McLachlan's Rarities/Let us again praise great software
Today's celebrity software toast goes out to cdparanoia... cdparanoia, are you out there? I love you, man...
My wife's got this beautiful and weird Sarah McLachlan CD—Rarities, B-Sides and Other Stuff... it's a handful of oddities, including, of all things, dance remixes of some of her better-known stuff.
I suppose it might make some of you folk question my taste (always assuming I haven't given you enough to do so already), but I really like this disk. Some of it's mid-nineties dance/techno, and no, that's not normally my thing... but put McLachlan's melodies and voice over the sometimes endlessly busy club-friendly backings, and there's this marvellous alchemy that happens. And that's not all that's going on here, either; the version of Shelter on this disk as one example is strangely, beautifully spare—bits of solo violin, here and there—and there's a handful of odd covers—including a nicely spooky cover of XTC's 'Dear God'. All ver' cool.
But the disk, alas, is ailing. Pressed going on eight years ago now, and scuffed more than a little (yes, we keep our CDs in a box with our collection of bits of broken glass—is that a bad thing?), most CD players throw up their hands in exasperation with it now. Which made me very sad.
Enter cdparanoia. The lovely and talented Linux 'ware is very, very, very smart about talking to CD drives at a particularly intimate level—and utterly obsessive about retrying bits that go wonky again and again and again and then doing its best to figure out from what it gets on multiple passes to what was originally on the disk.
The result: set it loose on a track that you just cannot, on any known player, get to come out right, and it pulls that track out into a file (albeit very, very slowly for badly damaged stuff—the 'Into the fire' remix took just under two hours for a six minute track), play the file back on your player of choice, and that file sounds as pristine as the day the disk was pressed.
Truly a beautiful thing.
My wife's got this beautiful and weird Sarah McLachlan CD—Rarities, B-Sides and Other Stuff... it's a handful of oddities, including, of all things, dance remixes of some of her better-known stuff.
I suppose it might make some of you folk question my taste (always assuming I haven't given you enough to do so already), but I really like this disk. Some of it's mid-nineties dance/techno, and no, that's not normally my thing... but put McLachlan's melodies and voice over the sometimes endlessly busy club-friendly backings, and there's this marvellous alchemy that happens. And that's not all that's going on here, either; the version of Shelter on this disk as one example is strangely, beautifully spare—bits of solo violin, here and there—and there's a handful of odd covers—including a nicely spooky cover of XTC's 'Dear God'. All ver' cool.
But the disk, alas, is ailing. Pressed going on eight years ago now, and scuffed more than a little (yes, we keep our CDs in a box with our collection of bits of broken glass—is that a bad thing?), most CD players throw up their hands in exasperation with it now. Which made me very sad.
Enter cdparanoia. The lovely and talented Linux 'ware is very, very, very smart about talking to CD drives at a particularly intimate level—and utterly obsessive about retrying bits that go wonky again and again and again and then doing its best to figure out from what it gets on multiple passes to what was originally on the disk.
The result: set it loose on a track that you just cannot, on any known player, get to come out right, and it pulls that track out into a file (albeit very, very slowly for badly damaged stuff—the 'Into the fire' remix took just under two hours for a six minute track), play the file back on your player of choice, and that file sounds as pristine as the day the disk was pressed.
Truly a beautiful thing.
posted by AJM at 10:13 a.m. (Permanent Link)
