In which Prometheus Music Gets It

[unixronin]

Long ago, I was introduced (by jilara) to a stunningly good technically-filk album by Julia Ecklar, titled Divine Intervention.  The writing was first-rate, the music rich and orchestral, and 22-year-old Julia's voice was astounding.  It was only available on tape at the time, but, hey, that was better than nothing.

Well, at the time it was out of production and complete unobtainium, so I made a copy of the tape.  Rather later, I piped it into babylon5 and ripped it to mp3.  Not the best quality mp3, because there's all the tape noise and so on, but I could drop it into my music library and listen any time.

Well, I've just learned that it has become available again, from Prometheus Music, either on CD or as MP3 downloads.  So I ordered a copy of the CD (it's sold through CDBaby).

This morning, I found mail waiting for me from Prometheus Music.  "Hi, thanks for your order.  Your CD is on the way, and in the meantime, you can go here and download it for free in MP3 format.  Oh, and we've tossed in a few Internet-only extras too."

Prometheus Music gets it.

(By the way, existing Julia Ecklar fans who don't already know will be pleased to hear that Julia is currently recording a new album, scheduled to be released next year, with the working title "Indistinguishable From Magic".)

Comments

[egoldberg.livejournal.com]

Well, thank you - both for your support of the album and for the kind words about the service. I must say, I've probably done this with 1000 customers by now, but nobody has blogged about it. Actually, I'm not sure if most people even took advantage of the MP3s!

Parenthetically: if you might have any thoughts, I've been wondering if the 160 kb/s MP3s are too low quality. Might you have preferred to have received higher bit depth MP3s, so you wouldn't have to re-rip it when the CD arrived?

And if you've joined our mailing list, I'll have the first MP3 previews of the next CD in your inbox as soon as it's in mine!

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Welcome, Eli! :)

I downloaded the MP3s this morning, but have only now actually gotten to sit down and listen to them. I'm pretty much used to ripping everything myself anyway, partly because I use DigitalDJ (http://nostatic.org/ddj/) as my music player (well, OK, as my jukebox; madplay (http://www.underbit.com/products/) is the actual player), which uses a SQL back-end database that's automatically populated with disc metadata by Grip (http://nostatic.org/grip/) during the rip, and partly because I prefer to rip at much higher quality than is generally available for download. (I use lame -p --vbr-new -V 0 --nohist -b 64 -B 320, which produces an output file about 15% larger on average than your static 160kbit files — roughly comparable in size to a static 192kbit file — but is almost indistinguishable from the CD source.) I can manually enter most of the metadata into DDJ's database, but it's much easier to let Grip do it.

Honestly, though, I suspect most people are going to be listening to the MP3 versions on an iPod or similar device on earbuds, and I doubt the difference would be audible there.

Either way, I can already hear details in these MP3s that weren't audible on the tape. I can't wait to hear what the CD sounds like....

[egoldberg.livejournal.com]

Ah! In other words, you probably wouldn't really have cared exactly what the bit rate was 'cause you would have re-ripped it to your preferred format.

I do hope you enjoy the CD quality. Personally, the most emotionally intense moment of the filk publishing hobby was when the digital conversion of the masters came back from the company that salvaged the last remaining set of (mold-caked) tapes (which I'd spent at least a hundred hours over 3 years trying to track down, with help from many other people). I remembered listening to "Ladyhawke" and just lost it crying hearing all the detail in the music that only a handful of people were able to hear before, and to realize by what a slender thread it didn't happen.

On the flip side, Michael (the producer) was disappointed: all of the original Beta masters were lost or ruined, and we only had a 2nd generation, 15 ips safety backup to work with. So the digital mastering (which was quite unusual for 1986) was lost.

Anyway, I'm in Holland here so it's late. Good night!

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I remembered listening to "Ladyhawke" and just lost it crying hearing all the detail in the music that only a handful of people were able to hear before, and to realize by what a slender thread it didn't happen.

I know what you mean. I'm hearing details in Fallen Angel, for one, that I just had no idea were even there.

[rbos.livejournal.com]

I'm really surprised you didn't know about Prometheus Music.

I recommend the newsletter, it's often a good read.

[7leaguebootdisk.livejournal.com]

Have you hear her "god wrote is lisp code"?

It is a free download.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I haven't downloaded and listened to all of those yet.

[jilara.livejournal.com]

I'm hoping this time Julia actually gets something out. We've been tantalized for a while with promises.

[egoldberg.livejournal.com]

Amen. Although nothing is guaranteed, I think the odds of a release are quite high. Michael's mostly in Pittsburgh for the summer (primarily for this project), an amazing engineer has been hired, and the money has been set aside to pay for it all. Sessions start next week.

You probably saw that there was, at least, a limited-edition reprint of Julia's teenage "Traveller" cassette. This was both to hold folks over during the wait, and also to raise funds for the project. If you haven't seen it, there's still about 300 copies left [of 1000 printed]. But, yeah, it's no DI sequel for certain.

More info at: http://cdbaby.com/cd/juliaecklar2