Tag: shn

Live Bootlegs

I am going to review some excellent live bootlegs, therefore I have decided to explain some things about live bootlegs and I’ll also talk a little about lossless audio files (and converting them into more handy types).

Live bootlegs are recordings of live music shows/appearances, they are recorded by fans with equipment of varying quality. In most cases live bootlegs are not explicitly allowed or even forbidden, but in some cases (like Jason Mraz) the artist himself encourages bootlegging, and also allows the distribution of bootlegs through the web.

Where do I get live bootlegs?
You could try googling, or just go to archive.org.

Now what’s the deal with these odd audio formats (such as Flac or Shorten) you might ask:
Well, let me put it this way. If you record a piece of music, you will get a file of about 30-50 MB at size. This is the raw audio data, and it is called “lossless” because all the data recorded is in that file, nothing has been lost. Then there are lossless compressions, that means the file size of an audio file is shrunken without any actual data being lost. SHORTEN or FLAC for example are such audio formats, the file size with these should be around half of the uncompressed audio file.
You can also compress an audio file with a “lossy” audio format, that means in order to decrease the file size some of the data will be deleted (this will be sound you can’t actually hear with your ears, because the frequency is way to high (or low)), that way you can achieve an audio file with about one tenth of the size of the original lossless, uncompressed audio file.

Now, as I said, bootleggers distribute their recorded music as lossless audio files (they do that, so that the quality of the files won’t degrade through sharing) but for most people these files are way too big, so you will want to reduce their size by converting them into a lossy audio format. (Also most portable music players won’t be able to play lossless audio files)

There are several free and open source applications for various operation systems that can do that for you, here are some. If you run into troubles, need more help or other programs, don’t hesitate to write a comment and I’ll look into it. Because so far I’ve only worked with soundKonverter (I, almost exclusively, use Linux).