Saturday, January 10, 2009

Katharsis Best of 2008, Part 1 - Jan. 5 '09

I'm back. This week I begin my review of my musical highlights from 2008. You can download the show recording here.

Featured this week: Dan Goldman (Luxury Pond), Snowblink, Ida, Heidi Elva, Barbara Buchholz, Dolly Sollito, Gregor Samsa, Goldmund, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Hauschka, Max Richter, Library Tapes, Bersarin Quartet, Jacaszek, Rudi Arapahoe, Christopher Bissonette, Aidan Baker & Tim Hecker, Erik Levander, Fax, Fennesz, Azeda Booth, Tagaq, Felicia Atkinson/Sylvain Cheveau, David Grubbs, and Balmorhea. Each of these artists released fantastic albums in 2008. A good number of them were exciting new discoveries for me.

Tune in for part 2 on Jan. 12. Timothy Heck (Music for Hedghogs) and Stan Mochanov (Post-Everything) will be weighing in with their favourites and we will discuss the year in music.

The recording is in .ogg vorbis format recorded directly from the cjsw stream. I prefer vorbis files to mp3’s due to their better fidelity at similar bit rates (ie. an .ogg vorbis file sounds better than an mp3 file of a similar bitrate) and the fact that vorbis is open source (ie. non-proprietary). Most computer audio software programs can play .ogg files but I realize that not all hardware music players (such as the iPod) can play .ogg files. If you want to convert the show recording to an mp3 or AAC file so that you can load it on to your iPod I recommend FreeRIP for PC users.

There is always some quality degradation with conversion between compression formats but as the cjsw .ogg stream is at a higher bitrate than the .mp3 stream converting the .ogg recording to an mp3 of similar bitrate shouldn’t sound any worse than a recording of the mp3 stream.


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