Phil's Vinyl Addiction (by Phil Harland) » Ethical “bootlegs”

Kitchener David Gray Concert with player from archive.org

pharland — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 03:35:49 +0000

Here again is that David Gray concert I recorded, which you can access in lossless format here, where you will also find the full track listing and other info. I was happy to see that it’s gotten about 500 downloads so far and one review (four out of five stars), so it’s quite well-received.

So here is the player for streaming quality (not nearly as good as the FLAC files which you should download if you like what you hear here). The track-listing does not appear with this widget but you can skip ahead songs by simply hitting the skip button to the right of the play button:

Concert recording of the week: David Gray in Kitchener, May 25 2010

pharland — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 13:41:54 +0000

David Gray is an excellent folk-rock singer-songwriter, originally from Wales (Wikipedia page here). He is perhaps best known for his hit “Babylon” from his White Ladder album, but there are many, many excellent tunes on his other albums as well. I finally had an opportunity to try out my new H2 recording device last week when we went to the David Gray show here in Kitchener at the Centre in the Square. The concert was excellent, as were the acoustics of the venue. One untuned guitar led to a loss of “Hold On” (one of my favourite Gray acoustic tunes). The recording turned out quite well, if I do say so myself (recorded at 44.1/16bit and saved as FLAC after some equalizing and fades in Audacity). But the first few seconds of the first track are missing and I didn’t have the device pointing in the right direction until halfway through the first track. So judge the recording by tracks 2-19. It’s available through the David Gray collection on the Live Music Archive at archive.org:

David Gray at Centre in the Square, Kitchener, Ontario, May 25, 2010

Concert recording of the week: U2 at KRO Studios, Hilversum, Holland (Oct 1980 — before Boy!)

pharland — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 14:01:57 +0000

At the risk of focusing too much on U2 (my favourite band as a teenager), my choice this week is another extremely early soundboard recording from 1980 (known as “Touch” in some of its bootleg versions), before the release of U2′s first album, Boy, in November of that year:

U2 Hilversum, Holland. KRO Studios October 14, 1980 (FLAC – via Qualitybootz).

Concert recording of the week: U2 at Paris Cinema Studio, London (1981)

pharland — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 13:18:22 +0000

When the members of U2 have said anything about trading of concert recordings among fans, they have been quite positive. They are very negative about people trying to profit from bootlegs, especially poorly recorded ones. Both Bono and Edge state the band’s opinion, including statements on the official U2.com site:

“We invite people to bootleg our shows. We invite people to make CD copies, we’ve no problems with that, but if some guy is gonna make money off the back of this, we’re gonna find out where he parks his car…” (Bono; source: KROQ Radio USA, October 2000)

“We’ve never had a problem with bootlegs or people recording our shows for their own use. Our problem has always been people ripping off our fans with inferior recordings that they sell at exorbitant prices” (October 30, 2000; source: , official site accessed March 14, 2010).

One of my favourite concert recordings is an early one from 1981 which was a planned broadcast on FM (BBC) but sourced from the pre-FM tapes:

U2′s concert at Paris Cinema Studio in London, England, on August 23, 1981 (FLAC – via Qualitybootz).

The setlists from that leg of the October European tour can be found here.

Concert recording of the week: Cowboy Junkies at the Commodore Ballroom, Vancouver (1996)

pharland — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 15:37:33 +0000

Since I was a teenager in the 80s, I’ll begin with a band from that era who have encouraged recording and sharing of their live shows: Cowboy Junkies (main archive page here). The Cowboy Junkies’ Trinity Session (1988), which was recorded in a church in Toronto, sounded entirely new — and haunting — to me back in the day (still did when I recently transferred it from vinyl this year), and just about everyone else my age in Toronto seemed to know about that album. This band is in many respects a jam band, whose live shows vary from night to night and who engage in considerable improvisation. Their covers of standards in entirely new ways really stand out to me.

There are many, many freely available recordings of Cowboy Junkies’ live shows on archive.org. The one I’ve been enjoying most lately is a great quality soundboard recording:

Cowboy Junkies at the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver, 1996 (FLAC – via archive.org).

(For those who aren’t aware, FLAC and, less common, SHN formats are the best quality formats to download and do not result in any loss of sound quality. For downloading shows from archive, I would suggest using Firefox with the free DownloadThemAll plugin which allows you to quickly identify the links for each song in FLAC and download them quickly.)

Intro to ethical “Bootleg” choice of the week series

pharland — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:20:46 +0000

In an attempt to revive my activity on this blog, I’m beginning a weekly post that will point you to a downloadable live recording that I find particularly cool or interesting. Alongside my obsession with used LPs, I’ve been getting more and more interested in “bootleg” recordings of live shows of late. The word “Bootleg” has some negative and positive connotations, as you may imagine (in light of its being a borrowed word from the prohibition of alcohol back in the early- to mid-twentieth century in some countries — put your “illegal” alcohol in your boot to avoid detection!).

When I advocate a concert or music “bootleg” in this upcoming series, I am referring to a recording of a live concert that is not commercially released by the artist or which has been given sanction for fan-trading by the artist. These “bootlegs,” or live recordings, should be exchanged among fans without any financial gain to the fans (i.e. for free) and with promotion of the artist (and therefore appropriate future financial benefit to the artist) in mind. In other words, I will follow what I consider a strict ethic here. We’re not talking about “pirating” but rather fans trading and promoting the unreleased (live or other) music of the artists they like most. Unreleased is the key term here, because I believe it is absolutely essential to support the artists who create the music by buying what they release in LP, CD, or whatever form. Another main issue is the quality of the sound on the bootleg, such that it does not misrepresent the quality of the artists’ performances (but these can be either “audience” recordings or “soundboard” recordings, usually the latter). Here I will only link to very high quality bootlegs in uncompressed formats (e.g. “shorten” and “flac” formats, and never MP3s).

There are two main sites which I consider ethical (in my terms) and high quality when it comes to live recordings (there may be more, of which I am now unaware–let me know in the comments section and I’ll investigate):

Dave’s Qualitybootz;
The Internet Archive’s “Live Music Archive” (closely associated with etree.org), which seeks permission from the artists (or their representatives) themselves.

So most of my choices will come from these two sources at this point. I’ll soon post my choice of this week.