prince

if it cannot be cast to a pod, then the people are not truly free it's not a podcast

lol

Unless I’m missing something, I see it as a regular podcast, using my (non-Apple) podcast app. It’s the most recent four episodes of Prince | Official Podcast.

Thanks! Couldn't find anything websearching, and MPR are aggressively hiding it - from the Art19 link I found that The Current also produced The Story Of 1999, on whose transcripts they link to four external account-required services, vs only two for SOTT. Especially bonkers since they host mp3s of it themselves.

fwiw the Art19 files are 128kbps, the MPR ones are 192 but with no metadata ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

_It's a regular ol podcast, I subscribed to it through Apple's app._

That's a walled garden!

This kind of a drag, literally, but the Dutch show on the new Sign 'O' the Times super deluxe box set runs a hair too slow, which means everything is a touch flat. You have to speed it up by 2% to get everything back to the correct pitch.

Not the worst thing in the world - the show still sounds great - but FYI.

*This is kind of a drag

I'm in tears thinking songs like "Cosmic Day," "Blanche," and "There's Something I Like About Being Your Fool" exist.

Was the off-pitch live show ported over from a previous release, and did it have the same problem on the previous release?

Of this era, "Adonis and Bathsheba" I think has always been my favorite outtake. I just think the song is so lovely, I can't believe he just dumped it in the vault.

can’t believe we can hear “wally,” and it rules

Dang, box not arriving until next Tuesday, was really looking forward to getting it day-of-release and diving in over the weekend...

Other folks got theirs?

I like how he rummaged through "Adonis..." so he can write "The Question of U" later.

my friend who works at rough trade brooklyn said all the LP and CD expanded sets are already gone, they only have the 3CD version left. Questlove came in and bought a dozen copies of the vinyl set lol.

what source did ppl end up going with online for this?

*they = the rough trade store, not the record company

Questlove came in and bought a dozen copies of the vinyl set lol.
does questlove have some kind of side hustle as an ebay record flipper?

He's got a closet full of Phish Record Store Day releases

I bet this could very well be his favorite album, or one of his top 10. if I had to guess, I bet he bought sets as gifts for friends.

This set is great in so many ways but I also can't help scratching my head at some of the decisions to include somewhat weaker versions of things that have existed as boots for ages that are - in my mind at least - superior to the ones on this official release. "Crucial" for one. And where's "101" or "Yo Mister" or...? Weird decision making on the part of the folks putting these deluxe releases together. having said that, much of the stuff that never saw the light of day til now is Woooooow.

It's funny how I can get so attached to copies of copies of outtakes from some act, and then when I get the official version I prefer the shitty copy of a copy of a copy that I've lived with for so long.

yeah some of the inclusions are on the bizarre and inessential side. this is of course outweighed by how much is downright incredible. "walkin' in glory" for instance

Just batched together some gift cards and pulled the trigger on the box after listening to some of it on Spotify. Kind of love the slowness of If I Was Your Girlfriend on the live album. Guess I could have waited to see if Questlove would send me a copy, but I can't count on that.

what source did ppl end up going with online for this?

I went the ImportCDs route, as suggested upthread. Still en route but I have the tracking info so all good.

like, i get why they put "dorothy parker" w/ horns on there. i like that eric leeds was blown away that they found it. but the answer to what song in human history needs a horn arrangement the least is probably "dorothy parker"

Yep.

Why "Crucial" with those...lamer alternate lyrics?

also i get not including stuff prince had already released but i'm still like... it would be cool to have it all in one place and know it's not remixed (cf. "move star")

And things like "The Cocoa Boys" which are so much funkier in their sparse bootleg iteration ( no horns, no crowd noise) showing up in a much more fleshed out yet -- i mean, this is all subjective but to my ears a much more "mainstreamy" and palatable version. Freaky, minimal Prince is GOOD. That's the essence of much of his best shit. Why go the fully produced route?

eh i'm sorta into that

Dunno. Kills the vibe for me.

So glad they didn't fuck with "All My Dreams". Now THAT"S the maximalist Prince stuff I dig - but that's also closer to a "Parade" vibe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_aAug_PpUM

they uploaded the new years show w/ miles davis to youtube, which is great bc i was mad they didn't include it with my promo lol

They will prob do a mop up set of outtakes at some point.

I'd have preferred if they released stuff like movie star, we can funk 86, on this too, so its all here, as well as things like splash and empty room. I dont need a shep remix of strange relationship or inferior alternate takes either tbh. They should have filled it back back with unreleased songs! That said, this is an incredible undertaking. Hoping things like the original cocoa boys are on the parade SDE. Do find it odd hearing old bootlegs in pristine quality. All that 'cant believe I'm hearing this/cant believe it's not released' frisson is gone.

excuse me while I have a latepass freakout over the 1979 ICNTTPOYM

If they ever do a re release of dirty mind, surely it would belong there?

Not sure if I trust the guys on Steve hoffmann forums saying that the masters are mp3s for certain songs, Or that the speed on the live CD is slow. Unless by 'lossy' sources they mean cassette tapes. In which case, yeah, they prob did use cassettes.

It's easy to see if you open tracks in Audacity set to spectrum view - mp3s usually employ a lowpass filter at 16kHz as part of the encoding, so the spectrum cuts off abruptly aside from transients. "Visions" has nothing above 12kHz, "Can I Play With U", "Colors", "It Be's Like That", "Rebirth of the Flesh", "A Place in Heaven (Lisa vocal)" have a hard limit at 16kHz with transients, exactly like an mp3, lots of tracks have an odd line running through at 16kHz which is suggestive. The remastered album and the live discs have absolutely nothing like that, so it's not part of the mastering process for the set.

The main archive guy said in an interview when the set was announced that there's clearly some sort of big plan at work for these kinds of sets -- my money is on a radically expanded deluxe Purple Rain at some point -- but I'm content to see how it plays out. Seems like it'll be one from the Warner's years and one from the NPG era each year along with some other things like the Piano and demo sets.

Will also say that the one thing I kinda most feared in the immediate aftershock of Prince's passing -- that the absolutely unsettled nature of his estate could lead to the archive completely being scattered or worse -- seems not to have come to pass, and I'm pretty damn grateful for that. Matos has a little more about that in his GQ feature:

https://www.gq.com/story/prince-sign-o-the-times-review

All I'm asking for is a complete Time set.

Re: sources, why would the estate use mp3s when there are flac files out there? If they are using downloads that is.

Was the off-pitch live show ported over from a previous release, and did it have the same problem on the previous release?

I don't know anything about previous releases, but some musicians who know Prince's music VERY well tried playing along with some numbers and found that everything was a touch flat. (Reminds me of...KIND OF BLUE, where supposedly it was a well-known "secret" that the album was never mastered at the correct pitch until 1996, mainly because a lot of musicians liked to play along and noticed right away things weren't in tune.)

Try listening to "Purple Rain" from that show. I've heard that song countless times, and right away it sounds a touch flat. When Prince's voice comes in, it sounds off.

mp3s usually employ a lowpass filter at 16kHz as part of the encoding, so the spectrum cuts off abruptly aside from transients. "Visions" has nothing above 12kHz, "Can I Play With U", "Colors", "It Be's Like That", "Rebirth of the Flesh", "A Place in Heaven (Lisa vocal)" have a hard limit at 16kHz with transients, exactly like an mp3, lots of tracks have an odd line running through at 16kHz which is suggestive

Is this some kind of DNA certification for mp3s specifically, or the sort of thing that could also indicate those tapes were flaky and needed to be baked, as was the case with some of the material?

It's a pretty hard limit, and for most of them it's at that frequency which is part of the mp3 algorithm. "Visions" could well be a flaky tape but it would be a remarkable coincidence for the others. There's software out there which does sophisticated analysis and gives a probability of lossless vs lossy, but I don't have it.

I mean, if bits of the recording literally fell off the tape, its probably fair to call that "lossy" even if we can't blame the compression algorithm

iirc (from reading a few articles this month) this version of Rebirth Of The Flesh hasn't been circulating before, so mp3 sourcing would more likely be a fuckup by someone at AT&T in a shared dropbox, not resorting to bootlegs as first source?

Absolutely - or someone snuck a mix out and emailed it to a friend, etc. The Guardian article says the original “Wally” was mixed and dubbed onto a cassette before the multitrack was wiped - that tape never showed up so we have the remake. Lots of unlabelled tapes and takes. I hope they use an experienced archivist.

This is a good piece, though Brooks does seem like a bit of a revisionist, to an extent.

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2020-09-25/prince-sign-o-the-times-ressiue-box-set

Brooks: Because of his deep historical knowledge and engagement with P-Funk and James Brown and classic R&B and funk, it meant he was legible to a hip-hop public that was listening to all the samples.

Is this really true?

going through the three discs now

if you'd told me when I downloaded 'The Work Vol. 1' that it wasn't even a third, or a fourth of the good stuff

shit is seriously saving my life right now