[johnfowles]

An interesting find Tony
it is certainly a well recorded ROIO (Recording Of Independant Origin) and the pair of rar (similar to zip) files you can download from rapidshare contain two sets of high quality mp3s sampled at the high rate of 320KBPS.I had previously found this as a (Bit) torrent where as befits the aim of torrents to enable the sharing of the highest quality concert files this concert downloaded as flacs
(FLAC Free Lossless Audio Codec) format files which as their name indicates are capable of being reconstituted (decoded) back to the identical full format as found on a CD (mp3s of course are
"lossy"because in order to achieve a higher level of compression certain information such as the high end frequencies only dogs can hear is discarded.
Regarding flacs as they arrive they will not play in a standard media player nor AFAIK can every burning program burn them directly to a CD.Hitherto I had labouriously used a freebie called FLAC FrontEnd to decode the flacs to the more "standard" wav format files to play and burn
I have recently made two breakthrough discoveries,
Firstly I found that it was possible to install a suitable free codec "plug in" in Windows Media Player that enables WMP to play unconverted flacs
Secondly I found that another neat bit of freeware called Express Burn will burn CDs directly from the flacs.
Not only that but by selecting the Session track At Once burning option it is possible to completely eliminate the gap or pause between tracks so that if the set of flacs are the complete concert with nothing left out the resulting CD will play continuously. I suspect that most burning programs can do this but Express Burn presents the option in a very obvious and user friendly manner, as explained in the program's help
"Burn Session At Once to customise pause
Track Pause
By default an audio CD has a pause of 2 seconds between tracks. Select 'Use default track pause' to use this default pause. If you wish another time, even a value of zero for no pause then select 'Burn Session At Once to customise pause'. Here you should also change the value in 'Track Pause' to the desired amount.
Please note some older drivers do not support customising the pause and you must use 'Use default track pause'. The burn will fail in this case with an error about setting the write parameters"
That setting works a treat on my CD burner

Regular readers of my musings will not be surprised to read that I am at this very moment preparing an illustrated tutorial on this feature!!
The torrent announcer in his info file for the St Pete's concert as available at one of the two principal torrent listing websites
http://www.dimeadozen.org
(the other site is http://www.hungercity.com)
had included a note headed "lineage" which said:-
"ca-11 -> stc-9000 -> r-09hr 24/96 -> soundforge 16/44.1 -> flac"
I have also found a forum in which a member had asked about using some concert recording equipment and had usefully said:-
"I recently bought an edirol R-09hr and was using CA-11 cardiods with the STC-9000 preamp"
Googling revealed that
the edirol R-09hr .is a small (4.5 x 2.5 x 1.1 inches) High-Resolution WAVE/MP3 Recorder that is sold by Amazon
Also on the torrent page a member had left a comment in which he apologetically gave links to a pair of "primitive" CD jewel case insert artwork suggestions


Which IMHO are not too shabby