The FSOL Message Board

Thankfully it's pay day today so I'm off to buy... well, the sampler at least, I can't afford those prints sadly. The Environments one looks incredible!

Ross wrote:The Environments one looks incredible!

The Environments is what i have laid my eyes on as well...

Been gazing at this poster again, cant take my eyes off it. I have nothing to pay my bills with, but i want it and next week i think Im going to order...

Omg, what a hell lot of releases to come. Grrreat. Anyone heard fsolsampler 2 already? I'm somewhat curious about the supposed E5 and A7 tracks...
("Hydromedusa" is 1 great track title, isn't it?)

One more for Graham to think about -
why they don't sell .FLAC at FSOLdigital??

.FLAC price should be somewhere between the mp3 and the physical release.
It's nothing fancy, not much additional work - and lots of more potential buyers.

- I mean, all the serious shops sell .FLAC and I know for a fact there are lots of people who despise MP3 and love FLAC and these kind of people buy only FLAC (no MP3 and no physical) - I know this from the 3 local web-shops where I am/was admin and had a inside view of the sells.

03 – The Future Sound Of London – ****** – Taken from Environments 5
07 – The Future Sound Of London – Strange Glare – Taken from Environments 5
04 – The Future Sound Of London – Desquamation – Taken from The Environments Series
15 – The Future Sound Of London – Hydromedusa – Taken from From The Archives Vol. 7

hmm.....

Screen prints? Fuuuuuck!

Cor blimey guvnor! Just got back from hols to see the changes. Looks very encouraging, can wait to hear the new sampler, Ross' soundtrack and Rizz Maslen/Field Recordings stuff. Looks like there's going to be lots of new stuff coming up. The site looks good, though the labels to the thumbnails don't display that well on the safari browser and the thumbnails themselves are placed in funny places on the page on an iPhone safari browser. Also I ended up with lots of stuff added to the cart unintentionally, which again might be a safari thing. Good to see that the side projects like heads of agreement appear to be in a decent nitrate now if the descriptions are correct.

Lovely looking prints!

dell1972 wrote:Also I ended up with lots of stuff added to the cart unintentionally, which again might be a safari thing.

This happens in Firefox and Chrome too, not just Safari - we're talking about bad positioning of the button...

Pandemonium wrote:(flac)

This also.
I'd probably buy the Neck Of The Woods and the upcoming Environments & Archives albums if they were available in flac, but as it is now..

It would be a wise move to offer flac, since a lot of people who prefer flac will just end up pirating the mp3's because they don't want to pay for them, not to mention if there is no physical release available.

I'm wondering what 'The Environments Series' is. Is this supposed to be a proper release, or does it just mean 'to be released on later parts of the series?'
Regarding the new site, I had also some problems to get items out of the cart, that went there unintentionaly. But a big 'thumbs up' anyway!

I'll stick my nose in and point out that FSOL are hosting these files themselves on their own servers, which might explain the preference for smaller file sizes. FLAC files are still quite large.

I gave FSOLDigital Sampler 2 a listen. The two Environments 5 tracks are fantastic, ****** is particularly beautiful. Hydromedusa doesn't quite live up to its title. Wonderful to see that Tudor Oak is finally coming out!

Ross wrote:I'll stick my nose in and point out that FSOL are hosting these files themselves on their own servers, which might explain the preference for smaller file sizes. FLAC files are still quite large.

Oh man, that shouldn't be the case with a band of this caliber.. certainly HDD/server space (i don't know about this stuff) can't be that expensive, can it? Flac is still pretty marginal I guess, but FSOL -out of all bands- deserve to be in lossless format.

I know for a fact that space is not the problem, if the servers are their own.
In that case, one or two HDDs of 80GB will do the job
and a HDD drive of 1TB is going for 80 euros
- and I have almost EVERY piece that FSOL ever released in FLAC and MP3, + videos ; and it all equals about 70GB

If they buy server space - cheap again, but the problem may be in accumulated transfer in GBs,
but hey, what the heck, that's why they SELL the stuff,
and if any given album differs in price by 2 euros (mp3 vs flac) it will pay the transfer of MBs by 400% at least.

I am working with this stuff lately and simply can not find a reason why they don't go PRO and sell MP3 / FLAC / CD of every release,
or at least MP3 / FLAC of every digital release...

Also, speaking of PRO digital files, (and PLEASE let someone point this out to them)
they should rip the FLAC files with LAME encoder, EAC software if they go with Windows, OR
they should rip the FLAC files with LAME encoder, XLD software if they go with Mac OS X
after that they can transcode any FLAC file with dbPowerAmp in any MP3 bitrate they want, VBR or CBR.
If the files are coming directly from their lap-top (or whatever, I'm thinking they end up like WAVs or PCM on some hard-drive) - then dbPowerAmp is all they need, for FLAC and for MP3.

they should NOT go with FHG or any other inferior MP3 encoder, or god forbid, some iTunes related encoder/software.
Every serious digital archivist and/or shop knows this.


http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; -- free software

http://code.google.com/p/xld/downloads/list" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; -- free software

http://tmkk.pv.land.to/xld/index_e.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; -- free software

http://www.dbpoweramp.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; -- $38 software

if they need some detailed instructions about the tuning of the software to produce perfect audio copy outcome,
I could provide them tutorials via e-mail or whatever

So, has anyone else listened to The Fears and Fantasies of the Unconscious Mind, or are we all too bothered with the specifics of how it's been encoded?

I've got a huge backlog of music purchases to work though so I'm holding off buying these for a bit - looking forward to hearing them though !