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Music great, lighting great, encore fantastic. Loads of audience participation, singing and dancing throughout. Fun!

I don’t particularly like the Commodore Ballroom, as a venue. It’s OK, but it’s a bit of an echoey box. The sound for Loviet, the warm-up band, was a bit echoey and too loud, lyrics indistinct.

They pulled it together though and the sound for Morcheeba was great. I was about four people from the front, great view & atmosphere - although I seemed to be in the unofficial tall guys section for some of the gig.

The band seemed to be having a good time - just like the audience. They were all excellent, from Skye Edwards huge stage presence and amazing voice, to Ross Godfrey’s great guitar work. It was lots of fun, music was great, lighting was great, encore was fantastic …

Continue reading “Review: Morcheeba Blackest Blue Tour, Vancouver 2022”

Just experienced the incredible, joyous, wonderful Florence + the Machine in Vancouver. Amazing. I’m officially part of Miss Haversham’s cult now!

I’ve been a fan for ages; their music just really lifts me up. This is the first time I’ve seen them live, and they really blew me away - what a great show!

This was their first tour post-covid, so included some emotional tales about how the pandemic affected people who’s vocation - and living - comes from performing live music.

Learnings

Things I learned from this gig:

  • Rogers Arena is a pretty good venue, especially if you’re on the floor, near the front.
  • Make a playlist after each gig with the setlist, so that you can relive the gig. I’ve been making these on YouTube Music, usually with the setlist from https://www.setlist.fm …
Continue reading “Review: Florence + the Machine Gig, Vancouver 2022”

Good, but I didn’t feel very engaged with the music.

I was in the Lower Orchestra section, in the 16th row - and pretty tired, that Monday evening. I like their music, but I found myself drifting off, thinking about other things.

Thinking much at all is a bad sign for me when I’m watching live music. I usually find it very engrossing & uplifting - ideally, I get carried away by the music and exist fully in the moment for the duration. That didn’t happen for me at this gig. I felt rather disconnected from the performance - perhaps because it felt like it was happening far away?

Photo from my seat, .
Figure 1. The view from my seat

Learnings

Things I learned from this gig:

  • Only go and see people if you would listen to their stuff for an hour or two without …
Continue reading “Review: Sigur Rós World Tour, Vancouver 2022”

A spellbinding & breathtaking evening, with a couple of surprising jewels, in a night full of riches.

Just got back from seeing Nick Cave and Warren Ellis in Vancouver. What a joy and a privilege! I’ve missed live music so much - what an incredible night!

This is a video from that night in Vancouver, of their cover of Cosmic Dancer, which was a fantastic surprise for me. That video was taken by someone standing just in front of me!

We got two encores. The first one was Hollywood, Henry Lee & Girl in Amber - all great. Then they cleared the stage and lots of people left. Then we got a second encore!

This is Into My Arms, which he did with just the amazing backing singers, as a second encore, after half the audience had left thinking it was done - one …

Continue reading “Review: Nick Cave & Warren Ellis Gig, Vancouver 2022”

I recently needed to convert some FLAC music files from the increasingly common 48 bit encoding, down to 16 bit at 44100 kHz, so that they’ll play on my Sonos. Here’s how to do it:

If you don’t already have sox installed, do this to install it:

$ sudo apt-get install sox

Then run this to do the conversion, in the folder with music in:

$ mkdir resampled
$ for flac in *.flac; do sox -S "${flac}" -r 44100 -b 16 ./resampled/"${flac}"; done

And that’s it - it will convert all the .flac files in that folder to 16 bit at 44100 kHz and put the result into the ./resampled subfolder, preserving the metadata.

Continue reading “How to convert FLAC files from 24/48 bit to 16 bit on Ubuntu Linux”

I recently needed to convert some Apple Lossless music files to FLAC. Here’s how to do it:

If you don’t already have ffmpeg or libav-tools installed, do this:

$ sudo apt-get install libav-tools

Then run this to do the conversion, in the folder with music in:

$ for f in *.m4a; do avconv -i "$f" "${f%.m4a}.flac"; done

And that’s it - it will convert all the .m4a files in that folder to .flac files, preserving the metadata. You can now delete the .m4a files if you want:

$ rm ./*.m4a
Continue reading “How to convert Apple Lossless/ALAC/.m4a files to FLAC with avconv, on Ubuntu Linux”