Harry's Blog

There's still no official announcement from Metallica over the appaling brickwalled mix of Death Magnetic that's been sold on CD. But it seems that some parts of the music industry media are picking up on the story.

You can read an interesting article on the problems with the Death Magnetic CD over at musicradar.com.

Thankfully it seems the awful audio problems the CD displays were not introduced when the tracks were laid down in the studio. They seem to be the product of a terrible studio master by Rick Rubin's engineers and then a hot master from the record company on top.

How can we be sure?

It's just been announced that Pink Floyd co-founder Richard Wright has died. The keyboard player and vocalist had been suffering from cancer.

He was just 65.

Shit.

A big thanks go to Bill Door for his invaluable advice regarding the subject of mp3 player capacity and file sizes.

You see I've been labouring under the misaprehension that the mp3 file format was any good. But it isn't. It's old, flaky and takes up way too much room. There are much better options around.

Both my mp3 players support Microsoft's WMA format. And while the sort of saddo who types M$ instead of MS may scoff, the fact is that it's an excellent format. I've just done a listening test and a 64kbps WMA file sounded just as good on my iRiver Clix 2 as a 192kbps mp3 file. That's the same sound with a file a third of a size.

You can see where I'm going with this can't you?

I've been on a bit of a music kick for a while now. A new guitar and amp (thanks darling) mean I'm basting in creative juices. The side effect of this is that I'm listening to a lot of music now - often listening to an album before going to sleep rather than reading for a while.

And the result of this has left me in a pickle, albeit a small one. Or two small ones even.

The first is pretty simple. I've decided I want to rip my entire CD collection to hard disk. That's not a major problem. We have a fast desktop PC with plenty of room to spare. The major issue here is putting in the effort to do it. My solution is likely to be taking a small pile of CDs to the study every time I work in there and rip while I work.

The more pressing issue is that I've no room on my mp3 players for all the music I'd want to carry around. This isn't a problem I've come up against before, I've always said that no-one needs to take more than 4GB of music with them because you just don't have that many favourites.

Crikey the new Coldplay album is bland. We've just sat through the whole thing and I've had to put on something with a bit of bite to cleans my ears afterwards.

It's the production that is most shocking. What on earth was Brian Eno thinking? The record sounds like a U2 off-day played down a very deep dark well.

And what's with all the mumbling Chris?

And the annoying thing is that it'll sell more than the new Whitesnake album - which is ridiculously (and frankly surprisingly) good.