens - wow, beam me up Scotty." [AP]
Post-punk vets Fugazi have joined the live CD generation themselves:
- For many years, Fugazi has made a point of taping our live shows. We started out using a simple cassette recorder, then moved on to a digital audio tape recorder (DAT) and finally just burned straight on to CDs. Most of the tapes were made from a combination of board mixes and live mic-ing and over the years we have amassed literally hundreds of these recordings in our tape library.
This site is a way to offer our audience access to selected tapes from that bank of recordings. We have digitally transferred to compact disc an initial sampling of twenty of these shows from various points in the band's career and outfitted each with a uniform generic cover with individual concert information and a track listing. Shorter shows that fit on one disc are available for $8 postpaid. Longer sets are on 2 discs and are available for $10 postpaid.
It should be noted that these are very much the original recordings without any attempt to correct for things like volume changes, strange mixing effects, the occasionally out-of-tune guitar or the tape running out. Though the sound quality on these tapes does vary, if a show was too poorly recorded it didn't make the cut. We hope to add more shows in the future but for now here's twenty.
I saw Fugazi in the early-'90s at some teen club in the Cleveland area - it was louder than hell and the subtleties that make their records so great were lost.
Article comments
1 - Tom Johnson
"What we were seeing is that a large number of people were taking their CDs home and ripping them to MP3s, so we thought it would benefit music fans to eliminate that middle step," Reilly said.
Get away from the ridiculous mp3-thing and they might have a real idea on their hands. Let the buyers decide if they want crappy compression when they get home.
Making fans pay for mp3s is just plain stupid. The charge for on-demand live CDs makes sense, as there are actual materials involved. After a few thousand fans have bought the little harddrives, what exactly is their material cost for mp3s? Nothing.
2 - Tom Johnson
what exactly is their material cost for mp3s? Nothing.
Let me restate that: "what exactly is the venue's material cost for mp3s? Nothing."